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Ashwini Vaishnaw: Controversial Rise from Bureaucrat to Modi's Key Man

Ashwini Vaishnaw: His rise from IAS officer to key minister in Modi's cabinet is marked by controversy and accusations of negligence and corruption.

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Ashwini Vaishnaw Minister

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Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister for Railways has had a rather unusual career trajectory. A former officer of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) who served former Prime Minister of India Atal Behari Vajpayee as his personal secretary, Ashwini Vaishnaw quit the civil service to become a corporate captain before joining politics. He is the only first-time member of the Rajya Sabha to hold two important ministerial portfolios, over and above that of the Railways. As a cabinet minister, he is clearly a confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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When Ashwini Vaishnaw rode pillion on a motorcycle in front of news camerapersons to reach the site of a passenger train accident that had taken place on 17 June in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, the critics of the Union Minister for Railways blamed him for gimmickry and optics instead of owning up responsibility for the accident. 

Vaishnaw is no Lal Bahadur Shastri who offered to resign from his position as Minister for Railways twice in 1956 following two accidents. On both occasions, the then Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru rejected his resignation offers. 

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The current minister is preoccupied pushing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda which emphasises “high-speed” and “world-class” train travel for the upper and middle classes and ignores providing better facilities and more trains for poor passengers.

That Vaishnaw enjoys the confidence of Modi is all-too apparent. He is more than the country’s Minister for Railways. After the general elections of 2024, he was appointed Minister for Information & Broadcasting and continues to head the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY). In July 2021, he had been given charge of the Ministry of Communications (a portfolio now held by Jyotiraditya Scindia). Never before in the history of India has a first-time Member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, headed three important ministerial portfolios.  

After the Darjeeling accident, representatives of the Opposition alleged that the Modi government was “destroying” the Indian Railways and Vaishnaw was mocked as a “reel minister,” a reference to his penchant of using the social media. His Instagram account displays reels shot by professional camerapersons that highlight the “amazing strides” that the Indian Railways have made under his stewardship in just over three years. His emphasis on the launch of fast, air-conditioned Vande Bharat trains (see here, here and here), that cannot be afforded by the poor.

A year earlier, when at least 296 people were killed and more than 1,200 injured in a train accident in the Balasore district of Odisha, one of the worst railway disasters in the history of India, Vaishnaw had similarly been accused of “showmanship.” The country’s premier police investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), was entrusted with a probe into the train tragedy, which was described as an attempt by the central government to find a “political solution” to the technical shortcomings in the railways’ system

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