Very good analysis and frankly i dont think that Manmohan singh is not corrupt. In fact Manmohan singh is one of most shrewd and cunning politician otherwise how one can remain PM for two terms when everybody wants to be PM. People say that he is a simple innocent person but they fail to realize that the moment there is attack on his seat, he strikes back in most ruthless manner ( remember his responce to Advani in elcetion and how he forced Mayawati and managed BJP and Mulayam to get Nuclear liability bill passed).

This is tragedy of this nation which is led by not a leader but a manipulator

Singh doesn’t even begin to think along these lines.

Congress is terrible …

Very interesting take on the situation and the person. I agree with you mostly and as another comment above me pointed, the solution may lie in our leader(s) taking a holistic approach to the multiple problems at hand than strive towards this fixation on GDP growth!

It does not help that corruption, at all levels, plague the country more than ever before. Instead of patronizing these crooks in the cabinet, the country could greatly benefit from tough, decisive action against them. How that would play for Mr Singh and his tenure may remain to be seen.

Best
Savio

I personally feel that Dr Singh and his Men have a single point agenda of solving the problems of the nation by putting more money in one’s pocket (which by the way have a huge hole aka Inflation). Quite analytical approach but not a realistic one!!

Problems of a nation, particularly like India, cannot be solved solely by achieving a GDP growth of 8% or even a double digit figure.
We need thinkers and leader who are more holistic. This includes strong statesmanship, ability to assert strong views and to take tough decisions. Probably the biggest example of it is Mr. Obama for USA.

In terms of alternatives to Dr. Singh we have poor bench quality. Eagerly waiting for the Miracle man to guide this country safely!!!

Believe it or not, prime ministers from the Nehru-Gandhi family did no wrong, infallible as all three were.

If there were mistakes, nay, Himalayan blunders, these were the handiwork of lesser mortals, not of super human beings belonging to India’s First Family.

Constraints of space do not allow one to catalogue all that went wrong during the time Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister. Suffice it to say, the man guilty for the bloody nose the Chinese gave India was not Nehru. No, how could it be him? No way.

It was then defence minister V K Krishna Menon. However, if the defence forces did anything good, such as ‘liberating’ tiny Goa on the eve of the 1962 general election, the credit solely belonged to Nehru and Nehru alone.

Of course, it was not Nehru who internationalised the Kashmir dispute by rushing to the United Nations. Why? Simple, being a Nehru, he could do not wrong.

Now come to a huge black mark during the reign of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi [ Images ]. Of course, she was happy to be Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Durga when our valiant soldiers helped liberate Bangladesh. But if a few months later Bangladesh became an Islamic republic, it wasn’t her fault, was it?

Mind you, snuffing out of democracy from the land for 19 months was certainly not her decision. The Emergency was the handiwork of her minions. So were those horrible excesses committed during that dark period. Corrupt bureaucrats and policemen were clearly at fault while Indira Gandhi was completely innocent. And her younger son, Sanjay, well, he was the epitome of good political behaviour all along.

As for Rajiv Gandhi [ Images ], dearest to the current bosses of the Congress party, one seeks the reader’s indulgence, especially because one has to acknowledge the sterling contribution of one of his most enlightened followers, Arjun Singh [ Images ], as well.

Hats off to Singh. Age might have taken a toll physically, but mentally he continues to be as crafty, as devious as at anytime before.

Maybe the Churhat Lottery king still hoped to get a crumb or two from the table of Sonia Gandhi when he absolved her late husband and then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi of any role in the escape of Warren Anderson from these shores in the wake of the Union Carbide catastrophe.

That at no time he wanted to tell the truth was clear from the fact that hours before actually speaking in the House, he had duly sent the text of his speech to at least two Cabinet ministers who, in turn, vetted it for ensuring that there was nothing in it that may show the great prime minister of the time in bad light even by inference.

So it was that the wily Thakur told the Rajya Sabha during the debate on the Bhopal gas leak tragedy that then prime minister uttered not a word edgeways when informed about Anderson’s arrest soon after the latter had set foot in Bhopal.

Singh would like everyone to believe that Rajiv Gandhi had nothing to say about the arrest and escape of the head of the parent Union Carbide Company. Now, which other prime minister could maintain such stoic silence upon being told that the boss of the company which was responsible for the deaths of thousands had been arrested?

Clearly, Rajiv Gandhi had acquired such saintly qualities that he could be completely unmoved by mundane, worldly events. Remaining indifferent both to a huge tragedy or a great windfall is one of the prerequisites for being a godly person.

No wonder the party led by his widow was duly engaged in deifying him, though personally the one-time Italian does have a very good reason to do so. And people like Singh were determined to bolster Project Mahatma Rajiv Gandhi in the expectation of some worldly gain.

It was not without significance that Singh sought to blame then home minister P V Narasimha Rao for Anderson’s inexplicable release. That way he indulged his pet peeve while simultaneously earning brownie points from the Congress boss who too shares his antipathy towards Rao. And, on the whole, quite a good one at that.

Curiously, all persons Singh named to buttress his story — and what a story it was — are no longer alive. Rajiv Gandhi, Rao and then chief secretary of Madhya Pradesh whom he named are not around to testify as true his version of events.

Nonetheless, one is really happy that even at the ripe old age of 80, when he can hardly walk or speak, Singh has not lost his sycophantic streak, though of late he has been denied an opportunity to worship at the altar of 10, Janpath.

The British monarch, it is famously said, can do no wrong, (even though a British monarch behaves far more responsibly and correctly than most democratic leaders in this country.) For our Congressmen, members of the Gandhi-Nehru family too can do no wrong. Be it the Bhopal gas tragedy, or the Bofors bribery scam, or the massacre of thousands of Sikhs in the national capital, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was entirely blameless.

Though the anti-Sikh riots took place under his very nose, the nation was expected to believe that then prime minister was completely unaware — even if he had proclaimed at a Boat Club rally that when ‘a big tree falls the earth shakes’.

Or take the Bofors scam. Ottavio Quattorocchi had publicly claimed that he was like a member of the Gandhi family. But Gandhi, the nation was told, was completely in the dark about Q’s involvement, if any, in the Bofors deal.

It was another matter that without the Italian agent’s powerful intervention the contract for the purchase of the howitzer guns could not have been given to the Swedish firm in preference to the French Safma which had emerged number one in the short-listed panel after rigorous field trials.

Now, anyone with a wee bit of common sense would ask whether a prime minister who was unaware of these huge controversies was fit to rule the country. Or was he sleeping on the job?

Admittedly, Congressmen are not expected to ask questions; they are only expected to follow the Great Leader. But must everyone else, especially the so-called independent media, give in to this craven display of cringing sycophancy?

Meanwhile, it ought to be remembered that unlike the present system under which every minister does his or her own thing while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh minds his own business, that is, in case he has any business to mind, prime ministers from the Nehru-Gandhi family were truly in firm control of their governments.

Nobody dared take a decision without prior consultation with them. So, to say that Andersen was released and sent back to America without Rajiv Gandhi’s prior approval is truly a cock-and-bull story which must form part of the fiction section in the parliamentary library.

I have come to believe that most educated middle-class Indians lack a well-developed political antenna and naively believe that a country as large and diverse as India can be influenced — or even actually run — by ‘’apolitical technocrats’’.

Consider this — declaring oneself to be apolitical is also a political choice (just like they say that ‘’indecision is a decision, too’’); therefore, I have never believed that it is possible to take an “apolitical” stance on most issues. Agreed that it is perfectly valid to say that one will decide one’s stance on an issue on its merit rather than on the pull of any emotion; but having finalised one’s stance, the only channel for articulating it in a multi-party one-man-one-vote system is the political process.

What persons individually declaring themselves to be apolitical are doing is condemning themselves to political irrelevance in a system that is completely dominated by well-organised political groups. Later, if these apolitical persons realise that there is strength in numbers and, therefore, join together to form a pressure group, that itself would be a political act, no matter what they choose to call their group.

The crux of the matter is that even if we steer away from overtly political issues and limit ourselves to “neutral” issues like infrastructure and bijli-sadak-paani, the ultimate implementation will be done by elected representatives, who get into positions of power through a process of elections, which, by its very nature, is thoroughly and fiercely political. These men/women will only pay attention to those who can help them win elections, so if the ‘’apolitical’’ group wants to get any work out of them, it will be forced to either support them or refuse to support them (electorally, or at least monetarily), which again amounts to taking a political stance.

The people I hold responsible for such confusion are the leaders of the fledgling modern nation of India (mainly Nehru and Gandhi) who used to avoid confronting tough issues and would always wrap harsh truths inside pious platitudes . This served them well in terms of avoiding tough decisions/choices and in terms of keeping up their holier-than-thou image, but the result was that over a period of time, we Indians have lost the ability to distinguish between harsh truths and pious platitudes.

The most pious of these platitudes is the abovementioned widespread middle-class Indian belief in the “apolitical” approach to nation-building. The other extreme, of course, is the utter politicisation of every big and small matter by morons masquerading as politicians. Both of these co-exist. The upshot is that as usual, India ends up getting the worst of both worlds — on the one hand, there’s a naive idealism that denies us a host of strategic options because the chattering classes which consider themselves ‘’apolitical’’ are disengaged from the political process, and therefore can’t be mobilised to support these options; and, then, on the other hand, we have rank cynical politicisation of every big or small issue by full-time politicians.

These politicians have been elected not by the ‘’apolitical’’, voting-day-is-Lonavala-day middle class Indians but by the illiterate unwashed masses who actively participate in the electoral process because they know they wield power only on the day they vote. The politician then cares far more about these voters, thus further accentuating the alienation of the middle class .

To conclude, then, I believe that unless educated middle-class Indians — the ones who want to make a difference — sort out this basic contradiction in their minds, all their well-meaning “apolitical’’ efforts will flounder, as they have been doing for ages.

Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!
Shantanu

Leaders missing in action: Sonia and Rahul.
http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_sonia-and-rahul-gandhi-are-both-leaders-missing-in-action_1420267