People must get at the truth fully!
PM’s talk of rate of growth, convening of teams and a lackluster image no inspiration! Terror strikes India in a massive way!
Shakes our confidence and our collective response needs some hard questioning!
Is the government as it has responded enough of a guarantee for future security?
It is not easy to come to terms with the reality that had hit India in a brutal way. The 10-member gang of heavily-armed terrorists had caused havoc with the very foundations of the Indian nation.
What started and how it ended would never go away from our minds and public memory, at least in this instance, won’t be anyway shorter. Rather this memory would lengthen by each passing day.
Now, how the government has responded leaves us rather not reassured, but rather more anxious about what would happen next.
The Prime Minister, for one, soon after the attacks, looked thoroughly shaken and his eye balls were rolling about as the nation watched the Chief Executive through his spectacles and he ,as usual failed for words that didn’t rise up to the emotional pitch every other citizen reaches so suddenly and so spontaneously.
It looked at first as if the government response would be more of the same, a quick flying visit by the PM and Sonia Gandhi and followed by the same routine, emotionless and bureaucratic language. Yes, it first looked like that and we have to admit that some people, like Shobha De took exception to the lifeless language of the PM and the very nation felt let down and the country felt like an orphan, to say the least. No one seemed to be in control of the situation.
It is rather too much of an irony of the current political culture that the Leader of the Opposition, Mr.L.K.Advani played a discordant note from the very start, he travelled separately, he spurned the offer of the PM to take him along with him to Mumbai and later when the Pm called for an all party meeting Mr.Advani was characteristically immature to decline such an invitation. Why play politics so cheaply at this hour of a national crisis of such great magnitude?
But then our democracy is so large and so well-founded on some of the greatest thoughts of mankind, it is one of the rare Constitutions India possesses and we can all take consolation and some pride even at this moment of such a war against our very dignity as a nation, against our sovereignty and much else.
So, the response of the government further on was fine but not enough.
There are certain questions that won’t go away!
Why the government didn’t act even after it was warned three times, says the news reports, when the maritime security let us down?
Of course, sacking the Home Minister was in tune with the feelings of the moment. But then what about the very intelligence agencies, the NSA, IB and RAW?
All these heads must have bee replaced at once. This was not done. Why?
There must be accountability in politics. This was what was repeatedly pointed out by the corporate world that came directly under fire in these brutal killings. So, at least the government must act to show that the security is being revamped.
The corporate world responded remarkably candidly and they asked some hard questions and the government is duty bound to respond.
It is not enough the Maharashtra CM and before him, his home minister, are also sacked. Yes, they deserve sacking for what they had spoken and what they done when they went around the scene of crime again humanity.
But then it looks as if the government would more. What more? Please tell us, the people!
Surely, the people won’t rest in peace unless the government puts all its cards, so to say, before the public.
Govern the way, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan duo had conducted themselves they won’t go further than trying to protect their own crowd. Both in the party and in the government.
This wont do.
Let a citizen’s committee be set up and let the committee go about and find out whether the government was in the know of things when the advance warnings were given and by whom and what the government did or failed to do.
A public enquiry with eminent citizens and independent people, say with such personalities like Shobha De, Sabhana Azmi, corporate leaders like Adi Godrej and Rajesh Shah and intellectuals, NGOs and artists and writers. Let such people be constituted into an independent enquiry committtee, let writers like Maheswatha Devi and others be co-opted so that the committee commands the credibility it deserves.
Only such an independent enquiry would satisfy the public and defuse the anger and accumulated sense of helplessness in the face of the rather lack luster responses so far offered by the government.
It matters pretty little whether there PM rakes as FM also or whether the very same bungled NSA briefs the home minister or not.
The public is restless. This restlessness wont go away by business as usual. The restlessness might soon erupt into a large scale public anger if the government proves inadequate to bring a sense of capability to the tasks on hand.