FOREIGN EXCHANGE-Shadow Is Substance

which he is embroiled.
That such blatant efforts to protect and please Narasimha Rao are not shared by the other constituents of the United Front government is evident from the CPI home minister Indrajtt Gupta's feeble efforts to bring about tough measures to punish guilty politicians and his outbursts of frustration at his failure to carry them out. At the National Council meeting of his party recently, he was reported to have confessed that he could not put an end to the politician-police criminal nexus that operated all over the ministerial territory that he is supposed to be ruling over. Even during the few months that he had been occupying the home minister' s office, the measures that he had announced had either been rejected or ignored by the cabinet and on other occasions he had not been apparently consulted in majordecision-making. To start with, his proposal to reduce expenditure on protection for VIPs by withdrawing SPG protection from a large number of politicians who did not deserve it welcomed by citizens who constantly face inconveniences in their daily movements because of SPG interference in civic living-has been scuttled. He was not even consulted which as the home minister he should have been by the Deve Gowda cabinet when it decided to appoint as the governor of Uttar Pradesh a bureaucrat like Romesh Bhandari (against whom the Left Front has strings of allegations). To cap it all, he was not apparently taken into confidence by his own officials in the home ministry who mooted, processed and cleared the proposal to give cabinet rank status to former prime ministers (including Narasimha Rao) a development of which Indrajit Gupta claims to have been ignorant, according to his statement at a press conference on August 12, Any minister with an iota of self-respect should either punish officials who defy his instructions or resign if he cannot get his instructions carried out. Does the CPI veteran as the country's home minister propose to demean himself as a doormat of the Deve Gowda-Narasimha Rao political alliance?