Run ups to the Cabinet reshuffle are more or less a happy time for reporters. Ministers and politicos, who would otherwise act pricey, now call you up for the latest on dit on the reshuffle. Their gatekeepers or personal staff are even more deferential.
All this, of course, is dependent upon the quality of information that you possess. Last Sunday, rumours spread like wildfire that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had left two slots on his day?s appointment list empty. Meaning, he had allotted the time to someone, but didn?t want it to be known as to who that was. The short hand for all this is that the empty slots were for the Congress president Sonia Gandhi to get into a pow wow with the Prime Minister on the reshuffle.
From Sunday morning until about 11 at night, TV crews waited, sometimes in three shifts, for the meeting to take place. Print reporters called in favours at the Prime Minister?s residence, and with the TV crews stationed there to keep track. Alas, the short drive from 10 Janpath to 7 Race Course Road didn?t take place and, despite the early arrival of monsoon, no cheer could be found.
The next morning, a few newspapers hazarded that a midnight meeting may still have taken place. Congress strategists were bombarded with questions on the time table and particulars of the reshuffle, to which a stock reply, framed and finalised from the earliest days of the Manmohan-Sonia division of power, was trotted out: ?Only two people know the particulars, the PM and CP (Congress President), neither of whom are confiding in anyone.?
Even attempts at pointing out that this just proves that the said Congress leader is out of the Manmohan-Sonia circle of trust does not elicit any information. In the Congress, discretion is the better part of survival, no mistake.
More experienced reporters sourced a third party involved?the office of the President of India. This is perhaps the only time that her appointment diary becomes important to political reporters. The President is off to her annual sojourn in Hyderabad on Saturday, July 2. By deduction then, the reshuffle has to take place either before that or in the period between after she returns and the commencement of the Monsoon Session on August 1.
Until then, of course, it is open season on speculation.