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The Selection and De-‐Selection of Cabinet Ministers in India (draft copy; references incomplete) Csaba Nikolenyi Department of Political Science Concordia University Paper presented at the 22nd World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Madrid, Spain, July 9, 2012. The author acknowledges the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Faculty of Arts and Science of Concordia University.

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Introduction

This paper examines the politics of selecting and de-‐selecting cabinet

ministers in India, the world’s largest democracy. The country’s written

constitution does not say much about either the composition of the national cabinet

or and the process by which members of the national executive ought to be

appointed. Therefore, for most of the past six decades, since India gained her

Independence from Britain, the Westminster convention of ministerial appointment

and dismissal has been followed. Accordingly, the leader of the party with the most

seats in the lower house of Parliament would be appointed by the head of state, the

President, as the Prime Minister, who in turn has an institutional free hand to make

and unmake his/her ministers. This Westminster blueprint, however, has become

complicated by a couple of political variables: changes in the institutional and

organizational strength of the dominant Congress Party; and the development of a

coalitional multi-‐party system which is at odds with the practices and routines of

Westminster parliamentary democracy.

The paper makes three main points with regard to the determinants and the

dynamics of selecting and de-‐selecting cabinet ministers. First, the lack of

institutional constraints on the Prime Minister’s ability to decide about ministerial

careers could be effectively balanced by a strong party organization in the first

couple of decades after Independence. Thereafter, the de-‐institutionalization of the

Congress Party left the Prime Minister in complete and full control over the cabinet,

which was indicated by an increase in cabinets reshuffles and the forced resignation

of cabinet ministers. Second, since multi-‐party and minority governments have

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become the recurring feature of the national party system, Indian Prime Minsters

have had to contend with a new source of constraint on their authority to make and

unmake cabinet ministers: the demands and preferences of their coalition partners.

Third, as part of the overall fragmentation of the party system, which followed the

decline of the Congress Party from its historical position of dominance after 1989,

cabinets have become larger and more complex. Whereas short-‐lived minority

cabinets have had, by virtue of their lack of durability, few ministerial exits and

reshuffles, there has been a steady increase in ministerial exits and turnovers in the

age of multi-‐party coalitions.

The paper will present these points in three sections. The first section

describes the Indian political system in relation to the process of cabinet formation.

In particular, this section focuses on the process and dynamics of choosing,

appointing, and investing in power the Prime Minister and the formal and informal

rules that constrain his/her subsequent choice of ministers. The second section

deals with the selection of cabinet ministers by looking at its two principal

determinants: intra-‐ and inter-‐party politics. The third section discusses the

emerging pattern of ministerial exits and cabinet reshuffles.

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1. The Political System and Cabinet Formation

1.1. The constitutional context

Upon Independence from the British Empire, India adopted a constitutional

structure that combined a parliamentary system government with a highly

centralized federal state structure. The national parliament consists of two

chambers: the directly elected Lok Sabha (House of the People) and the indirectly

chose Council of States (Rajya Sabha). Today, the Lok Sabha consists of 543

members each elected from single-‐member districts using the first-‐past-‐the-‐post

electoral system and two members appointed by the President to represent the

Anglo-‐Indian community. Elections to the Lok Sabha must take place at a maximum

of five-‐year intervals unless a state of emergency is declared, which happened only

once in 1975. Although the electoral system by which the first chamber is elected

has remained intact since 1952, it is important to note that in the first three

parliamentary elections (1952, 1957 and 1962) approximately one-‐third of the

electoral districts had two-‐ or three seats. The Rayja Sabha provides representation

to the states of the Union in the national parliament: 233 of its 245 members are

chosen in a staggered fashion by the Legislative Assemblies of the states and union

territories using the single-‐transferable vote system (Constitution of India, Article

80/4) and the President nominates the remaining 12 members directly who have

special expertise in “[l]iterature, science, art and social service”.

A well-‐known consequence of the plurality electoral system is its

preponderance to create artificial parliamentary majorities (Rae 1971; Lijphart

1994); i.e. most election produce a majority victory even though the majority party

would normally secure only a plurality of the popular votes cast. Indeed, until 1984

each national election produced such an artificial majority in India and all but one of

these elections were won by the Indian National Congress Party (henceforth

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Congress). The 1977 election followed the infamous Emergency Rule, which

galvanized the anti-‐Congress opposition parties that successfully challenged the

dominant party in a united People’s Front, the Janata. The 1989 poll was the first in

a still continuing series of elections that have failed to return any single political

party with a majority of the seats. Since then, single party minority, coalition

minority and coalition majority governments have become the norm (Nikolenyi

2010; Shridharan 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005; Shridharan and Varshney 2001;

Yadav 1996).

The Indian constitution vests executive power in the President, who is

chosen indirectly by an electoral college that comprises all members of the national

parliament and the sub-‐national assemblies.1 Article 74 establishes a Council of

Ministers to aid and advise the President in carrying out the duties of his/ her office.

While the Article stresses that the President must act in accordance with such

advice received it also stipulates that the advice is not subject to judicial inquiry.

Appointments to the Council of Ministers are dealt with in Article 75, which

provides that

i) the President appoints the Prime Minister and on the latter’s advice all

other member of the council;

ii) the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha,

and that

iii) any minister in the government must be also a member of either house

of parliament save for a six-month grace period.

The 91st Amendment passed in 2003 added two important restrictions to the

process of appointment to the Council:

1 The ex-officio head of the Rajya Sabha is the Vice President who is chosen by the two chambers of the national parliament only.

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iv) the total size of the Council of Ministers could no longer exceed 15% of

the total number of members in the lower house, which, at the current number of

543 Lok Sabha seats establishes a ceiling of 81 ministers; and

v) that no member of parliament who was disqualified under the terms of the

Anti-‐Defection Amendment of the Constitution (Amendment #52) was eligible to be

appointed as a minister (sse Nikolenyi and Shenhav 2009). Apart from these

provisions, however, the Constitution is silent as to the actual process and practice

that the President and the Prime Minister must follow in appointing ministers.

1.2. The role of the President

Although the constitution does not require it, Indian Presidents have

normally and typically invited a sitting member of the Lok Sabha to form a

government and assume the position of Prim Minister. The first exception to this

was Indira Gandhi who was a member of the Rajya Sabha at the time of her

appointment as Prime Minister in 1966. Similarly, Manmohan Singh, the Prime

Minister of the Congress-‐led coalition governments that were formed after the 2004

and 2009 general elections was also a member of the upper chamber. In two

instances, Narasimha Rao in 1991 and Deve Gowda in 1996, the President appointed

Prime Ministers who were not members of either house of parliament. The six-‐

month grace period mentioned above made these decisions constitutional even

though Deve Gowda’s appointment was followed by litigation on grounds that while

the Constitution allowed for the appointment of a minister who was not a member

of parliament it did not do so explicitly with regard to the Prime Minister (Jain

2003:35). In the end, the verdict of the Delhi High Court ruled that there was no

difference between the Prime Minister and other ministers in this regard.

Subsequent to his appointment, Deve Gowda secured a parliamentary seat by

winning a mandate in the Rajya Sabha from the Legislative Assembly of Karnataka,

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where he had been the state Chief Minister until his appointment as head of the

Union government. Five years before, in 1991, Narasimha Rao was also appointed

Prime Minister even though he did not have a seat in either house of parliament at

the time of his appointment.2

The investiture of the Indian Prime Minister does not follow either negative

or positive parliamentarism in their pure forms (Bergman 1993). In the period of

Congress dominance (1952-‐71) when government formation was straightforward

in the light of the decisive electoral victories scored by the Congress Party, the

President would simply invite the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party to

form a government by making recommendations for appointment to the Council of

Ministers. Similarly, although the Congress lost the 1977 election, the electoral

results gave a clear and decisive mandate to Morarji Desai, the leader of the recently

formed Janata Party, to form the next government. Indeed, Vice President B.D. Jatti

followed established convention and proceeded to appoint Desai as the first non-‐

Congress head of government in Independent India (Manor 1994: 129).3

The first time that a President was called upon to depart from this

convention and test competing claims to majority support by rival contenders for

the Prime Ministerial berth occurred in the wake of the disintegration of the ruling

Janata Party in 1979 (Manor 1994: 130-‐3). In the evening of July 15, 1979 the day

before a scheduled vote of no-‐confidence in his government, Morarji Desai resigned

from his post as Prime Minister. In turn, Sanjiva Reddy, the new President, invited

the leader of the opposition Congress Party, Y.B. Chavan, who had moved the no-‐

confidence motion, to form a government on July 18. As a result of the various

permutations and splits that had taken place in both the government and the 2 In contrast to Deve Gowda, Rao entered parliament by winning a landslide victory in a Lok Sabha by-election. 3 The Vice President presided over the formation of the Janata Party government due to the death of incumbent President F.A. Ahmed while in office.

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opposition benches since the general election, Chavan was unable to secure a

majority and advised the president accordingly. However, he informed the President

that his party had formed an alliance with Charan Singh’s Janata Party (Secular), a

splinter party that had split from Desai’s Janata Party, with the objective of forming

a coalition government in which Charan Singh would be the Prime Minister and

Chavan the Deputy Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Morarji Desai also staked a new

claim to form a government on behalf of the Janata Party.

To resolve the stalemate the President asked both contenders to provide him

with a list of supporters within two days in order to determine who would be in a

position to form a majority-‐based government. Although both lists contained the

names of 279 supporters, with 42 included in both, Reddy determined that the

Janata Party had the legitimate support of only 238 MPs while the Janata Party

(Secular)-‐Congress combine was supported by 262 MPs. Therefore, on July 26, he

invited Charan Singh to form a government and to prove his majority by passing a

vote of confidence on the floor of the Lok Sabha by the third week of August.

Although on July 28 Charan Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister at the head of the

country’s first ever coalition minority government, he failed to secure the number of

votes that would have allowed him to pass the confidence vote required of him by

the President. Therefore, on August 20 1979 he resigned and advised the President

to dissolve the Lok Sabha and order new election. Even though Sanjiva Reddy was

not constitutionally obliged to act on the advice of an outgoing Prime Minister, he

chose to do and called new elections much to the dismay and opposition of the new

leader of the Janata Parliamentary Party, Jagjivan Ram, who had staked a claim to

form a government. It remains unclear whether on this particular occasion the

President acted out of prudence, political calculation or bias against a Prime

Ministerial contender who belonged to one of the country’s most underprivileged

minorities, the scheduled tribes. What is important to underline nonetheless is the

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tremendous clout and discretion that an institutional weak head of state can play in

times of political uncertainty when a legislative and governing majority are absent.

Presidential discretion and initiative in the appointment of the Prime

Minister and government formation have become the norm since 1989, the first

election that would usher in the new party system where no single political party

can win parliamentary majorities (Nikolenyi 2010, 1998; Shridharan 2004).

Following two successive majority mandates in the 1980 and 1984 polls, the

Congress Party was reduced to a mere plurality position in the Lok Sabha in 1989

with 36.3% of the seats. Absent a majority party, President Venkataraman adopted

what would become the standard modus operandi for all future Presidents facing a

hung Lok Sabha: he invited party leaders in a descending order of party size to

establish their claim and try to form a government. Since the Congress still had the

most seats, the President first asked Rajiv Gandhi to do so; however, he declined the

invitation, arguing that the electorate had clearly spoken and wanted a change in

government (Paul 1990: 54). The party with the next highest number of seats was

the Janata Dal, whose leader, V.P. Singh, accepted the appointment as Prime Minister

once he secured the support of both the BJP and the Left Front, his party’s electoral

allies against the Congress in the recent elections.

After the 1996 election, President Sharma faced a new dilemma as a result of

the consolidation of electoral coalitions and alliances, which have become the

principal contenders in the party system. The political party with the highest

number of seats was the BJP, however, the United Front electoral alliance clearly

had stronger support in the Lok Sabha. The President opted to follow the

established precedent and appointed the leader of the BJP, A.B. Vajpayee, as the next

Prime Minister while ordering him to obtain a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha

even though it was evident that the attempt was doomed to fail. Indeed, Vajpayee

resigned the day before the vote was to take place. Following the resignation of the

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BJP cabinet and the expressed disinterest of the Congress in forming a new

government, the President invited H. D. Dewe Gowda, the leader of the United Front,

to form a cabinet. Gowda and his cabinet were sworn in on June 1 and with the

support of the Congress the new government won the vote of confidence on June 12

(Roy 1996: 253-‐4). From 1998 onwards, no President has had to face this dilemma

because future plurality parties (the BJP in 1998 and 1999 and the Congress in 2004

and 2009) were also at the helm of the electoral alliance with the most seats. 1.3. Formation time Government formation tends to be a very quick process in India. Since 1971

it has taken merely 6.4 days on average to appoint a new Prime Minister following

the conclusion of the general election, see Table 1. The government that took the

longest to form, and incidentally also the shortest to last, was the BJP-‐led coalition

government headed by A.B. Vajpayee government sworn-‐in in after the 1996

election: it took 9 days after the end of the general election for this government to

be appointed and it only lasted only 13 days in office. Similarly, most of the mid-‐

term governments were also formed rather quickly. Since Independence, there were

six cases when a new Prime Minister had to be sworn in either because the

incumbent passed away (1964, 1966), resigned (1979, 1996,) or was defeated

(1990, 1998) on the floor of the Lok Sabha on a confidence vote. The average

formation time of these governments was 9.3 days: the governments of Lal Bahadur

Shastri in 1964, of Indira Gandhi in 1966 and of Charan Singh’s in 1979 took 13 days

each to form, that of Chadra Shekhar in 1990 took only 3 days, while those of Deve

Gowda in 1996 and Inder Kumar Gujral in 1998 took 4 and 1 days respectively.

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It is worth noting that there does not appear to be any relationship between

the size of the coalition and the formation time of the government. The governments

that took the longest to form included three coalition governments (Gujral 1997,

Vajpayee 1998 and 1999) and two single party majority administrations (Shastri in

1964 and Indira Gandhi in 1966). Whereas the former reflected the complexity of

the negotiations that characterized the coalition formation process including a large

number of parties in a highly fragmented Lok Sabha, the latter were a reflection of

the internal divisions in the ruling Congress Party at the time. Following the deaths

of J. Nehru in 1964 and L.B. Shastri in 1966, the principal line of vision within the

Congress leadership lay between Morarji Desai, former Chief Minister of the

erstwhile state of Bombay and Minister of Finance under Nehru, who sought to

succeed Nehru as the next Prime Minister and the Syndicate, an informal group of

powerful senior party leaders bent on preventing Desai from assuming the Prime

Ministership at any cost (Brecher 1966, 1967). In both succession struggles it was

the Syndicate that ultimately prevailed and secured the elections of Shastri, by

consensus, and then of Indira Gandhi, by ballot, to the leadership of the Congress

Parliamentary Party (Brecher 1967).

1.4. Government structure and size

In addition to the Prime Minister, and the occasional appointment of a

Deputy Prime Minister, there have been four types and ranks of ministers in the

Indian Council of Ministers (Kohli 1992: 5-‐16). The core of the Council is made up of

Cabinet Ministers who are assigned responsibility for one or more government

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departments. At times the Prime Minister may appoint a Minister to Cabinet rank

without the assignment of a specific portfolio in which case the minister is

understood not to be part of the Cabinet proper. Cabinet Ministers may be assisted

in their work by Deputy Ministers or Ministers of State; the latter may either be

assigned to a particular Minister or may hold an Independent Charge. Ministers of

State and Deputy Ministers are always hierarchically subordinate to a Cabinet

Ministers. Finally, some Prime Ministers, e.g. Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi, also

appointed Parliamentary Secretaries, although this rank has become by and large

extinct (Jain 2003: 14).

There has been variation both in the number and types of appointments, in

terms of ranks, that Indian Prime Ministers have made to their Council of Ministers.

For example, the government of Jawaharlal Nehru appointed after the third general

election, in 1962, consisted of 18 Cabinet Ministers, 22 Deputy Ministers, 12

Ministers of State, and 7 Parliamentary Secretaries. In contrast, Prime Ministers

Morarji Desai, V.P. Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, near the end of his term in 1989, or

Manmohan Singh used a two-‐tier model and their cabinets included only Cabinet

Ministers and Ministers of State (Jain 2003: 27). Jain (2003) reports that the

overwhelming majority of the 395 members who served in the Union cabinet

between 1947 and 1989 held either the rank of Cabinet Minister (147) or that of

Minister of State (163). Table 1 provides information about the changing nature of

the Council of Ministers. It is clear that there has been a pronounced increase in the

size of government over time; whereas the number of cabinet ministers would be

anywhere between 15 to 20 until the latter half of the Rajiv Gandhi government, this

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number has been approaching 30 under last couple of Prime Ministers (Vajpayee

and Singh) who also appointed the largest ever Councils of Ministers. This growth in

the size of the government is a reflection of the increase in the number of parties in

the party system, which has led to the increasingly more fragmented legislatures

and electoral alliances.

2. The Selection of Ministers

Although the Prime Minister faces very few institutional constraints on his or

her ability to make appointments to the Council of Ministers, there are a number of

pragmatic and strategic considerations that are taken account when these

appointments are made. These include the consideration of internal politics within

the Prime Minister’s party, which until 1989 was the principal such consideration;

relations among the coalition partners that have agreed to form or support the new

government; representation of geographic units, both states and regions;

representation of religious and ethnic minorities; and to a limited extent

professional expertise. By far the most important dimensions of choice are the intra-‐

and inter-‐party considerations to which all others are subjected. Therefore, this

section focuses on these partisan aspects of ministerial appointments.

2.1 Internal party politics

Indian Prime Ministers are always compelled to include senior leaders of

their parties in the cabinet in order to ensure the harmonious relationship between

the organizational and the legislative wings of the party; to affect the factional

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balance of powers within the party; and to protect the party’s electoral base in

particular states and regions. As mentioned earlier, such considerations are always

subject to the constitutional stipulation that the appointee cannot be without a

parliamentary seat for a period longer than six moths. In a few special

circumstances, the Prime Minister appointed senior co-‐partisans to the position of

Deputy Prime Minister in order to maintain a precarious balance of political forces

within the party. For instance, in 1967, following the divisive succession battle that

followed the death of Prime Minister Shastri and the poor electoral performance of

the Congress Party at the polls, Indira Gandhi promoted her former leadership rival,

Morarji Desai, to the Deputy Prime Ministership in an effort to keep the party

united. The arrangement did no last long as Desai was ultimately sacked from the

cabinet in 1969 and proceeded to form the Opposition Congress party (Singh 1981).

In 1977, Prime Minister Morarji Desai of the Janata Party appointed Charan

Singh and Jagjivan Ram, respective leaders of two constituent parties that had

merged to create the Janata before the general elections (Limaye 1994). When

Charan Singh left the Janata and formed his new Janata Party (Secular) government,

he appointed Y.B.Chavan, the leader of his coalition partner, the Congress, to the

senior cabinet post. Prime Minister V.P. Singh appointed his-‐co-‐partisan Devi Lal as

deputy head of government in 1989 as a reward for the latter’s assistance to prevent

his leadership contender, Chandra Shekhar, from assuming the leadership of the

Janata Dal. The promotion of L. K. Advani, president of the BJP and Home Minister in

the Vajpayee government, to Deputy Prime Ministership in 2002 was regarded as an

indication that radical wing of the BJP, which had been associated with Advani’s

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leadership versus Vajpayee’s moderate stream, was on the ascent in the internal

political constellation of the party (McMillan 2005: 29).

However, there have been a few important exceptions when senior party

leaders would purposely stay away from a cabinet post in order to keep a distance

from and not come under the hierarchical subordination of the Prime Minister. Most

recently, after the elections of 2004, and again in 2009, the leader of the Congress

Party, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-‐born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi,

opted to stay outside the executive and has exercised her clout over the cabinet

from her position as party president instead.4 Similarly, the DMK, the Congress’

second largest coalition partner in the 2004 coalition government, was not

represented in the cabinet by party’s president either although for a very different

reason. By virtue of being a state-‐based party, the primary arena of political

competition for the DMK is the at the state level, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu,

where the DMK has been one of the major parties to structure and define the local

party system. The DMK’s president, Karunanidhi had been the leader of the party

since 1969 and served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on for four terms prior to the

2004 elections. Similarly to the previous instances when the DMK participated in a

coalition government at the national level (Gowda 1996, Gujral 1997) the party

delegated lower level officers to the Union government and kept its top brass at the

helm of party affairs on the home turf. In contrast to the Congress and the DMK, a

number of other coalition partners in the UPA were represented by their senior

leadership: the leaders of the NCP (Sharad Pawar), LJP (Ram Vilas Paswan), JMM 4 The BJP-led opposition also mounted a strong negative campaign against the idea of allowing a foreign born person to assume the post of head of government.

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(Shibu Soren), TRS (Chandrashekhar Rao), and RJD (Laloo Prasad Yadav) were all

included in the initial cabinet line-‐up.

Senior party leaders often also exert influence on the Prime Minister to

appoint their own factional supporters as cabinet ministers or members of the

Council. Their advice is an important source of information to the head of

government about the current balance of factional forces within the ruling party.

For instance, both Nehru and Indira Gandhi had consulted with and acted on the

advice of Morarji Desai to make specific appointments in their respective cabinets

(Jain 2003: 112). Also, K. Kamaraj, the powerful former president of the Congress

Party, and leader of the Syndicate, had tremendous influence over the appointment

of ministers in both the Shastri government of 1964 and the Indira Gandhi

government of 1966.

2.2. Inter-‐party considerations

In the era of coalition politics since 1989 the need to accommodate coalition

partners has become a central consideration in the Prime Minister’s choice of

cabinet appointments. As Table 1 shows, all but one of the governments formed in

this period were undersized minority cabinets, most of them coalitions. The Prime

Minister’s need to hold together the already precarious parliamentary support base

of these minority governments has increased the clout of the leadership of the

junior coalition partners over the government formation process. Moreover, since

minority governments by definition need to rely on the parliamentary support of

parties that are formally not included in the governing coalition, Prime Ministers

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have also had to consider the preferences of opposition party leaders when making

ministerial appointments.

The presence of regional and state-‐based parties in the national party system

has further complicated the processes of ministerial appointment and portfolio

allocation. For many of these parties, the primary arena of competition is at the state

level where their electoral support is based and rooted. Therefore, the senior

leadership of such state parties, when they are in power locally, is typically reluctant

to enter the Union cabinet; instead they nominate their own loyal supporters for a

ministerial berth. Although the Prime Minister has the ultimate say over the actual

appointment, the recommendation of the coalition partner typically becomes the

ministerial choice. Yet, if there is a real conflict between the preferences of the

Prime Minister and that of a coalition partner, the former typically prevails. The

allocation of portfolios to the RJD, an electoral ally and subsequent coalition partner

of the Congress Party after the 2004 election is a case in point. Laloo Prasad Yadav,

leader of the RJD demanded the prestigious Home Affairs portfolio in exchange for

his party’s support of the Manmohan Singh minority government. Considering that

the RJD was the Congress Party’s largest electoral ally this demand was particularly

difficult to refuse. Nonetheless, Manmohan Singh resisted Yadav’ demand; while the

RJD received the highest number of portfolios in the new coalition government the

Home Ministry was awarded to Shivraj Patil, a senior Congress politician. Similarly,

when the AIADMK joined the BJP-‐led NDA coalition government in 1998, party

leader Jayalalitha insisted, successfully, that her nominee T. Durai ought to receive

the Law and Justice portfolio. Another intriguing feature of Jayalalitha’s involvement

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in the formation of this government was her effective representation of all the other

small parties from the state Tamil Nadu (AIADMK, PMK, MDMK, TRC and JP) in the

negotiation of portfolio allocation with Prime Minister Vajpayee (McMillan 2005).

The composition and the fragmentation of the governing coalition places an

important constraint on the Prime Minister’s choice of ministers. At first, the head of

government has to decide how many positions in the Council of Ministers the

various coalition partners will receive, how many of those appointments will be

made at the Cabinet rank and how many will be junior Deputy Ministers or

Ministers of State. In the larger coalition governments that have been formed since

1998 portfolio allocation has been more or less proportional to the relative size of

the coalition partners as per Gamson’s Law (Gamson 1961). In contrast, the lack of a

sufficient number of coalition partners in the much smaller minority governments

of V.P. Singh, A.B. Vajpayee, Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral resulted in a less balanced

allocation of ministries among parties.

Tables 2 through 4 provide detailed information about the proportionality of

portfolio allocation among coalition partners in the 1998 and 1999 NDA and the

2004 UPA coalition governments. The Council of Ministers formed by the National

Democratic Alliance after the 1998 election consisted of 43 members, including the

Prime Minister, of whom 22 comprised the inner cabinet. The allocation of

portfolios among the constituent parties of the Alliance was responsive to their

relative electoral success, however, their share of cabinet berths was not exactly

proportional to their share of Lok Sabha seats. Although the BJP clearly dominated

the NDA with 72.05% of the total alliance seats under its control in the Lok Sabha

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(183 out of 254), the party was noticeable underrepresented at the cabinet table

with its 11 ministers (50%). The overall share of the BJP ministers in the larger

council was 58.14% (25 out of 43), which left the party in solid control over the

government. The BJP’s largest coalition partners were the AIADMK and the Samata

Party with 18 sand 13 seats in the Lok Sabha respectively. While the former

received one more government position than the latter (3 vs 2), both Samata Party

ministers were inducted at the cabinet rank. In another apparent violation of

Gamson’s law of proportional portfolio allocation, the tiny PMK was also awarded 2

ministries even though the party had won only 4 seats in the Lok Sabha. The 1998

coalition government was considerably biased in terms of regional representation.

Due to strong performance of the electoral alliance in the states of Tamil Nadu and

Bihar, these states were overrepresented (MacMillan 2005: 26).

At the time of the formation of the first UPA government, in 2004, the single

most important constraint on the Prime Minister’s choice of ministers was the need

to balance ministerial representation among the Congress Party’s electoral allies.

Manmohan Singh’s Council of Ministers included 28 cabinet ministers, 29 ministers

of state and 10 ministers of independent charge. From among the 11 Congress allies

three were not included in the first post-‐election cabinet: the tiny Jammu and

Kashmir People’s Democratic Front and the Republic Party of India, each having

won a single seat in the Lok Sabha, as well as the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra

Kazagham (MDMK) running in the state of Tamil Nadu. The remaining eight allies

received a rather proportional allocation of ministerial positions with the number of

berths received reflecting the party’s contribution to the overall parliamentary

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strength of the UPA.5 Table 4 shows the number of seats that each UPA member won

in the Lok Sabha, followed by the percentage of these seats in the alliance and finally

by the number of percentage of seats in the new government. The deviation from

purely proportional allocation of government positions was very small in this

government: the average of the absolute value of the difference between each

coalition partner’s share of ministries and seats in the UPA parliamentary group was

only 1.5. Of the 12 parties making up the UPA, the Congress, the JMM, the LS, and the

MDMK were slightly under-‐represented while the other partners received more

government positions than their proportional share of UPA seat would have

warranted.

The only coalition partner that did not receive a ministerial position of

cabinet rank was the IUML; for the most part the allocation of cabinet positions

maintained the same balance among the coalition partners that was true for the

entire government. Nearly two-‐thirds of cabinet portfolios (18 out of 28) were held

onto by the Congress Party, followed by 3 awarded to the DMK, 2 to the RJD and 1

each to the NCP, PMK, JMM, LS, and the TRS. The allocation of the 29 ministers of

state followed a similar pattern with the Congress keeping 16, the RJD receiving 5,

the DMK 4, and the TRS, PMK, NCP and the IUML 1 each. Finally, the Congress

further preserved its dominant position within the government by keeping 8 of the

5 However, it is worth noting that although the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was the second largest member of the alliance after the Congress party, it received one less minister in the new government than the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK), which won the third most seats in the UPA. Another obvious inconsistency was the allocation of only two ministries to the PMK even though the party had secured three times as many seats (6) as the TRS (2) which got the same number of berths in the new government.

21

10 ministers of state with independent charge and allocating only 1 each to the NCP

and the RJD.

3. The De-‐selection of Ministers

Table 5 documents the frequency of the main types of ministerial exits within

India’s Union cabinets. There are two important points to note:

i) there has been a linear increase in the number of ministerial departures over

time; and

ii) minority governments have seen less frequent ministerial departures than

majority or near-majority governments;

3.1. Intra-‐party politics

In the period of the ‘Congress system’, (Kothari 1964), which was defined by an

institutionally strong Congress party organization that was able to exert influence

and impose effective constraints on the Prime Minister’s ability to make and

unmake cabinet ministers, ministerial exits tended to be much less frequent than in

the subsequent periods. Prior to the first free elections, Prime Minister Nehru’s

power over the cabinet was kept in check by the influence that his Deputy Prime

Minister, Sardar Patel, and the spiritual leader of the Congress party and movement,

Mahatma Gandhi, exercised over the party organization. Until Patel’s death in 1950,

cabinet appointments were effectively sanctioned by Mahatma Gandhi who strove

to make sure that the balance between the Patelite and the Nehruvite factions would

22

be maintained to keep the peace with the ideologically diverse Congress party

(Gangal 1972: 19-‐22).

Although the untimely deaths of Gandhi, in 1948, and of Patel, in 1950, removed

these important sources of constraint on Nehrus’ power over the cabinet, the Prime

Minister still faced a strong party organization that sought to maintain and exercise

its authority over the cabinet. The most astonishing demonstration of the power of

the Congress party organization vis-‐à-‐vis the Prime Minister was the forced

resignation of Krishna Menon from the Defense portfolio in 1962. Together with G.B.

Pant and Morarji Desai, Menon was a member of Nehru’s inner cabinet having been

inducted to the cabinet as minister without portfolio only six years prior, in 1956.

The immediate and apparent reason for Menon’s departure was the military fiasco

caused by China’s attack in 1962, which caught the Indian army by and large

unprepared. At first the Prime Minister was reluctant to drop his close confidant

from the cabinet for fear of showing weakness as a leader. In the end, however,

Nehru succumbed to the pressure that was brought on him by the senior party

leadership and accepted the resignation of his trusted minister of Defense.

The forced resignation of K. Menon proved to be a turning point as it marked

the beginning of a long period of Prime Ministerial supremacy to determine the exit

and reshuffling of cabinet ministers. In an immediate reprisal against his colleagues

who engineered Menon’s departure from the cabinet, Nehru activated an earlier

recommendation by K. Kamaraj, then Chief Minister of the state of Madras, which

would mark the first ever large-‐scale cabinet re-‐shuffle in India’s post-‐Independence

history, the famous Kamaraj plan (Brecher 1966). Citing the party’s relative

23

electoral setback in the 1962 general election and losses in a number of by-‐elections

in 1963, the Kamaraj plan called upon senior government ministers to return to

organizational party work after having spent a substantial period of time in the

national executive. Under the Kamaraj plan a total of nine senior cabinet ministers

were forced to resign, which was an extremely large number considering that the

overall size of the cabinet at this point in time was still well below 20.6

The unbridled authority of the head of government over the career of her/his

cabinet ministers continued to grow under Indira Gandhi (1966-‐77, 1980-‐4) and

then her son Rajiv Gandhi (1984-‐89). Kochanek (1976: 101-‐2) notes that Indira

Gandhi created a “dependent cabinet” as part of her strategy of building a new

authority structure in India, one that was to revolve around her personal influence

at the expense of the formal institutions of political power including the legislature,

the executive, the judiciary and the ruling Congress Party itself as well. Indira

Gandhi assured herself full control over the cabinet both by securing the

appointment of ministers with no independent political power base of their own but

also by engaging in an unprecedented number of reshuffles.

An important indicator of the profoundly different frequency of ministerial

mobility during the ‘Congress system’ (1947-‐1964) and the period of de-‐

institutionalized Congress dominance (1964-‐1989) is the number of times that

changes took place at the helm of the “Big Four”. During the 17 years of the Congress

6 These nine ministers were: H.M. Ibrahim (Irrigation an Power) and K.D. Malviya (Mines and Fuel) on June 26, 1963; K.C. Reddy (Commerce and Industry) on July 19, 1963; M. Desai (Finance) on August 31, 1963; J. Ram (Transport and Communications), B.G. reddy (Information and Broadcasting), K.L. Shrimali (Education), and L.B. Shastri ( Home) on September 1, 1963.

24

system the average number of ministerial changes in these portfolios was 1

compared to 2.15 during the second period. The ability of the Prime Minister to shift

even the most senior cabinet ministers at will was a clear indication of the high

degree of power concentration in the hand of the head of government. For instance,

both Y.B.Chavan and Narasimha Rao served in almost all major portfolios for some

time under Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi respectively. The former had

filled the posts of minister of Defense, Home, Finance and External Affairs; the latter

had been assigned Home, Defense, External Affairs and Human Resource

Development (Jain 2003: 117). Malhotra (1983) notes that no less 140 changes took

place in the Council of Ministers, including cabinet and lesser rank reshuffles, during

the first 11 years of Indira Gandhi’s leadership (1966-‐77). The same trend

continued under Rajiv Gandhi who instituted 24 changes in the first 3 ½ years of his

government (Jain 2003: 41); the total number of exits during his term in office

reached an unprecedented record of 43.

The two Gandhis also took advantage of federal structure of the state in order

to keep their cabinet subservient. Indira Gandhi is credited to have started the

practice of turning the Union cabinet into an instrument of intervention in sub-‐

national politics by a skillful management of the vertical mobility of ministers across

the state and the Union levels of government (Panandiker and Mehra 1996: 116-‐8;

Kochanek 1976; 110-‐1). In order to extend her influence and control over state

politics, Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv thereafter, would frequently appoint some

of her most trusted cabinet ministers to take up the position of Chief Minister in

states where the Prime Minister’s authority needed strengthening. Similarly, both

25

Gandhis would frequently use the Union cabinet as a temporary shelter where their

loyal Chief Ministers could be appointed following a local electoral defeat or

factional strife within the local Congress organization (see Wood 1984). Jain (2003:

49) documents that Rajiv Gandhi accommodated no fewer than eight locally

“displaced” Chief Ministers when he reshuffled his cabinet on June 25, 1988.7

These maneouvres were part and parcel of the strategy to keep the Congress

Party de-‐institutionalized and abolish the local power bases that had kept the Party

organization strong and vibrant in the days of the ‘Congress system’. According to

Kochanek (1976: 111), however, the state Congress Party organizations had

effectively rebelled against Indira Gandhi’s centralization of power and resisted her

further attempts to impose Chief Ministers from New Delhi by the middle of 1973.

Nonetheless, her son resorted to the same practice as he effected a total of 11

ministerial moves across the Union-‐state divide between September 1985 and

January 1989: Rajiv Gandhi appointed five Union ministers to becoming Chief

Ministers and moved six Chief Ministers to the Union cabinet (Panendikar and

Mehra 1996: 131).8

7 These eight Chief Ministers were: Narasimha Rao, S.B. Chavan, M. Solanki, J.V. Rao, Bhajan Lal, B.B. Singh, B, Dubey, and Moti Lal Vore. See (Jain 2003: 49 note 45). 8 The eleven moves included three ministers (Arjun Singh, Motilal Vore, and ND Tiwari) who moved in both directions once during Rajiv Gandhis; term in office. The other two Union ministers who were appointed Chief Ministers in this period were S.B. Chavan and Bansi Lal; the other three Chief Ministers who were appointed to the union cabinet were Bhajan Lal, B. Dubey, and V.B. Singh (Panendiker and mehra 1996: 131).

26

3.2. Inter-‐party considerations

Since the onset of coalition politics in 1989, state and national politics have

become ever more intertwined in defining the dynamics of executive politics in the

Union cabinets. The presence of regional and state parties in the national

government has forced Prime Ministers to become increasingly more sensitive and

aware of the subnational repercussions of their choices to make and unmake

cabinet ministers. Moreover, the coalitional nature of party politics has also meant

that Prime Ministers since 1989 have had to take into account increasingly the

demands of their party’s coalition partners when deciding about the fate of

individual cabinet ministers. In instances where the Prime Minister’s party is in

direct competition with a coalition partner in the local party system of a state, the

Prime Minister may find itself under conflicting pressures from the coalition partner

on the one hand and from his party’s state unit on the other with regard to

ministerial choices and exits.

For instance, the resignation of two AIADMK ministers from A. B. Vajpayee’s

coalition minority government in April 1999, T. Durai and Janarthanan, which would

eventually pave the way to the wholesale departure of the party from the governing

coalition was as much linked to inter-‐coalitional fights as to intra-‐state politics in

Tamil Nadu. The apparent cause for AIADMK leader Jayalalitha’s decision to recall

her two minsters from the Union cabinet was the Prime Minister’s unwillingness to

reinstate her protégé Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat as chief of the naval staff following

his dismissal by Defense Minister George Fernandes of the Samata Party, a key ally

of the BJP both nationally as well as in the second largest state of the country, Bihar.

27

In addition, however, the AIADMK leadership was becoming increasingly frustrated

with the Prime Minister’s reluctance to help the AIADMK in the state party system of

Tamil Nadu by dismissing the state government which was held at the time by the

DMK, the AIADMK’s principal local opponent (Nikolenyi 2010).

The cases of Mamata Bannerjee and Nitish Kumar provide interesting

examples of the complexity of ways in which state and national level political and

electoral calculations affect the politics of ministerial careers in contemporary India.

Mamata Bannerjee, founder and leader of the TMC, an splinter from the state unit of

the Congress party in the state of West Bengal, quit her portfolio as Minister of

Railways in A.B. Vajpayee’s NDA coalition government in 2001 in order to contest

the upcoming West Bengal state election in an electoral alliance with the Congress

Party, which formed the national opposition to the NDA. Following her party’s

defeat at the West Bengal polls, Mamata was re-‐admitted to the Union cabinet as

Minister of Coal and Mines. Nitish Kumar, the senior leader of the Janata Dal

(United), started out as Minister of Railways in the Vajpayee’s third BJP-‐led

government but resigned in the wake of a major train accident that claimed the lives

of nearly 300 people at Gaisal in August 1999. Subsequently he was appointed as

Minister of Agriculture but he left his post in order to become Chief Minister of the

state of Bihar. Following his failed, and very brief, attempt to form a state

government, Kumar was re-‐inducted to the Union Cabinet as, once again, Minister of

Railways.9

9 Kumar gave up trying to form a state government in Bihar after only 7 days.

28

In cases of minority government, an important source of constraint on the

Prime Minister’s authority vis-‐à-‐vis his ministers is the party, or parties, whose

external legislative support sustains the minority government in office. For example,

although not a formal member of I.K. Gujral’s United Front coalition government, the

Congress Party demanded the removal of cabinet ministers belonging to the DMK, a

state based party from the Southern state of Tamil Nadu, when leaked reports of an

investigative commission linked the DMK with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in

1991. Although the Congress explicitly claimed that it could not justify supporting a

coalition government that included a constituent party which had been directly

responsible for the assassination of its former leader, an equally important reason

for the Congress’ demand was to weaken the DMK’s ability to channel national

resources to Tamil Nadu where the Congress was part of the anti-‐DMK pole in the

state party system. Prime Minister Gujral’s eventual refusal to bow to the Congress

demand led to the eventual resignation of his entire government. This episode was

similar to the conditions under which Charan Singh’s Janata Party (Secular)

minority government met its premature end in 1979. Literally the the day after his

cabinet was sworn in, the Congress, which had pledged external parliamentary

support to keep the government in office, announced that it had provided

unconditional support only for the formation of the coalition cabinet, however, as

far as the continuation of the government in office was concerned the party’s

support “was not totally unconditional” (Paul 66). As a condition of its continued

29

support, the Congress demanded the removal of any cabinet minister, specifically

who had opposed the party’s leader, Indira Gandhi, in the past.10

10Keesing’s’ Contemporary Archives, p. 29973.

30

Conclusion

The formal constitutional powers of the Indian Prime Ministers, with regard

to the appointment and dismissal of cabinet ministers, have remained largely

unchanged since the adoption of the constitution in 1950. The only constitutional

amendment that has affected the otherwise unconstrained discretion of the head of

government to form and change the composition of the Council of Ministers is in

Article 91 that limits the overall number of ministers and makes a ministerial

appointment subject to the Anti-‐Defection Law. Otherwise, Indian Prime Ministers

have had no institutional constraints on their authority to affect and shape the

careers of their ministers.

At the same time, two important political variables seemed to have made an

important difference with regard to the extent to which Prime Ministers can

exercise their formally unbridled authority: i) the organizational strength of the

Prime Minister’s political party, and ii) the format of the party system. As we saw

above, the leadership of an organizationally strong ruling party was capable of

balancing the formal powers of the Prime Minister even as popular and as strong as

Nehru was. Similarly, the institutional strength of the BJP party organization also

placed effective constraints on the cabinet making and cabinet changing powers of

the party’s Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee who, during his successive terms,

constantly had to balance between the competing claims of his government’s

coalition partners on the one hand and the BJP party organization, which he never

controlled, on the other. In stark contrast, Indira Gandhi, apart from her early days

31

in office, and Rajiv Gandhi were able to keep the Congress Party institutionally and

organizationally weak which left them in complete control over the Union cabinet.

As to the format of party system, Prime Ministers face considerably more

demands and claims on their appointment and dismissal practices when they lead a

coalition or a minority government, which has become the recurring pattern since

1989. The federalization of the national party system, which has been the result of

the simultaneous fragmentation and de-‐nationalization of the national party system,

has introduced regional and state-‐based parties as pivotal players in Union politics,

adding state-‐level political calculations as an important determinant of ministerial

entry and exit in the Union cabinet. Although the Indian constitution now places a

strict cap on the size of the Council of Ministers, Indian cabinets have become larger

and increasingly less stable, in terms of individual ministerial terms, over time. The

continued fractionalization of the party system and the institutional weakness of the

Congress, which continues to remain one of the two large national parties with

governing potential, suggest that these trends are here to stay.

32

Tables 1: Indian governments, 1952-‐2009 Name of Prime Minister (party)

Term in office Type of government

Formation time Size of Council (cabinet)

J. Nehru (INC) 21.2.1952-‐11.5.1957

Single-‐party majority

NA (15)

J. Nehru (INC) 11.5.1957-‐2.4.1962


NA (13)

J. Nehru (INC) 2.4.1962-‐9.6.1964


NA (17)

L.B.Shastri (INC)

9.6.1964-‐11.1.1966


13 days missing

I. Gandhi (INC) 24.1.1966-‐13.3.1967


13 days (19)

I. Gandi (INC) 13.3.1967-‐17.3.1971


missing (16)**

I. Gandhi(INC) 17.3.1971-‐24.3.1977


6 days 36 (13)

M. Desai (JP) 24.3.1977-‐28.7.1979

Coalition majority

4 days (20)

C. Singh (JS) 28.7.1979-‐14.1.1980

Coalition minority

13 days (15)

I. Gandhi (INC) 14.1.1980-‐31.10.1984


4 days (15)

R. Gandhi (INC) 31.10.1984-‐2.12.1989


3 days 40 (15)

V.P. Singh (JD) 2.12.1989-‐10.11.1990

Coalition minority

6 days (17)

C. Shekhar (JS) 10.11.1990-‐21.6.1991

Single party minority

3 days (15)

P.V.N. Rao (INC)

21.6.1999-‐16.5.1995

Single party minority

6 days (16)

A.B.Vajpayee (BJP)

16.5.1996-‐1.6.1996

Coalition minority

9 days (12)

H.D. Gowda (JD)

1.6.1996-‐21.4.1997

Coalition minority

4 days 21 (14)

I.K. Gujral (JD) 21.4.1997-‐19.3.1998

Coalition minority

11 days 43 (21)

A. B. Vajpayee (BJP)

19.3.1998-‐13.10.1999

Coalition minority

12 days 43(22)

A.B. Vajpayee (BJP)

13.10.1999-‐18.5.2004

Coalition majority

10 days 69(26)

M. Singh (INC) 22.5.2004-‐20.5.2009

Coalition minority

8 days 68 (29)

33

M. Singh (INC) 20.5.2009-‐ Coalition minority

7 days 67(28)*

Sources: http://pmindia.nic.in/pmsofindia.php; Jain (2003); Keesings Contemporary Archives various reports Notes: * as of May 31, 2009. ** as of 26.6.1970 Jain (2003:45).

34

Table 2: The NDA government of 1998

Party Number of seats in Lok Sabha

% of seats in NDA

Number of ministers in government

% of ministers in government

BJP 183 72.05 25 (11) 58.14 (50) AIADMK 18 7.09 3(1) 6.98 (4.55) S 13 5.12 2 (2) 4.65(9.09) Shiv Sena 6 2.36 1(1) 2.33(4.55) BJD 9 3.54 3(2) 6.98(9.09) SAD 8 3.15 2(1) 4.65(4.55) Lok Shakti 3 1.18 1(1) 2.33(4.55) HVP 1 0.39 -‐ PMK 4 1.57 2(1) 4.65(4.55) MDMK 3 1.18 -‐ TRC 1 0.39 1(1) 2.33(4.55) Arunachal C 2 0.79 1(0) 2.33 JP 1 0.39 -‐ Maneka Gandhi

1 0.39 1(0) 2.33

Buta Singh 1 0.39 1(1) 2.33 (4.55) Total 254 43(22) Source: McMillan (2005: 25).

35

Table 3: The NDA government of 1999


% of seats in NDA

Number of ministers in government (cabinet)

% of ministers in government (cabinet)

BJP 183 67.53 46 (15) 66.67 (57.69) JD(U)/Samata 22 8.12 6(4) 8.7 (15.38) Shiv Sena 15 5.54 3(2) 4.35(7.69) DMK 12 4.43 3(2) 4.35(7.69) BJD 10 3.69 2(1) 2.9(3.85) Trinamul C 8 2.95 2(1) 2.9(3.85) MDMK 4 1.48 2(0) 2.9 PMK 5 1.85 2(0) 2.9 MADMK 1 0.37 -‐ SAD 2 0.74 -‐ ABLTC 2 0.74 -‐ HVC 1 0.37 -‐ KNC 4 1.48 1(0) 1.45 MSCP 1 0.37 -‐ Ram Jethmalani

-‐ -‐ 1(1) 1.45(3.85)

Maneka Gandhi

1 0.37 1(0) 1.45

Total 271 100 69(26) 100 Source: McMillan (2005: 27).

36

Table 4: The UPA government of 2004


% of seats in UPA

Number of ministers in government (cabinet)

% of ministers in government (cabinet)

Congress Party 145 67.4 43* (19) 61.8 RJD 21 9.8 8 (2) 11.8 DMK 16 7.4 7 (3) 10.3 NCP 9 4.2 3(1) 4.4 PMK 6 2.8 2(1) 2.9 JMM 5 2.3 1(1) 1.5 LS 4 1.9 1(1) 1.5 MDMK 4 1.9 0 0 TRS 2 0.9 2(1) 2.9 IUML 1 0.5 1 1.5 RPI 1 0.5 0 0 JKPDF 1 0.5 0 0 Total 215 68 (29) Notes: * this figure includes the Prime Minister.

37

Table 5: Exits from Indian cabinets Cabinet Total

exits Resignations Dismissals Non-‐

political or other

Shifts

Nehru-‐1 8 4 0 2 2 Nehru-‐2 6 2 0 2 2 Nehru-‐3 11 9 0 0 2 Shastri 3 1 0 1 1 Indira Gandhi-‐1

5 1 0 0 4

Indira Gandhi-‐2

8 6 0 0 2

Indira Gandhi-‐3

27 10 3 2 14

Morarji Desai

12 7 2 0 3

Charan Singh

5 4 0 0 1

Indira Gandhi-‐4

27 5 2 0 20

Rajiv Gandhi 43 22 4 0 17 V.P. Singh 4 4 0 0 0 Chandra Shekhar

PVN. Rao 27 20 0 0 7 AB Vajpayee-‐1

0 0 0 0 0

D. Gowda 8 8 0 0 0 IK Gujral 4 4 0 0 0 AB Vajpayee-‐2

17 9 0 6 2

AB Vajpayee-‐3

26 15 0 5 6

M. Singh -‐1 30 11 0 10 9 Sources: Panandiker and Mehra (1996: chapter 5) and author’s own dataset. Exits include ministerial departures prior to the end of the government. The seven cabinet ministers who were shifted from one portfolio to another in the Rao government are the following: Ghulam N. Azad, Pranab Mukherjee, B. Sharakanand, Jaffer Sharif, Arjun Singh, Dinesh Singh, and Swamy Venkat. The six cabinet ministers who were shifted within the Vajpayee-‐3 government are the following: Sinha Shatrughan, Anant Kumar, Jagmohan, Jaswant Singh, and Uma Bharati, Nitish Kumar. Cabinet ministers who were shifted within the Vajpayee-‐2 government are as follows: Jagmohan and Jethmalani, both of the BJP.

38

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