Author: Mehul Kamdar
Publication: Sulekha
Date: March 25, 2006
URL: http://www.sulekha.com/blogs/blogdisplay.aspx?cid=45157
Some years ago when the Narasimha Rao government
presided over one of the biggest incidents of fraud in Indian history, the
Harshad Mehta scam, a friend joked that the scam would feature in the newspaper
until a cricket series came up, following which the attention of both the
media as well as that of the Indian people would be diverted to this new tamasha.
Surely enough, his joke proved prophetic in a country that I dearly love along
with millions of others, a country where the ever recumbent incumbents in
Parliament are a bad joke on the people they rule over. Somehow, it is a tribute
to millions of good Indians that the country continues to progress despite
the worst efforts of it's neta-babu clique and some criminal elements who
exploit the clique's ineptitude and even work with it from time to time. We
therefore have police officers who work for underworld gangs and buy properties
worth crores while promoting themselves in films even while they are in office.
And, we have a sleepythead government in New Delhi which slops about like
a beheaded goat at a temple sacrifice while Naxalite criminals increasingly
turn huge swathes of India into a mirror image of Nepal.
Hardly a few months after Naxalite thugs defeated
the police to free more than a thousand of their criminal cohorts from a jail
in Jehanabad, we have a second atrocity in Orissa with the state police completely
unable to do a thing. The local police have claimed that the hills around
Ramgiri Udayagiri were full of landmines placed there by the Naxalites and
that they could not chase and hunt them down because of this. The Congress
government, hot as it has always been on rhetoric, has been singing paeans
to it's empress Sonia Gandhi for her "renunciation" of her Parliamentary
seat in a parallel to A Nero playing the harp while Rome burned. They managed
to sweep Jehanabad under the carpet, and there is little doubt that this party
that has presided over some of the worst flare ups in Indian history, namely
Punjab and Kashmir, is likely to set the nation afire again with it's incompetence
this time as well. The combination of Congress sycophancy and ineptitude seems
fully resurrected this time as well.
In the violence in the Punjab, the Congress
negotiated with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and the news on Doordarshan called
him "Sant" until Her Majesty Indira Gandhi aka Indira is India to
her party people decreed, "Off with his head!" and he became "Mr"
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale on the national propaganda mouthpiece overnight.
The Congress Chief Minister in Andhra Pradesh, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy came
to power and invited the Naxalites to talk to him at his residence as his
guests, ending a hunt for them in his home state's jungles until they gained
his confidence and went back to their murderous ways. YSR had a powerful inspirational
example by his party's former leader to follow and the blessings of her daughter
in law and her children, the de facto rulers of the country, to follow. Of
course, the Congress had won claiming to work for indebted farmers who were
committing suicide in droves after crop failure after crop failure, but they
did not seem to bother about tribals whom the Naxalites killed by the dozen
from time to time. What good are tribals when they most probably don't vote?
There is a very real danger that an increasingly
prosperous India, where millions of people have better lives than they ever
had in the country's history, everything is set to be undone by the criminal
Naxalites. A student of the Madras Christian College writing in the Open Page
in The Hindu has opined that the Jehanabad attack was comparable to the attack
on the Bastille. When newspapers that enjoy singing the praises of an incompetent
government (there is a parallel here as well - The Hindu backed the Emergency
day after day until Indira Gandhi was defeated and it then apologized for
it's propaganda when Morarji Desai was sworn in) endorse the bloodthirsty
whims of proto Naxalite, there is something seriously wrong in the country.
The spectre of Nazis over Germany or of the Bolsheviks over Russia, of a coming
bloodbath because a dangerous internal enemy threatens a country while fat
cat politicians do nothing but twiddle their thumbs is evident in the case
of Manmohan Singh's government. He has not only done nothing to recover the
prisoners freed by the Naxalites and arrest their cohorts in the Central Indian
jungles, he has allowed the Naxalites to do this a second time in a different
state in a demonstration of their increasing clout. While he presides over
his boss' ridiculous drama in Delhi, huge swathes of the country systematically
come under the Naxalites' jackboot. India cannot afford this threat to her
sovereignty. She cannot afford another incompetent Congress government, this
time under the latest recumbent, Manmohan Singh.
