WILL WE GET A NEW FM?

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s conspicuous absence from key pre-budget interactions between the Prime Minister with policymakers and industrialists has sparked off speculation of a change of guard at the ministry. The consensus is that this will happen post budget (because anyway it is the PMO and not the Finance Ministry that is the key architect of the budget); but there is no consensus on the replacement. Some say the PM could follow the Jaishankar model and bring in a technocrat like K.V. Kamath into the ministry. Others point to the fact that while Nirmala was absent from the Niti Aayog meet, three other ministers were there flanking the Pm—piyush Goyal, Nitin Gadkari and Amit Shah. Goyal, as we know, was a frontrunner for the FM’S job last year, but apparently it was the late Arun Jaitley’s ABP policy that did him in (Anybody But Piyush). Piyush certainly has Shah’s backing, but will the PM oblige? After the last Lok Sabha polls, there has been a significant dip in the rapport between Modi and Gadkari, claim sources, thereby ruling out his shift to the North Block. However, another candidate could be Shah himself. After all, his “In Tray” at the Home Ministry is now empty. He has delivered on all the key promises in record time—from revoking Article 370 to the CAA (with or without the NRC). Will the economy be his next big challenge? Of course since this is the Modi era, all such speculation must come with a warning: however well-placed the source may be, only one person knows the correct answer—and that is the PM himself.