Goel to liaise with allies

By Harish Khare

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 8. He may have waited for one week to find out how much of elbow room he would be permitted in the Prime Minister's Office as Minister of State, but Mr. Vijay Goel should be a satisfied man after the Prime Minister's order of work allocation. And the icing on the cake is that a spacious room has been found for him in the corner-most building of South Block.

Mr. Goel's most-important political assignment would be ``NDA- related issues''. In other words, the new Minister of State would be expected to become the interface between the disparate allies and the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee. In addition, Mr. Goel will have the responsibility for co-ordination, where needed, between the State Governments (as well as the Union Territories) and the Prime Minister's Office.

These two tasks will require political tact and savvy on Mr. Goel's part. While the coalition partners in New Delhi are at best unpredictable, the NDA State Governments have been making - and getting away with - unreasonable demands. Mr. Goel should be able to become a buffer between the Prime Minister and the intractable allies.

Besides these political chores, Mr. Goel is entrusted with the task of responding, on behalf of the Prime Minister, to questions in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, of interaction with the parliamentary committees; to look after the utilisation of the constituency fund in the Prime Minister's constituency of Lucknow. He would also be in charge of ``public grievance''.

In due course, Mr. Goel can certainly use his ministerial perch within the Prime Minister's Office to become a key political operative for Mr. Vajpayee. He could virtually become a functional ``political adviser'' to the Prime Minister. It would be recalled that soon after the 1998 elections, Mr. Vajpayee experimented with having a political adviser, but the appointee, Mr. Pramod Mahajan, did not come up to the expectations.

It was Rajiv Gandhi who had appointed a Minister of State in the PMO (Ms. Sheila Dixit). Later, Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao had, first, Mr. Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi, and later, for a short while, Mr. Aslam Sher Khan, as Ministers of State in the PMO. For the first three years of his Government, Mr. Narasimha Rao also had the benefit of having a ``political secretary'' (Jitendra Prasada) in his capacity as the Congress president.

Mr. Vajpayee has not been able to find the right person with the right authority to interact with the BJP. So far he has relied upon Mr. L.K. Advani to take care of aspirations and frustrations in the party. The Vijay Goel experiment would be watched as yet another attempt to iron out the wrinkles between the Government and the organisation.

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