Author: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao
Publication: News.in.msn.com
Date: May 30, 2011
URL: http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5182835
PM keen to become President, Chidambaram positioning
himself to take over as the next PM
The UPA-II is adrift and the Congress top
brass has clearly failed to deal with it, feel party insiders.
A Congress member who did not want to be named
said the scams-related crises at the Centre could be attributed more to an
internal failure instead of to the opposition's ability to score points against
the government.
He said the party has failed on three fronts:
no outreach to Parliament, no outreach to the judiciary and no outreach to
the media. The party member criticised Pawan Bansal, minister for parliamentary
affairs, for "inept floor management". Bansal kept allies out of
the loop which is why the Public Accounts Committee launched a successful
offensive against the government through its provisional report on the 2G
spectrum allocation scam, he said.
Even Veerappa Moily, law minister, seemed
to be caught off guard. The government's law officers were not prepared to
deal with the 2G spectrum allocation scam or the financial mess surrounding
the Commonwealth Games 2010, the member said. The result, the Supreme Court
is directly dealing with corruption cases and the executive has practically
no role, he said.
Ambika Soni, minister for information and
broadcasting, did little to keep the media informed about the government's
position on all contentious issues. This necessitated the formation of a Group
of Ministers to deal with the media, he said.
