Something of a magnitude of the Mumbai terror attacks happen. One minister resigns or is made to resign and another one replaces him. How does that improve the situation? This has been going on for decades. It is time to put a stop to this.

After Mumbai terror attacks, the Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, was asked to go. So were the Maharashtra chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh and the deputy chief minister and home minister of Maharashtra, R.R. Patil.

My question is: is this any solution? How does this solve the problem? Why do we allow ministers to resign or be sacked after something goes wrong?

To the public it might look as if the party has taken action against the erring minister. That the minister has been punished for non-performance. Actually, this is one way of letting the minister go scot-free.

To me, this is a wrong decision and a wrong action. I think it gets us nowhere. In fact, we act against the interests of our country when we let his happen.

The ideal thing to do would be to keep those ministers and chief ministers in place and pound them with questions and demand answers for their failure and pressure them to perform next time. At least they are more familiar with the ministry and departments under it. At least, they know how their ministry functions and be in a position to pin point the lapses and people who were responsible for those lapses. It would be so much more difficult for the new incumbent to gauge all of these.

The television channels which were focusing on minute to minute live coverage of the operations thereby endangering the life of our heroes should divert their footage to sustained questioning of the erring ministers, bureaucrats and others and taking them to task till they tear their hair for their failures.

The public needs to be persistent about this. But, unfortunately after a few days or weeks, we tend to forget everything and life goes on as usual. This is a casual attitude and the politicians gain from this.

Ultimately, it is the public that suffers and so it is the public that must step up pressure on the politicians; on the administration; and, on security services through media. And, it should also keep the media on its toes and impress upon them that they will not view the channels that don’t keep up pressure on the government to come clean and give an assurance that these kinds of incidents will not happen again. The public should also be vigilant and willing to change newspapers and magazines that do not take up these issues to the extent that they bring forth results and switch to the ones that keep up pressure on the government and makes the government perform.

The ministers, the bureaucrats and the government are not doing the public any favour by performing well. They are put there and paid to do the job. If they fail to do justice to their jobs, let us cut the deadwood…for ever.

Now, what happens is, one minister goes and another one takes his place. After some time, the inefficient and ineffective minister finds another berth. This should not happen. Once a minister or a bureaucrat displays his inefficiency or ineffectiveness, he should be given one chance and only one chance to perform.

If he fails to perform well, he should be shunted out for and never be allowed to come back as a politician or as a bureaucrat or security personnel in any avatar. And, a failed politician or bureaucrat should not be allowed to occupy any position in the government after that. In fact, their failure should be treated as a disqualification for government jobs. Only such a fear psychosis will make them perform. Fear is the key to all our problems.