Be it rampant corruption or open rebellion in the ranks after the reshuffle, things seem to be falling apart at the Centre

"Things fall apart; the Centre cannot hold"-William Butler Yeats

This line from the English poet Yeats describes accurately the present status of the Manmohan Singh government and, by extension, the state of the economy and public ethics and morals.

A mere listing of some of the news that hit the headlines over the past week should be sufficient to buffer the above statement.

Let us begin the charge-sheet with a Latin tag "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Translated into English, it means the familiar "who shall guard the guards themselves?" Here, I refer to the Vasundhara building, a housing society in Juhu of ultra-posh flats for IPS officers.

The flats were built for the top policemen to live in; but they have rented these luxury apartments at rents which you, me and the dog at the lamppost cannot think of even in our opium dreams. The highest rent of Rs36 lakh a year is going to Dilip Shrirao, joint commissioner, vigilance, FDA. Totally, 28 IPS officers are raking in windfall gains of several lakhs a year. Who shall guard the guardians?

Let us move to matters political. Mukul Roy, of the Trinamool Congress, was the minister of state for Railways before the reshuffle. The standard practice when big train accidents occur is for some minister to visit the site of the disaster, console the victims and learn at first hand how the accident took place.

Manmohan Singh took over the Railway Ministry after Mamata Banerjee swept the elections and became the Chief Minister of West Bengal. Mukul Roy, as minister of state, should have visited the site of the accident in Assam, in which 69 were killed and 100 injured. He sat tight, probably because didi had not given him instructions. The next day, the Prime Minister asked Roy to go and take a look.

Roy actually refused! His argument was that everything had been investigated and cleared up by railway officials and therefore there was nothing for him to see.

Imagine a minister of state at the Centre refusing to obey a direct order from the Prime Minister!

Many people may not remember that Lal Bahadur Shastri, when he was railway minister under Jawaharlal Nehru, accepted moral responsibility for a terrible accident in Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu, (then Madras State) and resigned as Railway Minister, even though Nehru did not ask for it.

Are things falling apart? You can bet your mother-in-law's dentures that they are.Take the aftermath of Tuesday's ministerial reshuffle at the Centre. Gurudas Kamat resigned after he was appointed minister of state (Independent charge), for drinking water and sanitation.

And Veerappa Moily cribbed openly after being moved from Law to Corporate Affairs. In a public statement he practically accused the Prime Minister of falling prey to vested interests. Moily said: "Vested interests are at work. For the sins of administrative ministries (referring to the Telecom Ministry and the 2G scam and the Finance Ministry and the black money issue), the Law Ministry cannot be hanged."

In four decades of professional journalism, I have not come across such a scathing indictment of a PM after a ministerial reshuffle.

The satraps are indeed beginning to bare their claws. History tells us that when satraps get on to their hind legs, the Emperor's throne begins to shake.

Moving to the economy, the telecom industry, especially mobile telephony, has been racing like Michael Schumacher (Sebastian Vettel, if you prefer) in the last decade.

Now comes the speed breaker. The 2G scam has got the bankers in a tizzy. On 20 May 2011, the exposure of Indian banks to telecom companies was nearly Rs98,000 crore. On the same date a year ago, it was a little less than Rs64,000 crore. Fresh lending has almost stopped now, but bankers have said they have to continue lending to existing borrowers. A proviso, though: the tap has been turned off for companies and groups being investigated in the 2G scam. Another growth industry is coming to a shuddering halt.

Finally, a figure that is alarming. The number of individual investors has dropped from 20 million soon after liberalisation began, to 8 million at the latest count. The ordinary citizen has lost faith in the financial markets. I rest my case.

Things are falling apart. Manmohan Singh has some three years to paste the pieces together. But, remember the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty?

(R Vijayaraghavan has been a professional journalist for more than four decades, specialising in finance, business and politics. He conceived and helped to launch Business Line, the financial daily of The Hindu group. He can be contacted at [email protected].)