What Shaktikanta Das’s unexpected entry as top gun in Modi’s PMO means

The appointment of Shaktikanta Das as additional or second principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi has, indeed, raised eyebrows in bureaucratic, political and power circuits of Delhi and also much beyond its confines. The reason is that this is unprecedented, because PK Mishra already heads the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as the principal secretary.

The move is going to make the Modi administration more top heavy than that of his predecessors. And, since Das was appointed after his retirement as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor and also as a secretary in the Union government before that, the step may strengthen the lure for post-retirement jobs in the government among the higher echelons of the country’s bureaucracy.

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Committed bureaucracy

It can well lead to the making of what is feared to be a “committed bureaucracy” wherein the political executive’s important moves could miss the kind of critical, cool and dispassionate view or appraisal that these may deserve before their launch from the domain experts the bureaucracy is supposed to have. It is a known fact that these days, the PMO makes the most crucial policy and administrative decisions, not the related ministries.

Moreover, the ministries are now thought to be full of officers of the PMO’s choice. Most government secretaries are said to report to the PMO directly. In the recent past, quite a few of the secretaries were given extension after extension after hitting the age of superannuation. This was reportedly done at the behest of the PMO. Among other things, it blocked the opportunity of promotion to those caught in the second rungs of the bureaucracy. A former cabinet secretary and a former Union home secretary are among those who were given repeated extensions in the recent past.

Sense of stagnation

Those in the know of things point out that a feeling of stagnation had become the hallmark through the officialdom until the previous or second term of the Modi government. Many officers from state cadres who came to the Centre on deputation often wanted to go back to their states in view of a loss of prospects by being ensconced in Delhi and, to say the least, a sort of indifference towards work was also setting in among some of the officers.

The chain of feedback of communication — if not that of command — was weakened because of this. For example, India woke up to the shortage in coal supply for power generation at the onset of summer in 2022, and only hurried action could avert the possible disruption in power generation and supply through the peak demand period during the ensuing summer months.

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Command structure

The point, in short, is that this happened under the nose of a mighty PMO, which will now add more heft to it by inducting another principal secretary to refurbish its top ranks. Besides other things, the idea can entail the risk of doubling the command structure at the very top of today’s power structure unless the functions of the two principal secretaries are clearly demarcated and the two incumbents can get along well.

It is more so since the move is in sharp contrast to what had happened during the NDA-I rule under then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. For some time after Vajpayee took over as the PM, Brajesh Mishra and Shakti Sinha worked together as top PMO officials but eventually Sinha joined the World Bank, leaving Mishra in sole and full command of Vajpayee’s PMO. So much so that Mishra came to be generally referred to as “executive prime minister” in his heydays.