With festive season around the corner, cabinet reshuffle likely to happen next year

For months, Delhi’s ever-active grapevine has been buzzing with rumours of an impending reshuffle of the Cabinet. The departure of Pranab Mukherjee, the senior-most minister of this administration, for Rashtrapati Bhavan made a reshuffle nearly certain. Mamata Banerjee’s departure from the coalition with 19 MPs has left another six portfolios vacant. So, it is no longer a question of whether to rejig the ministry, but when.

On Wednesday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh behind closed doors to work out the complex balancing act that goes before handing out portfolios to people in the Congress and its allies. Meanwhile, President Mukherjee has been travelling and will be back in Delhi on Friday. If the reshuffle does not take place on that day, it will have to wait for some time, possibly a very long time.

That is because complex factors profane and sacred, mundane and cosmic are lined up over the next few weeks, possibly the next few months. The period of shradh, considered inauspicious in north India, starts from September 30. It will end only in the middle of October. From October 20, Durga Puja, the biggest festival in east India, begins and will go on for a full five days. Expect no major official work to be done during these days: President Mukherjee will not be in Delhi for certain. He worships the mother goddess in his ancestral village Mirati on ashtami, the most auspicious day of the puja. Then there will be Dussehra and Diwali. The winter session of Parliament will follow, then Christmas and New Year will roll by. Where is the time for silly reshuffles with all this fasting and feasting going on? Well, there’s a small window: the week of October 16-20 when it can be done. Otherwise, expect a new Cabinet only in the new year.