Minimum government, maximum governance or other way around?

By Gomi Senadhira

During the 2014 election campaign in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most appealing slogan was “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance”. It was an attractive slogan. It implied that the government under BJP would be efficient and that a smaller cabinet and a bureaucracy with more capable people would be better than a larger one with many inefficient people at the top. During the election campaign, Modi vowed to reduce India’s government’s size to revive the economy and fight what was then Asia’s second-fastest-growing inflation. As per the mandate received, Narendra Modi’s 2014 cabinet was the smallest in 16 years. It consisted of 23 cabinet ministers, down from 34 in the previous government of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

However, keeping the size of the cabinet small is an uphill task in any parliamentary democracy. So, more recently, after the Cabinet reshuffle in July 2021, Modi’s council of ministers became the third largest council of ministers, since 1990, with 30 Cabinet ministers and 47 ministers of state as opposed to 21 and 32 in the previous council. In India, the record size of the council of ministers was 80, excluding the PM. That happened twice under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and twice under the Manmohan Singh government. Why 80? Is it an auspicious number selected by astrologers? No. That is the maximum allowed under the Indian constitution.

Yes, the Indian constitution has provisions to limit the size of the Council of Ministers. That was after the 91st amendment, which provides that the total number of ministers, including the Prime Minister, in the Council of Ministers shall not exceed 15% of the total strength of the Lok Sabha. Before the 91st Amendment in 2003, the size of the Council of Ministers was decided by the PM according to the exigencies of time and requirements of the situation. But this led to very large Council of Ministers, particularly when no party had a clear majority.

This practice was not only economically and politically unsustainable but also inimical to the principle of the separation of powers between the executive (ministers) and legislature (MPs), a fundamental pillar of any democracy. Hence, the Indian Parliament introduced the 91st Amendment to reduce the size of the Council of ministers to 80, which is 15% of the total strength of the Lok Sabha. As the Indian parliament has a total of 802 MPs (552 in Lok Sabha and 250 Rajya Sabha), the actual maximum number of ministers in India will remain under 10% of the total number of MPs, under any government.

In contrast, the Guinness World Record for the most cabinet ministers in one country is held by Sri Lanka. That was achieved by our former President Mahinda Rajapaksa in November 2005 when he appointed 52 cabinet ministers.https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-cabinet-ministers-appointed-by-a-government ).

In January 2013, President Mahinda Rajapaksa broke his own record and increased the size of the cabinet to 67. it appears that the Guinness World Records has failed to update its records. Or perhaps, like most Sri Lankans, the Guinness Book also had given up commenting on the size of Sri Lanka’s cabinet. After all, why play harps to the deaf elephant. The 67 ministers in the 2013 cabinet included the executive president, Prime Minister, and ten senior Ministers. In addition to the cabinet ministers, another 28 were appointed as Deputy Ministers, and two were brought in as ‘Project Ministers.’ This took the total number of Ministers in the 225-member Parliament to 97. There were also a group of young Members of Parliament, named ‘Monitoring MPs. Some of these ‘Monitoring MPs’ were as powerful as the cabinet ministers. Then the senior ministers. At that time, some analysts pointed out why Sri Lanka was better than Singapore. After all, Singapore had only one senior minister, and Sri Lanka had ten.

Fortunately, the council of ministers, formed under Gotabaya Rajapaksa in August 2020, consisted of 26 ministers and 41 state ministers. The current council of ministers includes only 20 cabinet ministers and 38 state ministers. The smallest in recent history. Unfortunately, even with the smallest council of ministers, more than 25% of MPs are ministers in Sri Lanka. In India, with one of the largest council of ministers in recent history, only 10% of the MPs are ministers!

During the last two decades, the Maximum Government, that too under unskilled people at the top, has delivered worse governance and turned Sri Lanka into a bankrupt nation. So, it is necessary and timely to amend the constitution and limit the size of the Council of Ministers to 10 or 15 percent of the total strength of the Parliament.

(The writer can be contacted at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)