The Congress-led government in New Delhi has attained the Himalayan highs in corruption, and non-performance.
BJP gave K'taka voters no choice
It is hard to fight corruption, right? Then, why not put up with it and get on with the business of life? After all, the great unwashed masses of this ancient land blame it on their karma in their past lives for whatever is happening to them in their present avatar. Such fatalism has in fact been the greatest source of strength for our criminal and corrupt political class. The ruler-ruled (raja-praja) syndrome is so deeply etched in the collective Indian psyche that despite incontrovertible evidence of wrong-doing the aam aadmi keeps on repeating the same set of thugs to preside over his destiny election after election. It is a sham democracy, isn't it? That would explain the return of the Congress in Karnataka after a gap of more than a decade. As if their experience with successive governments in Bangalore was not dreadful, the voter with the proverbial short memory has brought back the same set of crooks whom he had cast aside with utter disdain only five years ago. Give him a couple of months, and he will begin to grumble that the new lot is worse than the one he had so comprehensively rejected in the recent poll. For, it is futile to expect the Congress DNA to change. However, this is not to suggest that the Karnataka outcome was not on the expected lines. It was. The BJP did not leave the voter with any option. It did everything in its power to court unpopularity. Its drubbing was well-deserved. Early evidence of factionalism in the state unit was accentuated further by groupism at the central level. If Sushma Swaraj patronised the infamous Reddy brothers, L.K. Advani played godfather to Ananth Kumar. The two together never allowed a moment of peace to B.S. Yeddyurappa. And now the Advani-Sushma duo is engaged in denying the BJP the only credible chance it has of dislodging the corrupt and non-performing UPA by blocking the graduation of Narendra Modi from Gandhinagar to Delhi. The absence of a strong BJP leader in New Delhi gave a free rein to various factional players in Bangalore. All things considered, Yeddyurappa was more wronged against than wronging. By the prevailing standards of morality, his was a minor act of corruption — taking donations for a family-controlled education trust, as per a Lokayukta indictment, from a company which had bagged the mining rights from his government. Come to think of it, if that yardstick were to be applied universally, the Prime Minister himself could be in trouble. For, as his own Coal Minister for nearly three years, he allocated 140-odd coal mining leases without due diligence. In the process, the nation's natural resources got depleted without any benefit flowing to the aam aadmi. Facts already in the public domain establish that he cannot evade responsibility for having made wrongful allocations en bloc for the benefit of his masters in the Congress. The Prime Minister's desperation to escape an adverse finding alone would put in perspective the intervention of a joint secretary each from the PMO and the Coal Ministry and the gross intercession of the Law Minister, since sacked, and the Attorney General in the investigative work of the CBI. Not unlike the Harshad Mehta scam when he was the Finance Minister, Singh is loath to accept even his constructive responsibility for the wholesale trade in the grant of leasing rights for coal mining to all manner of people, some of them who had had nothing to do with the industry and were engaged in running regional rags or were out to make a quick buck using their proximity to the ruling party bosses. It was plunder, with no objective criterion followed in handing out 140-odd leases. That painful truth should become clear if a chastised CBI probes the scam sincerely and reports to the apex court on 10 July when it reopens after the summer recess. Frankly, even the outcome of the Karnataka poll should give the Congress party a strong reason to worry about. For, if its analysis is correct that the Karnataka voter has punished the BJP for corruption and non-performance, it cannot be unmindful of its own champion status in that regard. The unending series of scams in the last four years is reason enough to throw it out at the first available opportunity. Nor can the party be unaware of the policy-paralysis, the stalemate in Parliament, the rising crime graph in the national capital, the ministerial malfeasance, the ever- rising consumer prices, et al. As compared to the failures of the BJP government in Bangalore, the Congress-led government in New Delhi has attained the Himalayan highs in corruption, non-performance and abdication of national duty. Conversely, Karnataka has given the BJP-led NDA a new hope — and the Congress-led UPA a dire warning of the impending doom.
We have our sympathies for Pawan Kumar Bansal. Frankly, he did not have to resign. After all, what has he done what others in his party have not? He too, in the true Congress tradition, was engaged in enriching himself and his family by using the instruments of the state. You feel doubly sorry for Ashwani Kumar. All that he was doing was to ensure that there was no adverse mention against the PM in the CBI status report in the Coalgate scam. But, typically, when it came to the crunch, Singh sacrificed him to save his own job. Yashwant Sinha is right. Manmohan Singh is indeed an over-rated economist and an under-rated politician. Meanwhile, there is one lesson that everyone in the media and politics must draw from Railgate: Never issue certificates of honesty to any politician. Who would have thought till last week that the low-key and invariably polite MP from Chandigarh would turn out to be such a big lawbreaker? Last year, when Bansal's name first cropped up in a housing scam in Chandigarh, and a senior BJP leader raked up the matter in the Lok Sabha, Bansal got away lightly, with most members discounting newspaper reports that he had indulged in hanky-panky in the allotment of kiosks and some other commercial structures built by the local authorities. Now they know better, don't they? Overnight genius By any reckoning, A.K. Antony's sole claim to fame is that he is financially clean in a party which is teeming with the corrupt. That is why eyebrows are raised in the political circles at the overnight rise of his wife as a painter of great acclaim. So much so the Army Welfare Fund has paid a pretty penny to acquire some of her artworks. One is reminded of a finance minister in the 1980s, whose wife had overnight emerged as a great singer, with an up-and-coming industrial group even organising a European concert for her. Similar stories abound about someone closely linked to the Delhi Chief Minister. But we are surprised about Saint Antony. Reportedly, several public undertakings too seemed to have purchased Mrs Antony's art. Source: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/corruption-is-an-issue-believe-it-or-not |
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