In a year of cruel months for the government, August has been the cruellest. This month has proved two things: one, left to Manmohan Singh and his small coterie of advisors, the UPA will merrily dig its own grave, lie down in it and help cover it with earth. Two, without the Gandhi family at the rudder, the Congress is lost.
Since August 4, when Congress spokesman Janardhan Dwivedi announced that party president Sonia Gandhi would be away from India to treat an illness, the Singh-led government has been knocked around by crises. For more than three months Singh’s administration knew that activist Anna Hazare would resume his fast to press for a strong anti-graft ombudsman.
Despite that, it ignored Internet and social media chatter that was drumming up support for the anti-corruption movement. It had no idea about the resentment of people about corruption, experienced daily by street vendors, daily wage workers, rickshaw drivers or families of patients in state-run hospitals.
This lack of touch with ground reality became apparent when, on Independence Day, Singh delivered his speech from Delhi’s Red Fort. It was tepid stuff, garnished with staples like growth, inflation, the prospects for industry and farming. In the course of that speech, Singh mentioned the word ‘corruption’ 16 times.
He then went on to suggest that Indians who questioned the government’s efforts to tackle graft were somehow complicit in slowing down our great growth story. Really?
The next day, Singh’s government committed its biggest political blunder by arresting Anna Hazare in the early hours of the morning and dumping him in Delhi’s Tihar jail where many of the people accused of graft charges are also housed.
By evening, with public outrage mounting, the government hastily decided to release Hazare, an offer that the jailed activist declined to accept, following the civil disobedience playbook with ruthless efficiency. “It is my painful duty to report to this House certain events that took place yesterday in New Delhi,” intoned Manmohan Singh the next day in Parliament.
He related in unnecessary detail events leading up to Hazare’s arrest and incarceration. And then laid the entire responsibility for the arrest at the door of the Delhi Police.
This was stupendously disingenuous. Nobody listening to that speech believed for a moment that the cops in India’s capital would take such a politically combustible decision on their own initiative. Unlike other states, the police in Delhi report to the Central government, which Singh heads.
Singh told Parliament that lawmaking was its sole preserve and agitators like Hazare were usurping its privileges. To this, CPI MP Gurudas Dasgupta tartly responded that Singh had no business talking about Parliamentary privilege and the Hazare agitation, because the government hadn’t bothered to keep the House in the loop, anyway.
This insistence on ‘we know best what’s good for you’ cost the government dear. All earlier negotiations with agitators like Ramdev and the Hazare team were conducted by a handful of Congress ministers, without the participation of anyone else from allied or opposition parties. This naturally led to a lot of resentment in Parliament, and delayed any solution to the crisis.
In fact, it’s clear that the first of what appeared to be a breakthrough in the standoff happened after several versions of the Lokpal bill were presented in Parliament and an all-party discussion began, followed by Saturday’s special session and debate. Why weren’t members of all parties and activists like Aruna Roy invited when the government sat down with Hazare’s team months ago?
Through August, as Indian politics was convulsed with the anti-graft agitation and the government’s bungling attempts to contain it, nobody in government could articulate a coherent vision of what India should do to curb corruption.
Singh’s core team of home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, law minister Salman Khurshid and telecom minister Kapil Sibal presented fragmented arguments that were sometimes defensive, at other times combative.
They said that the government had removed Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan and jailed ex-minister Andimuthu Raja, as well as several other MPs. They argued that many new laws and rules would be enacted to curb graft. But nothing they said could cool the red-hot resentment on the streets.
So, the normally-reticent Rahul Gandhi had to clear the air in Parliament on Friday. He thanked Hazare for speaking out against graft, helping reduce some of the tension between the agitators and the government.
Rahul also said that the Lokpal could be made into a Constitutional authority like the Election Commission and said that an empowered Lokpal could be a necessary, but not sufficient instrument to curb corruption.
He said at least five different areas need special regulations to curb graft: government procurement, land and mining, delivery of pensions and ration cards, tax evasion and political funding. Each of these activities, as every Indian knows, is a cesspool that breeds corruption. Rahul also broke fresh ground by asking for reform in campaign finance, a subject considered taboo by most political parties.
His formula, to get the state to fund political parties and campaigns, might not be ideal, or practical. First, it’ll be tough to devise a formula acceptable to all parties. Second, any ruling party will always be suspected of favouring itself over rivals. Finally, even with state funding, nothing will stop parties from taking in extra funds from obliging businesses.
Nevertheless, Rahul’s intervention was cogent and purposeful. In less than five minutes, he managed to say things that people on the streets wanted to be said, pointed to areas of concern and charted a guide, however rough, to getting us out of this mess. That’s much, much more than Singh’s administration managed to do in the last few months.
Since August 4, when Congress spokesman Janardhan Dwivedi announced that party president Sonia Gandhi would be away from India to treat an illness, the Singh-led government has been knocked around by crises. For more than three months Singh’s administration knew that activist Anna Hazare would resume his fast to press for a strong anti-graft ombudsman.
Despite that, it ignored Internet and social media chatter that was drumming up support for the anti-corruption movement. It had no idea about the resentment of people about corruption, experienced daily by street vendors, daily wage workers, rickshaw drivers or families of patients in state-run hospitals.
This lack of touch with ground reality became apparent when, on Independence Day, Singh delivered his speech from Delhi’s Red Fort. It was tepid stuff, garnished with staples like growth, inflation, the prospects for industry and farming. In the course of that speech, Singh mentioned the word ‘corruption’ 16 times.
He then went on to suggest that Indians who questioned the government’s efforts to tackle graft were somehow complicit in slowing down our great growth story. Really?
The next day, Singh’s government committed its biggest political blunder by arresting Anna Hazare in the early hours of the morning and dumping him in Delhi’s Tihar jail where many of the people accused of graft charges are also housed.
By evening, with public outrage mounting, the government hastily decided to release Hazare, an offer that the jailed activist declined to accept, following the civil disobedience playbook with ruthless efficiency. “It is my painful duty to report to this House certain events that took place yesterday in New Delhi,” intoned Manmohan Singh the next day in Parliament.
He related in unnecessary detail events leading up to Hazare’s arrest and incarceration. And then laid the entire responsibility for the arrest at the door of the Delhi Police.
This was stupendously disingenuous. Nobody listening to that speech believed for a moment that the cops in India’s capital would take such a politically combustible decision on their own initiative. Unlike other states, the police in Delhi report to the Central government, which Singh heads.
Singh told Parliament that lawmaking was its sole preserve and agitators like Hazare were usurping its privileges. To this, CPI MP Gurudas Dasgupta tartly responded that Singh had no business talking about Parliamentary privilege and the Hazare agitation, because the government hadn’t bothered to keep the House in the loop, anyway.
This insistence on ‘we know best what’s good for you’ cost the government dear. All earlier negotiations with agitators like Ramdev and the Hazare team were conducted by a handful of Congress ministers, without the participation of anyone else from allied or opposition parties. This naturally led to a lot of resentment in Parliament, and delayed any solution to the crisis.
In fact, it’s clear that the first of what appeared to be a breakthrough in the standoff happened after several versions of the Lokpal bill were presented in Parliament and an all-party discussion began, followed by Saturday’s special session and debate. Why weren’t members of all parties and activists like Aruna Roy invited when the government sat down with Hazare’s team months ago?
Through August, as Indian politics was convulsed with the anti-graft agitation and the government’s bungling attempts to contain it, nobody in government could articulate a coherent vision of what India should do to curb corruption.
Singh’s core team of home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, law minister Salman Khurshid and telecom minister Kapil Sibal presented fragmented arguments that were sometimes defensive, at other times combative.
They said that the government had removed Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan and jailed ex-minister Andimuthu Raja, as well as several other MPs. They argued that many new laws and rules would be enacted to curb graft. But nothing they said could cool the red-hot resentment on the streets.
So, the normally-reticent Rahul Gandhi had to clear the air in Parliament on Friday. He thanked Hazare for speaking out against graft, helping reduce some of the tension between the agitators and the government.
Rahul also said that the Lokpal could be made into a Constitutional authority like the Election Commission and said that an empowered Lokpal could be a necessary, but not sufficient instrument to curb corruption.
He said at least five different areas need special regulations to curb graft: government procurement, land and mining, delivery of pensions and ration cards, tax evasion and political funding. Each of these activities, as every Indian knows, is a cesspool that breeds corruption. Rahul also broke fresh ground by asking for reform in campaign finance, a subject considered taboo by most political parties.
His formula, to get the state to fund political parties and campaigns, might not be ideal, or practical. First, it’ll be tough to devise a formula acceptable to all parties. Second, any ruling party will always be suspected of favouring itself over rivals. Finally, even with state funding, nothing will stop parties from taking in extra funds from obliging businesses.
Nevertheless, Rahul’s intervention was cogent and purposeful. In less than five minutes, he managed to say things that people on the streets wanted to be said, pointed to areas of concern and charted a guide, however rough, to getting us out of this mess. That’s much, much more than Singh’s administration managed to do in the last few months.
