It is time, therefore, for a reality check. The size of the council of ministers before last Tuesday’s reshuffle was 64. And the average age of these members was 59 or 58.86, to be precise. After the reshuffle, the size of the council has increased to 78 and the average age has remained nearly the same at 58.87.
There is no reduction, but it is nevertheless, a creditable achievement that the government has not let the average age go up, particularly in a country where older people don’t usually give up to pave the way for the young to succeed and people’s attachment to jobs — in politics, the corporate sector and indeed, in almost all walks of life — increases as they grow older.
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Look at it another way. About 20 months ago the average age of the 64-strong council of ministers would have been around 57. That must have been one of the youngest council of ministers and it may still be. For, even after a big expansion, the average age has gone up just by the number of months that have lapsed since then.
There is another takeaway if you look at the age profiles of each of the three categories of ministers in Modi’s council. The average age of the Cabinet ministers is understandably the highest at 62 and this has not changed — both when the Cabinet had 27 members and now that Prakash Javadekar’s elevation has made it 28-strong. In spite of that, however, the average age for Modi’s Cabinet ministers would probably be the lowest among all governments in the past.
The number of ministers of state with independent charge before and after the reshuffle has remained 12, but the average age has declined from about 60 to 58.42. This is the impact of appointing three new ministers at this level and demoting two and elevating one of them from this group — the inductees were aged between 57 and 62, those who were demoted were older than 65 and the one to be elevated was aged 65.
The big expansion took place in the category of ministers of state — its size went up from 25 to 38 after taking into account the five ministers of state who were dropped and some promotions. But here the average age has increased. It was 55 before the reshuffle and over 56 after it.
So, what could have Modi done to bring the average age of his ministry down as significantly as was expected of him? Essentially, there were three options before him. One, he should have stuck to his earlier criterion that no minister in his council should be more than 75 years old. It was widely believed then that he imposed that criterion largely to reject the ministerial claims of many seniors in the party who were above 75 years — L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Yashwant Sinha — to name a few. But in the current Cabinet, there are now at least two ministers who are above 75. It is puzzling why Modi did not use that criterion last week to drop them and look for younger replacements. If those above 75 were replaced with new ministers with an average age of 62, Modi’s Cabinet would have looked even younger at 61.
Two, the age criterion for ministers in a young country like India, ideally, should be lower than the 75 years that Modi had proposed. Could he, therefore, have used last week’s reshuffle to introduce a lower age criterion of, say, 70 years? There are only four ministers in the Cabinet, and indeed in the entire council of ministers, who are over 70 years. Replacing them with younger ministers would have given Modi an opportunity to reinvigorate the entire team.
Finally, the much-delayed restructuring of central ministries could have been announced last week, paving the way for fewer ministers in all the three tiers of the council. It makes little sense for a prime minister, who had made the promise of minimum government, to present a council of ministers, which at 78 is as large as that of his predecessor.