Quote:An allegation that the Congress party took money from the United States during the Indira Gandhi era has been made in a book to be released on Tuesday, but the party dismissed the charge as 'unsubstantiated and malicious.'



The allegation is contained in the book which is a collection of personal letters and journal entries of former US Senator and ambassador to India, late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It is edited by Steven R Weisman, public policy fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute.



Moynihan, who was Washington's envoy to India during the crucial years of 1973 to 1975, refers to the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 28, 1974 in New Delhi.

Quote:There’s a lesson in this for the Congress which has come to believe that trickery and deceit, coupled with gross abuse of power, can help dislodge State Governments over which it has no control. The level to which the Congress can stoop is as evident from its chicanery in Karnataka as its misuse of agencies of the state in Gujarat. That the Congress is bereft of all vestiges of morality and ethics is demonstrated by its crude attempts to topple the elected Government of Karnataka, an evil enterprise in which the Governor is complicit. Similarly, in Gujarat the Congress stands denuded of all values that are integral to democracy: The people have given a fitting reply to the shameful manner in which a compromised CBI has been unleashed on Mr Modi, his colleagues and upright senior police officers to harass and intimidate them and tarnish the image of the BJP. Ironically, the ill-conceived ‘strategy’ of the Congress’s ‘high command’ has not only horribly misfired, but also exposed the party’s publicists in sections of the media: Both deserve no more than ridicule. Having said that, Mr Modi’s spectacular victory in Gujarat is not without a lesson for his colleagues elsewhere in the country — they could learn a thing or two from him on political management and good governance. For example, had Mr BS Yeddyurappa emulated Mr Modi, the Congress would not have succeeded in destabilising his Government.

Quote:Besides revealing that the party has mobilized Rs 10 lakh from each of the 11 cabinet members, Thakre, who passed stringent remarks against Chavan, disclosed that the CM paid Rs 2 crore for hiring 2,000 state transport corporation buses.



Snatches of the conversation indicated embarrassing facts — that each minister in the Chavan cabinet was asked to cough up Rs 10 lakh for the Sewagram event and Chavan himself committed Rs 2 crore for hiring 2,000 buses to ferry crowds for the rally. More shockingly, that money had to be passed on 'up there' in New Delhi (apparently to party bosses) by the satraps in Mumbai.





Read more: Maharashtra Congress chief goes 'public' with party secrets - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6750873.cms?prtpage=1#ixzz12RrYzyAH

Quote:Rahul as PM

On his present record, the Gandhi scion gives the jitters were he ever to get the running of India, says N.V.Subramanian.



London, 27 October 2010: If you wish to have a glimpse of the kind of government Rahul Gandhi will give to the country, if he ever unfortunately becomes India's prime minister, then you have to check the direction the Congress party is taking under him. The Congress party technically is still headed by his mother, Sonia Gandhi. But in key decisions taken, for example, on continuing with Omar Abdullah as Jammu and Kashmir's chief minister, with all its disastrous fallouts so far, or on canceling the bauxite mining leases of Vedanta in Niyamgiri Hills, or in decisions related to selecting Congress candidates for elections (where, of course, success is all that counts), it appears that Sonia has allowed Rahul to have the final call. It would, therefore, be logical and proper to place current decisions and steps taken by the Congress party at the door of Rahul Gandhi, and it would not be entirely out of sorts to extrapolate from there about the kind of primeministership he will give. This piece will not deal with the actual primeministership he is likely to dispense, because that will be at a future point in time, and it may happen as likely as that it may not, but rather the manner of a Rahul Gandhi primeministership, for which his present decisions, some of them at any rate, taken as the most powerful of the Congress general secretaries, will be analyzed for what they are worth.



The earlier view shared by this writer was that the Congress party was playing the "good cop" to the "bad cop" of government to usurp the opposition space of the BJP and to some extent the Left represented in the main by the CPI-M. This "good cop/ bad cop" theory cannot be entirely banished because it has come to occupy respectable space in India's party-political sciences, and was practiced unsuccessfully, of course, by the BJP-Sangha Parivar previously. But it appears more the case that the brand of politics or politicking Rahul Gandhi is pushing is becoming, if not in its conception, then certainly in its execution, anti-government, anti-state, with its obvious negative implications for Indian nationhood, and this syndrome appears to have infected the likes of the Union home minister, P.Chidambaram. (Chidambaram, as has been written in this magazine earlier, feels hugely threatened by the rise of Digvijay Singh, the political tutor of Rahul Gandhi, and who is ambitious for the home job.)



Take the case of J and K, for example. Nearly all the present troubles of the state can be traced to two young, super-ambitious politicians, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah. Mehbooba Mufti and the PDP made it impossible for the Congress when the J and K chiefministership came to it by rotation, aligning ideologically with the separatist forces and taking a sectarian line on the Amarnath Yatra temporary land-lease issue. For all that, the PDP did badly in the polls and Farooq Abdullah and Omar's National Conference in alliance with the Congress conversely did well. Rather than learn his lessons from the PDP's debacle, which was not to act the spoiler, concentrate on governance, and make it worthwhile for Kashmiris to remain wedded to democracy, Omar retreated to behind the high walls of office, broke his links with the people, and afforded a second life to the Syed Ali Shah Geelani sort of redundant separatists who want J and K's merger with Pakistan, even though it is a failed state with a terrible record of persecuting non-Punjabis and minorities.



To cover for his own inadequacies, Omar has gone into campaign mode, whilst being chief minister, targeting critical instruments of the Indian state like the Indian Army, which he now wants prosecuted for mostly false cases of extra-judicial killings, while seeking operationally to tie its hands through killer amendments in the Armed Forces' Special Powers Act. Rather than see through Omar's game, which is ultimately self-defeating, and capable potentially of destroying the Abdullah legacy in J and K, Rahul Gandhi has backed his continuance as chief minister, on the grounds that he is young and needs time. Being young is no justification to make blunders, but it almost appears that Rahul Gandhi does not care, even when it is clearly apparent that Omar Abdullah is straining J and K's ties with the remaining Indian mainstream. By setting up a panel of non-political resolvers for J and K, forgetting that the best solution for the state is to leave things alone, Chidambaram seems to have bought into the substance of Rahul Gandhi's apparent anti-government, anti-state politics, if it can be called that. And the new panel's leader, a former editor, rather than adhering to his brief objectively to transmit the expressed views of Kashmiris to the Centre, has weighed in on J and K's Pakistan angle, provoking another controversy.



{Again a govt functionary acting anti-government!}



In matter after matter, the Rahul Gandhi Congress is chasing headlines, following media chatter, and submerging in the NGO chorus.The decision to cancel the Vedanta mining lease is getting increasingly mired in allegations of exceeded briefs, with its huge impact on India's growth prospects and strategies. The anti-government, anti state reflexes of Rahul Gandhi have infected key segments of the Central government. In a different sort of way from Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh is attempting to remain in the good books of Rahul Gandhi, putting a block on infrastructural development even in the strategically sensitive North East. The thrust seems more and more to conform to the Rahul Gandhi thinking, whatever that is, and wise Pranab Mukherjee's observation that he has "overstayed" at the wicket and is too old for a future Rahul Gandhi cabinet tells which way the wind is blowing.



If indeed, unfairly to Pranab, his decision to seek early retirement is interpreted philosophically at a deeper level, it would suggest that wisdom is in precipitately declining demand. After all, why would Rahul Gandhi & Co want to encourage an anti-government, anti-statestream of action and thought while giving at the same time the essential motor drive to the Manmohan Singh government? It defies explanation (it bears similarity to Kalidasa sawing or chopping the branch of the tree he was straddling), even accounting for the good-bad cop theory. With things being in a bad way and chaotic as they are now, imagine the state of affairs when Rahul Gandhi reaches the top. You would all come to rue it.



N.V.Subramanian is Editor, http://www.NewsInsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi). Email: envysub@gmail.com.

Quote:NATION | Tuesday, November 2, 2010 | Email | Print | | Back





RSS campaign to counter ATS ‘disinformation’November 02, 2010 11:20:50 PM



LOKPAL SETHI | JAIPUR



State unit of RSS would start an extensive campaign from November 10 to counter the disinformation by ATS of Rajasthan, which is allegedly trying to implicate senior RSS functionary Indresh Kumar in Ajmer Dargah bomb blast case.



Though in a meeting RSS leadership at Pune decided to launch such nation-wide campaign, Rajasthan unit was particularly asked not to spare any efforts to make this campaign most effective one. This was done because case is related to Rajasthan, where Indresh Kumar had served for four years from 2002. In the chargesheet, filed by ATS in Ajmer Court, name of Indresh Kumar was figured as suspect conspirator. It said his role in the cases needed to be investigated further.



According to a RSS spokesman, modalities of the campaign are being worked out to make it a most extensive one to reach to all sections of the society.



It is learnt, RSS functionaries are trying to involve those Muslim leaders who are either close to Sangh or any constituent, including BJP, of Sangh Parivar.

Quote:Union Minister Salman Khurshid says that Congress chief Sonia Gandhi holds the 'real power' in the UPA coalition though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was very much in charge of the government. "Of course everybody knows that she (Sonia Gandhi) is the real power, but he (Manmohan Singh) is the real Prime Minister," Corporate and Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid told CNN-IBN on its Devil's Advocate programme.

Khurshid's reponse came when he was asked whether the real power in India was Sonia Gandhi and not Singh.