cabinet reshuffle: rearranging the deck-chairs on the titanic?

jul 11th, 2011 CE

Cabinet reshuffle: Rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic?

 

There was a headline in the Daily Pioneer the other day: “DMK reshuffles PM’s cabinet”. That was accurate, and telling: all that happened was that one set of dubious DMK folks was replaced by another set of dubious DMK folks: the accused Maran, for instance, replaced by Baalu, the man whose mission in life, it appeared, was to lay waste to the historic Rama Setu. And incidentally to pass on lucrative dredging contracts to pals, all in the name of the quixotic attempt to make Tuticorin attractive to shipping in the Arabian Sea.

 

Now there’s a lot of noise about the Big Reshuffle. It is to happen on Tuesday the 12^th of July, at 5pm, it appears. Ah, frabjous day! What else happened on July 12^th? A quick perusal of www.historyorb.com suggests the following:

• 1191: Richard the Lionheart defeats the Saracens in Palestine
• 1906: Alfred Dreyfus found innocent in France (just look up Emile Zola’s impassioned J’accuse! for more information about how Jews have traditionally been treated in Europe)
• 1970: Thor Heyerdahl crosses the Atlantic in “Ra” and docks in Barbados

I am pretty sure the Big Reshuffle isn’t going to top any of this. In fact, it’s going to be a pretty major non-event, so long as the same jokers are just getting different jobs (maybe with one or two of them dropped as sacrificial lamb, as Natwar Singh can tell you). It is, alas, merely a rearrangement of the deck-chairs on the Titanic, as the Manmohan Singh administration heads towards some pretty serious icebergs, mostly of their own making.

 

Incidentally, July 11^th had an anniversary of its own:

2006: the Mumbai train blasts that killed 187 people (and the trial of 13 alleged members of SIMI and LeT is still dragging on)