Jagmohan should have been there long ago. He was left out perhaps because someone more presentable from Delhi had to be accommodated. Luckily for Jagmohan, Sushama Swaraj who had been deployed as Delhi's chief minister on the glib assumption that she is as good a trouble-shooter as she is in shooting her mouth off failed in her mission. It is not good manners to reinduct her in her old job in Shastri Bhawan and Sanchar Bhawan after the showing of the party inDelhi under her stewardship. But Sushama Swaraj is too articulate a person to be left in a state of enforced silence. Why not make her the government's spokesperson?

Jagmohan is a comparatively new entrant in the saffron set-up. He was one of its most hated men twenty years ago. Those who recall the deluge of vituperation that followed the infamous emergency of 1975-77 will recognise Jagmoham as the ready and constant target of the most vicious verbal assault. Those who tried him before the Shah Commission for his excesses as the nearly omnipotent vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority had an excellent opportunity to exhaust all entries in their fabled lexicon of abuse. The fact was that Jagmohan was effective, outrageously effective, in executing any work that he took up, or was forced on him. During the emergency, his assignment was demolition. That was all.

What endeared him to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders was exactly this quality. This quality of wanting to do things effectively,without being inhibited by expediencies of popularity or values of sobriety and restraint. Jagmohan became a great friend of the BJP leaders not because of his erudition or because of his reputation as an administrative bulldozer. The reputation of Jagmohan's administrative extremism stood him in good stead in so far as it showed him as a no-nonsense governor of Jammu & Kashmir, where he was willing to take head-on the militants and their friends in the valley.

There the BJP leaders spotted him, and backed him. Some of those whom Jagmohan had to take on during his stint in Srinagar later became votaries of the BJP. But that should be seen only as an illustration of the dictum that there are no permanent enemies or friends but only permanent interests. Farooq Abdullah now finds that it is now in his interest to back the BJP.

While Jagmohan will bring sternness to Sanchar Bhawan, Jaswant Singh will have add nothing to South Block, for whatever he brings to the ministry of external affairs will be what ithas tasted ever since the rise of Vajpayee to power. Jaswant Singh lost the election, but he never lost power or office. He was always there, the amiable, articulate authority on foreign affairs and defence matters, not to speak of issues of development.

Though he was made only the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Jaswant Singh was always there to do what others could not or were not entirely happy to attempt. Jaswant Singh was readily available to fly from one place to another as Vajpayee's emissary; he was also readily available to dash off to Chennai and wait upon a recalcitrant Jayalalitha.

Jaswant Singh's amiability and elegance will now be on display in South Block on a formal basis. He will be particularly happy on two counts. One, Vajpayee makes him more or less indispensable as foreign minister. Two, he may be spared the odium of rushing to Chennai and waiting for hours on end to have an audience with the imperious ally.

Thankfully, that mission has been assigned to GeorgeFernandes.

Even more indispensable than Jaswant Singh is Pramod Mahajan. Being more indispensable is not the same thing as being less controversial. Soon after his defeat, Mahajan became Vajpayee's political adviser with an appropriate rank in the prime minister's office. He gave it up only when his election in a second contest was assured. Unlike Jaswant Singh or Jagmohan, Mahajan has confidently embittered certain sections of the party in his home state and befriended more useful sections outside the party.

That gives him fame for mess management. The party landed itself in trouble when the enforcement director Bezbaruah was summarily sent away and many people including Jaylalitha sought to link Mahajan with that move. Mahajan of course would not agree. And that familiar exercise of an inquiry into the circumstances in which that move was made will never end, hopefully. Mahajan knows his mind as well as his political interest. He is assertive. He can be depended upon to make the government's captivemedia behave in a manner that would be conducive to the ruling party's political gain. Given his eloquence and flair for sophistry, Mahajan will certainly prove that pseudo-objectivity is no virtue, quoting, if need be, Soren Kierkegard's famous saying that Truth is Subjectivity.