Last Updated: 19th April 2014 12:38 AM
http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Sunset-Hour-for-Cong-Gandhis/2014/04/19/article2176284.ece
There isn’t any glory for this “Accidental Prime Minister” as he walks into the sunset of history—his history. We are not yet told whether Manmohan Singh called up his former press adviser Sanjaya Baru and said to him what Julius Caesar did when a Roman senator close to him had made the final stab that felled him: Et tu, Brutus.
The comparison, of course, is neither fair nor even true. Singh has to demit office by May 24 at the latest. But he is no Caesar or a colossus. The appellation “Accidental Prime Minister” with which Baru introduces his one-time boss was in fact self-imposed. In 2004 May, Singh was installed as prime minister by the victorious Congress president to act as her nominee in a diarchy she had devised. And a nominee, if not a puppet, he had remained for almost a decade, with disastrous consequences for the country.
Baru’s description since has been confirmed and dilated upon by the former coal secretary P C Parakh. “If only the PM had been assertive” he says in his book, the Coalgate could have been avoided. “The PM could not control his ministers,” Parakh adds.
Neither Baru’s disclosure of a PM acting on the orders of his political boss nor Parakh’s exposure of real incidents in the UPA government where the PM is seen as ineffective, is a secret that has burst on the scene suddenly, whatever Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh might say about the motives of both Baru and Parakh. For the last several years this palace “secret” was the talk of the town from one end of the country to the other. The two disclosures and exposes from within the palace have only added spice and salt to the political menu at every dinner table talk of the last almost one decade.
Besides several others, this columnist, too, has repeatedly written (since 2006) about the weird arrangement in which the powers of the office of the prime minister have been allowed to be hijacked. And a cabal, christened as the National Advisory Council, along with some sidekicks of the Congress president were happily exercising those powers, sans any accountability to the Constitution and its various organs.
In the current election scenario, they throw more light on the Congress party and its first family than on the man himself. After all, Singh with his erudition and decades of public service behind him, could not have been ignorant of how puppets on the string are supposed to perform. He was willing to play the role.
The two publications intruding into the middle of what has become the most closely fought campaign on the fundamentals of the polity should awaken the country to the need to vote the Congress out of power to end decision-making by one family under the garb of democracy.
The focus of public discourse now should be not Singh but the way an entire grand old party with so great a history behind it had become a plaything of a charismatic family that monopolised all the glory of the national struggle within itself, jealously guarding against any ray of it illuminating such great patriots and performers like Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Rajaji.
What weakness is within us that a majority simply succumbs to such charms, including its academia failing to question that handed down wisdom? Why do we allow public places everywhere in the country be named after just members of the Nehru-Gandhi parivar when the independence struggle and later history have many illustrious persons in every discipline to be remembered?
So much so that even within the party two others who were again “accidental prime ministers”, Shastri and P V Narasimha Rao, soon became “non-persons” when the family members were back in power. Interesting to note in the light of Baru’s disclosures that Shastri’s name was not on the plaque behind the PM’s seat in the Lok Sabha when Rajiv Gandhi was ruling and a kind soul on the Opposition benches had to point this out to the then PM for correction to be done.
The lesson of history is that the Congress as the ruling party will be a willing tool of its first family and will never let the party practise the freedom it is supposed to have to choose any of its MPs as the real PM. The Baru-Parakh disclosures also show up the recent protestations in the Congress about the refusal to project its prime ministerial candidate and the claim that the elected MPs will take their own decisions.
These protestations often degenerated into the bizarre. In the light of the two books these may even be comic or an attempt to mislead the people engaged in the solemn task of choosing their new government. Some at least in the intelligentsia have begun to ask the question: Will the result in May mark the beginning of the end of the Congress as a national party?
Across the entire Gangetic plain from Ghaziabad to Kolkata, the Congress is not even the second most powerful political entity. On the east coast, from Kolkata to Kanyakumari, the Congress has ceased to be counted in the political chessboard after it was abandoned by its own cabinet ministers both at the state and central levels from Andhra.
The whole of Central India from Rajasthan to Chhattisgarh has seen the Congress fail to meet the BJP’s challenge. For 40 years, the Congress is out of power is Tamil Nadu, for 15 years in Odisha, since 1977 in West Bengal, and the last Congress CM in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is lost in memory.
The accidental success of the Congress in 2004 revived brief hope after the party was voted out in 1996. The party’s first family has squandered that opportunity after its disastrous governance for over a decade.
Across India every poll survey and indicator say that this party will not return to power. Many Congressmen admit privately that it is the end for the party. Only some mouthpieces of the Nehru-Gandhi family like Digvijaya Singh continue to repeat the make-believe like the last Mughal emperor that they will again rule. Good luck to these Rip Wan Winkles as they wake up on May 16 to find the ground under their feet slipping. Listen to the message, Digvijaya Singh, of Baru and Parakh and don’t shoot at the messengers and that, too, wildly.
Balbir Punj is National Vice President, BJP.
E-mail: punjbalbir@gmail.com
http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Sunset-Hour-for-Cong-Gandhis/2014/04/19/article2176284.ece