Independence granted us the autonomy to govern our own country. A critical effect was the birth of the first Nehru ministry in 1947 which paved its way to the Council of Ministers. Since then, ranks have changed, ministries have been added and women’s representation has increased. This analysis focuses on how the data assembled as a part of TCPD’s Indian Council of Ministers Dataset (TCPD-ICoM 1.0) can be analysed through different types of visualizations. The data spans the years from 1947 to 2019 and represents the evolving story of the Indian Council of Ministers.
As a part of our efforts to digitize and release this dataset, we have captured the start and end dates of each ministers’ tenure including the ranks, ministries, department details (if applicable). In addition to this, we also incorporate information about the minister’s profile - for eg. the house from which (s)he was elected, gender, political party, state etc. Details about each of these variables has been described in the codebook here.
Here we plot out some of the trends that can be observed in the dataset. By doing so, we hope to illustrate the various considerations during usage and analysis of its components using different types of visualizations.
As the dataset has the columns indicating the start and end dates for each term, we divide the data by the ‘rank’ column to visualize the prime ministerial position and the parties they belong to.
This simple gantt chart confirms what we know: the PM’s position was mostly held by members of the Indian National Congress (INC) post independence, while the last four decades have witnessed frequent changes. The gantt charts are also useful as the tenures of each person at various positions spans over a period of time. For example, we see the long tenures of prime ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru (1947 to 1964, close to 17 years) and Indira Gandhi (1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 to 1984, almost 14 years), and also shorter tenures of prime ministers like Gulzarilal Nanda (who took position for a brief period following Nehru’s death and served as Prime Minister for barely 3 weeks). Since the amount of time served by each minister at a position is varied, it is helpful to visualize this over a timeline.
On a similar line, we are also able to use the ministry categories to study the members who were a part of specific ministry types, and categorize them by the position held. For illustrative purposes, we take the case of the Ministry of Minority Affairs. Here, we see that while the Ministry of Minority Affairs was formally established only on 16th February, 2006 on amending the allocation of Business Rules (we digitized the amendments on the Secretariat’s Website), Mehr Chand Khanna held a position of Minister of Minority Affairs between 1957 and 1961, while Fazrul Rahman briefly held additional charge of Waqf. While such discrepancies are common in the dataset, they have been presented in a raw form such that researchers can make the decisions about how they may want to deal with such discrepancies.
This next chart shows the gender representation of ministers as per rank they hold in the cabinet. The female representation seems to have increased from only 6% in 1948 (taking composition as of 1st January) to 13% in 2019 which is in line with the share of seats held by women in the Lok Sabha. On average, about 8% of the Council of Ministers were women.
Selecting the ‘Prime Minister’ rank for this chart, we can see the years for which India had its only female prime minister (years 1967 to 1977, and again 1981 to 1984). Again, it’s important to note that when charting the data across time, we use the composition of the cabinet as on 1st January of each year to get the snapshot as on a particular date.
Moreover, we also see how positions have evolved over time by selecting different ministry categories. For instance, Rajiv Gandhi’s Ministry saw a compact Council of Ministers, which he achieved by stipulating two ranks: Cabinet Minister and Minister of State, doing away with the convention of having a ‘Deputy Cabinet Minister’ position. Moreover, we can also see that the convention of allotting a position of ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ has been irregularly followed.
This final visualization shows the distribution of ministers by the house from which they were elected from 1953 to 2019. We have selected this range as the Upper and Lower Houses of the Parliament were formally instituted in 1952. We expect to find a larger share of Council Ministers belonging to the Lok Sabha owing to the fact that the Lok Sabha’s strength was more than twice the strength of the Rajya Sabha at any point. We observe a larger share of Ministers from the Lok Sabha than expected in a few years - for instance 88% of ministers belonged to the Lok Sabha in 1963, and for all years, an average of 78% of ministers belonged to the Lok Sabha.
Moreover, there are few members for whom the house details say ‘Others’. These are of two types. Firstly, there are a few ministers who did not belong to the Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha. These were a part of the Cabinet Secretariat, and following the conventions at that time, they were considered to be a part of the Cabinet. Second, there is a group of ministers who were not members of any house at the time they were elected. The rules state that any minister has six months to be elected to either house after appointment, and thus the ministers who did not belong to either house at the time of election come under this section.