When a government doesn’t act and creates more confusion!
Could the Lokpal have prevented?
Scams like CVC, 2G and the latest CAG report the on KG gas allocations?
Certainly not!
We need transparency in governance! Leaders with moral scruples must speak out and act in time like this.
For that we need to adhere to basic democratic values and norms! At all levels. At the government and at the party levels! What is holding up the transparent governance?
We can see how the UPA-I turned out to be a nightmare of UPA-II?
In the UPA -I we started with the nomination of the Prime Minister. Neither he sought an election to the Lok Sabha very soon after his nomination, he persisted with the claim of his being nominated first to the Rajya Sabha from Assam and he was almost showing up his residential proofs, his paying or rent and also rent for electricity etc and that was a public joke, though we all tolerated as a harmless joke. The public of India would not have forgotten so soon the long-lasting battle waged by the veteran journalist Kuldeep Nayar who is happily among us to tell the sad story of his long fought and lost battle in the Supreme Court.
Though we have all learnt to accept and abide by the verdict of the Supreme Court, as we should as citizens of a Constitutional democracy, the moral and ethical dilemmas won’t go away so soon about the wisdom of the judgement. The basic scheme of the Constitution is to have a Council of States and that means each State must have a representation from the normally resident citizens. But here is an anomaly, that too by the person who becomes a Prime Minister and “declares” he is a normally domiciled citizen of a State of which everyone knows he is not a resident etc. And yet we all saw to the horror of horrors that a highly learned person, a very much respected public figure did this in the face of untruth and in an ironical way that act was to hold the entire country in some ridicule and every some moral outrage.
All this is now in the past but such untruth won’t go away so easily. That moral insult would persist. If you are an old fashioned moralist and even somewhat religious minded then you would find in your scriptures so many dictums that if you do wrong and that too knowingly, such unethical act becomes your own tormentor. In Tamil there is a famous classical epic, namely, Silappadikaram, whose critical line is that if you do wrong in governance then that very wrong becomes your destroyer. I am sure there must be similar such dictums in other languages and religious texts.
Here, there must be many in the country that the present plight of the UPA-II is a self-inflicted, self-invited indictment by such accumulated series of knowingly-done wrong doings.
You may laugh it off and that is your right and freedom. But there must be some reason and rationale for the series of such rapidly accumulated troubles for a genuinely elected democratic government.
There is a currently new sense of arrogance on the part of many who are in the business of governance. See the latest letter of Sonia Gandhi to Anna Hazare. Her letter whoever had drafted it, the drafters have done a correct job of sticking to the legal points, they sound prim and proper! Only when you are losing your common sense you turn like that!
You should show wisdom and compassion and a serious moral commitment for eradication of the scourge of corruption and that would show off in whatever you speak or write. Sonia Gandhi hasn’t shown any such wisdom or commitment.
Starting from the CVC to other scams, most importantly the 2G scam and the now controversy in drafting the Lokpal Bill, it can be seen the government never for once has given the impression that it is adhering to any shared commitment. No ideology, no commitment to any set of values and that is why you yourself had the Prime Minister in the 2010 draft where the Prime Minister was under its jurisdiction. Now you have gone back. For what valid reasons? None at all.
Neither you are welcome to the civil society viewpoints. Not necessary a democratically elected government should accept a civil society draft. But then your government draft must look like a superior piece in the eyes of the public. Unfortunately, it is not. On date you don’t have such a point of view. Everyone of the member of the government, the ministers is thinking in his own selfish point of view.
P.Chidambaram is already damned by the 2G taint and other troubles as charged by the new TN Chief Minister. Kapil Sibal’s credibility stands damned after his bravura performance in the 2G scam when he faltly denied any loss in the very scam that is holding up the Tihar jail with unwanted personages in such dreadful conditions.
What the public would think of these developments?
Did the Prime Minister at least for once asked such a question? One wonders?
Or, did Sonia Gandhi really care for the Indian public opinion? If she had she would not have written such a curt letter to a selfless citizen like Anna Hazare.
The very ministers who are sitting on judgement over the drafting of the Lokpal bill are otherwise humble men indeed but they don’t give the impression of open-minded, they want to go ahead and somehow seal the mouth of the public with a bill that would once again become an instrument of a more and more spineless government machinery.
The Parliament must of course be the ultimate judge and we can only hope that parliament would be enabled to debate and discuss the bill in some seriousness and somehow, in a parliamentary democracy there must be room for further reforms for making governance more and more transparent instead of the current malaise of non-action and a sort of curbing the voice of the citizens.
The Prime Minister must lead from the front. He must initiate new discussions and new debates and he could invite many experts from abroad too, there are so many precedents for this in the Nehru days and even after for various new measures, from Constitutional reforms to tax reforms etc.
Now, also there is an urgency, in the wake of these new scams to initiate electoral reforms, party reforms, Constitutional reforms and we have to do these reforms urgently. Otherwise, we would fall back to our old habits that served our interests very fine.
See how our parties function now and there is no transparency in collecting election funds. In TN it was evident, the very government started to resorting to large-scale corruption as a way of accumulated illegitimate funds. In just one election, the CEC with its vigilant acts, detected Rs50 odd crores by deploying flying squads and in spite of so much corrupt funds leaking out the DMK was roundly wiped out! Why? Thanks to the renewed vigour of the CEC? If the same CEC is given the reforms it wants, then you can imagine how clean electoral machinery we can get?
So, why the PM doesn’t act?
So too why the PM doesn’t reply to the letters of another letter writer, this time one Sharma from Vishakapatnam on the KG gas allocations?
So, a PM who doesn’t have time to receive an Anna Hazare, who has no time to reply to letters from Subramanian Swamys and Sharmas and yet he is too willing to preside over a government that has no other work to fight a rearguard battle against its own rewards of inaction?
This is not just an irony; it is a Greek Tragedy of the supreme kind!
So, it is not a government for tit for tot! It is a government that is playing to the classical virtues of a tragic-comic end!
Image Source : www.rajasthantalkies.com/2011/04