Sonia Gandhi would head it
Is it not a parallel PMO?
Is the timing right?
One more bureaucratic layer?
One more bureaucratic hurdle for the people?
Sonia Gandhi is already burdened with a heavy workload!
Why not Rahul Gandhi heads the NAC?
And the Youth Congress can monitor the government’s various development schemes and programmes.
Rahul’s team has some the bright minds, US educated, US-work experience and motivation for doing something great and worthwhile. So, why not tap these latest talents?
The UPA is now in a sort of mess and if not in a crisis-like situation. UPA-I is totally different from UPA-II. Within a year of its formation, there have been fast developments.
In particular, the allies, the DMK, NCP and the Trinamul have begun to show their real face and their current pulls and pressure might impact the government functioning in way that at the moment seems unpredictable. The cut motion saw the current voting pattern too. For the government 289 and against the government 201 and if we take away the BSP vote of 21 MPs, you have a minority government and this is not a very encouraging reality.
The so-called parties that helped the UPA by staging a walkout are, to say, the least, unreliable even in terms of some basic principles based politics.
What is the advisability at this stage to create a National Advisory Council? There is not much that the proposed NAC can advise the Prime Minister.
The UPA allies, the alliance ministers, Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel are already in the cricket mess and how the IPL controversy will play out is yet to be seen. So, the duo, two powerful ministers in the UPA might stick on and might not give any headache, except when pressed by outside developments emanating from the IPL controversy.
As for the Trinamul Congress, it is already creating trouble for the Congress. How the alliance in West Bengal works out is also in the realm of the future, both immediate and the not s0 immediate time frame.
Very likely, the Trinamul is no better, say, the Mayawati “alliance” as on date. While you can restrain Mayawati, as the incumbent Chief Minister with her own load of troubles, you can’t do so with Mamata Banerjee.
As for the DMK, it is the worst possible headache for the Congress.
Congress really is helpless. In TN, the Congress is almost non-existent to the point of simply surrendering to the DMK blackmail.
The UPA is tied to the DMK misdeeds by sheer forces of a series of blunders.
The UPA ministers from TN, both Mr.P.Chidambaram and Mr.G.K.Vasan owes a lot to the current troubles, they sought to carve out a space for themselves, only for themselves and not for the party.
And now, the Congress party machine as such is also in no less a mess. The party units simply don’t exist in major states, UP, West Bengal to TN and even in other states like MP and Bihar.
So, Sonia Gandhi has a huge workload and no less for Rahul Gandhi.
So, we ask: why take up the NAC which in a way is supposed to be a parallel PMO?
Yes, it is. The budget is from the PMO allocation, the subjects, the monitoring of the implementation of the popular, rater the populistic programmes by the NAC is at the face of it near impossible and in a way not even warranted.
How to monitor the programmes which are in the domain of the state governments.
Even the Congress-led states won’t like interference from others who have no legitimacy and no expertise.
The 35-member strong bureaucracy, in our opinion, is sheer waste of public funds. The one more bureaucratic layer, if at all, would only serve to deny and delay access to Sonia Gandhi who is already inaccessible, owing to security and other inherent setup at 10, Jan Path and 24, Akbar Road, the Congress headquarters were also there is a 35-strong General Secretaries and other busybodies who, by the way they have so far performed, haven’t monitors the functioning of the state party units.
So, we suggest that Mrs.Gandhi better free herself from the NAC trap, which we suspect is a ploy from those who want to be seen as pliant to Mrs.Gandhi and want to play up her ego as if to give the country, Indira Gandhi-like populist slogans and image.
The Garibi-hato call in 1971 helped Mrs.Gandhi to take on the Congress old guard and also helped her to capture the imagination of the people.
Now, a similar image for the others Mrs.Gandhi, in our, view is a sheer folly and might in fact do much damage to the faltering Dr.Singh’s dispensation.
Dr.Singh is finding the going very hard; the Maoists have dented the government image, in particular, the image of the Home Minister, who lately has become a bit more subdued.
The IPL had taken the sheen out of the Singh’s capacity to handle the hot potato! And then came a series of scandals from phone tapping to Raja tapes that exposed how weak is the party’s core strengths. The corporate lobbying as revealed by the Raja tapes is really not the thing the party wants now, with the numbers in the Lok Sabha threading the cohesion and the pulling power of this regime for the rest of the Lok Sabha term.
What we need now is a re-energisation of the party machine.
This is the task the Congress President must give top priority, in our opinion.
The party needs, if at all. not an NAC but a high power Congress Advisory Council consisting of senior Congress leaders, experts, even experts in new technologies like IT to advise the party how it can expand the reach of the party, its messages to the last stages, the poor at the grass roots and the educated youth at the college level, through the medium of the Internet.
The Congress party must take a leaf out of the Barack Obama book, how the US President conducted the campaign, using the Internet and the Congress party, under Rahul Gandhi and others must sit together and create a number of think tanks and party cells, say cells for foreign affairs, employment, housing and health and everywhere there is an opportunity and wherever there is expertise to expand and make more democratic working of the state units desirable.
We have some experience in TN where the party unit is almost dead and not working. What it does is to cohabit with the DMK which denied the Congress any share in power.
This is the sort of challenge the Party faces everywhere and what the party can do is to get inputs and give the feed back to the party in Delhi.
Which in turn can share the inputs, however imperfect, it is the party feedback that might carry some genuineness and might help to improve the functioning of the government.
Image Source : tnyouthcongress.org