Congress
In Hopeless Tizzy
The inexorable truth emerging is that
Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi with the contribution of the
extra-constitutional and arch-leftist National Advisory Council, plus her Vice
President of the Party son, and businessman’s wife daughter, is responsible for
the sorry economic mess this country finds itself in.
With the torment she and her party have
routinely subjected the BJP and its leading lights to, the timing of such
revelations about her own wrong doings, is most inconvenient. There are also
worrying references to an Accountability Commission in the works should the BJP
form the next central government. Terrified at the prospect, Sonia Gandhi has
just made a presidential address to the nation spewing venom at the BJP, and
suggesting it will ruin the nation if elected.
And of
course, Sonia Gandhi has chosen to reply to all the swirling questions on her
own conduct with an arrogant and deafening silence. Her party, ministers, and
spokespersons on the other hand, are busy pouring scorn and denial on all that
has been alleged lately.
It is pitiful, in the aftermath of the
scandal that has broken on her role in subverting the office of the prime
minister, to see Sonia Gandhi ‘live’ at her election rallies. There she is,
reading doggedly from her canned script, totally unspontaneous and wooden. She
turns the pages on her lectern, sounding dated and stiff, circa the 1980s,
spouting school level Hindi and routine homilies of Congresspeak, far removed
from the grim reality we find ourselves in.
This, after a lifetime spent in India as
Indira Gandhi’s bahu, without yet learning the language. But then, it is
reported that it took her many years to even acquire Indian nationality. As for
her language skills, she is unlike so many ‘foreigners’ who speak, read, and
write Hindi and other Indian languages, quite often better than the natives.
She did learn her English mercifully, because
she met Rajiv Gandhi, while in Cambridge, England, when she was being tutored
at the Bell Educational Trust for the purpose.
Sonia Gandhi’s campaign speeches , full of
set Congress clichés, are transcribed in Roman script, in easy to pronounce
words for her broad Italianate delivery. She does not use a tablet or a
computer for the purpose, or even a teleprompter, Obama fashion. As a
consequence, she is hardly able to look at the audience, unable to even
gesticulate, with both hands occupied. This, while the bussed and trucked in
rent-a-crowd audience listens dutifully, baking in the heat, clapping when the
Congress crowd managers say so.
Her script today gets her to mention Mahatma
Gandhi and Maulana Azad, amongst the whole galaxy of modern India’s founding
fathers, though that’s it, even as she is speaking on the father of the Indian
Constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birthday! The script-writer obviously didn’t notice this,
and neither, for that matter, did she.
Sonia Gandhi shouts out that only Congress
can provide a strong Government, oblivious of the pass she has single-handedly
brought it to. Then she shouts Jai Hind,
three times, exhorting the crowd to join her.
Away from the speechifying, she maintains a
sphinx-line silence. Books by former media advisor to the PM Sanjaya Baru and
Coal Secretary PR Parakh rule a section of the media space today.
Both accuse Sonia Gandhi of reducing Manmohan
Singh to a rubber stamp for decisions that were essentially hers, using trusted
Secretary Pulak Chatterjee as the go between. Baru uses a fond tone for
Manmohan Singh ion his book, while Parakh seems bitter at being unsupported and
let down.
Baru states Manmohan Singh was aware of his book
being written, and tacitly wanted it to come out before he demitted office so
that the public would know that he was indeed rendered helpless. Of course, Manmohan Singh clung to his seat,
and its privileges and perquisites, for all 10 years of his so called
‘accidental’ double-term. This despite
all the insubordination and humiliation that came his way for being, albeit willingly, powerless.
Whichever way one looks at it, this by itself
is a sorry and inescapable indictment of
Singh’s character. That he also betrayed the authority of his office in terms
of his Faustian pact with Sonia Gandhi, is also undeniable. In the Congress Party however, such
compromises with the suzerainty of the dynasty are routine, and for Manmohan
Singh to have stood on principle would have been silly and suicidal.
As the news broke, the BJP started saying ‘we told you so’ all along. And the cornered Congress, more because they are losing this election, than yet another scandal breaking over their heads, came up with a knee-jerk reaction.
On the one hand it loudly trashed the
character of both authors, cast aspersions on their motives, and the timing of
the book releases, and got the PMO to flatly deny it all. Still, tellingly, there
is no direct sound-byte from the ‘invisible’ PM himself.
Congress however, to deflect attention,
decided to perform another U turn amongst all the talk of a rubber-stamp prime
minister. It had been frequently
praising prime minister Vajpayee lately in an attempt to contrast his
statesmanship with Modi’s alleged ‘authoritarianism’. Now, turning on a dime,
it proceeded to call Vajpayee two-faced and weak for not putting Modi out of
business in 2002.
This, while controversy raged as both books
by the UPA insiders pointed to Manmohan Singh’s bound and gagged status under
Sonia Gandhi’s pernicious and ill-advised rule.
It implies however, that Sonia
Gandhi, and not Manmohan Singh, was responsible for all the rampant corruption and the nose-diving economy.
That Sonia Gandhi approved every sensitive
government decision before the hapless prime minister merely rubber stamped
them.
But, as the 81 year old Manmohan Singh gets
ready to demit office and retire to former Delhi CM Shiela Dikshit’s old house
set in 3.5 acres, he might be quietly
smirking up his beard, that the Congress, and the dynasty that runs it, may
well be out of power for longer than he managed to occupy South Block himself.
(1,001
words)
April
14th, 2014
Gautam
Mukherjee
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