Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh call for best and brightest people to politics
What is really happening today?
Who should make the first moves, so to say?
Our Republic is not reflecting the socio-economic visions yet.
Crisis of faith and legitimacy
Governance is not just a mediating role of the rule of law
Governance is a moral legitimacy?
Do you or have you done the job on date?
Where you have failed? Where you have hidden?
Why so much or even so little speech and so little credible action?
Why so much political and official corruption?
What is the credibility of the high Constitutional functionaries?
A new crop of weak and ineffective leaders have entered into the Congress party, asks an editorial in a national daily. The Rashtrapathi, the Prime Minister and Congress party president have called for good people to context elections. The occasion was the diamond jubilee celebration of the Election Commission. So, the right thoughts, the right words and the right sentiments. Nothing wrong.
The latest 2009 Lok Sabha elections and also the Maharashtra Assembly elections saw certain new trends in Indian politics. Not for the good but for the worse!
These elections saw, in the case of the Lok Sabha elections the rise of the number of MPs with dubious records. More MPs with criminal records, more moneyed candidates, mostly contractors, as from AP, for instance, and also from other states and also significantly, the younger MPs as dynastic heirs.
These are all much written about and what is new is really nothing new!
What is surprising rather is the fact that the Election Commission meet only brought home may be the harsh reality, may be, the very occasion must have made the President, the Prime Minister and the party president rather uncomfortable to realise how the entire country would view them.
There is some agonising thought, may be deeper inside the minds of everybody, that the very system of our governance, call it democracy or election or whatever has thrown about people, not by some accident, but some failure on the part of leaders, decision-makers who were guided by certain fall in values, selfishness or some new insensitivity to moral qualms?
It looks like that.
How can the leaders, those in public offices, can stomach the thought that they have offered themselves to these high offices, knowing fully well that they are not qualified in the true sense of the Constitutional provisions and norms?
The Constitutional rules are in black and white. While the conventions and practices, say like the one who needs to be elected to the Rajya Sabha need such and such criteria and if these criteria is thrown to the winds who is to be blamed? The EC officials? Or, the party president who opts for the individual or individuals? Or, the very individual who offers himself or herself? The time has come to ask such questions pointedly!
We see the devaluation of high offices, right?
Then, we go on talking rather pointlessly the same old songs? The same old clichés? right?
If the Prime Minister says the best and the brightest must come to politics, is he talking genuinely?
When, Sonia Gandhi says criminals should not contest elections, the obvious first reaction would be, for everyone I imagine, what the party president did in the first place?
Hasn’t she knows most of these dubious characters are dubious and the very first opportunity should have been used by her to stop them at the gates?
Why the party president didn’t do that in the first place?
The very selections of persons for some of the most highly demanding jobs are all entrusted to those whose credentials are suspect from day one, so to say?
So, the country saw the celebration of the very Republic Day was packed with full of ironies.
There are a record number of farmer’s suicides, record number of malnourished children, tragic deaths of infant deaths is all too harrowing, too sad to demand much hard hearts to narrate and explain.
So the solemn occasions like the Republic Day often need to be passed unspoken, in silence in one’s privacy. To celebrate the occasions like these in India, under the rather cynical dispensation, when many more demanding thoughts have to be left out of our already heavy hearts! There have been many newspaper columns and editorials that have touched upon these topics. Hence, we thought we are not alone imagining such harsh thoughts for our leaders to find it hard to entertain our own ones!
There is the episode of Ashok Chavan, the Maharashtra CM over his paid news scandal.
Now, the EC has asked for Chavan’s reply on paid news, what would be the next step?
We can be sure that the EC action would be buried in the dustbin of the very same office?
Yes, there are many such EC inactions, with the minor crimes like bribes for voters to even such cynical moves, taken at the highest levels, in such cases like a Union Minister who lost in the Lok Sabha elections at the first instance and then suddenly the results were reversed at the behest of the state and even the Central government and the incumbent minister is luring over the affairs of the country! What is this? Is this to fool the very intelligence of the countrymen?
Then, there is the sheer failure of governance lately, from the government bungling of ads with an ex-Pak General to the awarding of the Padma awards. One leading newspaper ran an editorial and notes why award some hundreds of Padmas when you can’t even select one Bharat Ratna?
Yes, you give a Padma to an NRI in the US just to please the US government, to please Hilary Clinton? It looks like that. Thank god, you gave the one to Professor Tan Chung, a close friend of the Vadamalai Media, of all other distinctions? To please China or cultivate China?
It looks the government does things without any ideas or idealism or vision. It goes by some bureaucratic balancing act. This is where the artificial governance comes out.
There is no natural governance. There is no natural government. It is an artificial construct, this government, the high constitutional authorities are all dumped, artificially, the very process of selection, decision-making is dictated not by a genuine democratic process, it is imposed from outside by several fortune seekers, so to say.
We have to talk about democratic values, say what the Prime Minister’s idea of democracy, democratic values, and democratic norms. That will be an education for the country, an education for his own government and for his own party. So too Sonia Gandhi must say whether she believes in democratic ways in at least some aspects of the party’s functioning?
We haven’t thought of awarding the Bharat Ratna, even to such personalities like the late Jyoti Basu or happily with us, our much-admired Atal Behari Vajpayee. Why?
Why no one in the government thought of such awards.
We ourselves have written more than once to these high personages to award the Bharat Ratna to such achievers like Dr.Verghese Kurien, of Amul, for many years. We wrote to Vajpayee himself when he was the Prime Minister and also to Kalam and now to the current incumbent of the Rashtrapathy Bhavan!
The government inspires the confidence of the people by its highest standards of behaviour.
Not just by its routine jobs, celebrating one event or other or saying the right words for the right occasions.
Now, at least, the government must act; take decisions and sometime some hard decisions. All decisions won’t be soft or easy. Some decisions must be taken so that there is real change in the system.
Sorry to say but the fact remains Dr.Manmohan Singh won’t act for the rest of his term, it seems.
M.K.Narayanan we kept for so long. All we have now changed is the places where the very same individuals would be bidding their time to serve the same old masters, the same old chores!
The Governors for example!
So too the senior officers, in the foreign embassies and also internally with some tenures whose justification seem to have expired long ago. Unless you move out a whole tribe of the seniors, with extended tenures in these jobs, where it eh chance for new talents, new winds to blow in? How can the government invite new talents?
You have to send high profile, really talented and qualified faces as, say, ambassadors to USA and China and even to some other countries. These new talents only will bring back new inputs and new ideas.
As of now, there are no such moves whatever.
So too in the party apparatus.
The PCCS must be renewed and activated.
What is the point of keeping the very same persons as PCC presidents, Cabinet Ministers and the CWC members?
Is there no talent in the country to assign such responsibilities?
If the PM thinks he can induct a wide variety of new talents.
If Sonia Gandhi thinks she can instantly induct, say a hundred new talented faces into the PCCs.
So, the new Republic of India become really a new endeavour to look far and wide and help to make India a vibrant force in all areas of national life.
Even such post like a Culture Minister, a vital portfolio, remains vacant! Why? Please send your comments. www.isvarmurti.com.