10-08-2010, 10:29 PM
Something to think about. The inner civil war is coming out. Rahul baba and coterie is underming the MMS govt to prepare ground for him to step in as savior.
LINK: SOURCE
Quote:Party vs government
With Congress bosses daily battling the Manmohan Singh regime, who needs the BJP?
N.V.Subramanian analyzes.
8 October 2010: There are two types of battles underway between the Congress party and the Manmohan Singh government. Both battles, one institutional in character and the other individual, are undermining the Centre and by a natural correlation the country and specifically its national interests. It is unfair and difficult to say that one side or one set of individuals are always right and the other wrong. But the Congress party's growing differences with the government will run the country aground sooner than later and recovery will be impossible at least in the present term of office of prime minister Manmohan Singh.
In normal course, the buck should stop with the PM, but Manmohan Singh has never been that manner of all-commanding prime minister in the more than six years he has been on the job. The only time he discovered his self-respect was when the Indo-US nuclear deal was threatened by UPA-I's Left allies and the Congress party was frightened into supporting him lest he quit.
Since then, it has been downhill for the PM, and strangely, Manmohan Singh seems not to care. Leave aside other things, he decided to intervene in the Commonwealth Games fiasco when India's image had ground to dust internationally, and perhaps even that was nudged by the Congress leadership. On the Congress party-government face-off on everything from tackling Maoists to environmental concerns, mining in tribal areas, and issues related to education, Manmohan Singh has maintained a stoic silence, as though completing his prime-ministerial term, however abjectly, is all that he cares about.
Meanwhile, under his watch, among others, P.Chidambaram and Digvijaya Singh spectacularly are locked in a confrontation that entirely threatens to undermine the authority of government. To be sure, Digvijaya Singh has provoked this fight, utilizing his proximity to Rahul Gandhi, but at the same time, Chidambaram has shown vulnerabilities that any opponent could exploit.
Chidambaram has been successful in containing Pakistani terrorism directed against India, but even so, it is unclear how profoundly he understands the critical home portfolio he holds. Frankly, Chidambaram shows no grasp of the complexities of India, especially North India, where he earlier blithely has advocated using the military against the Maoists. Nor has he any understanding of Jammu and Kashmir, where this writer and this magazine twice had to provide him correct perspective about the burgeoning violence, which he, like the disastrous Omar Abdullah, conveniently blame on the army.
It is no secret that Digvijaya Singh (blocked from Madhya Pradesh by Shivraj Chauhan) is ambitious for Chidambaram's job, and he has made the hurting but not unwise comment (incidentally first articulated by this magazine on objective considerations) that the basic requirement for a home minister is to have solid and successful chief-ministerial experience. On the other hand, Chidambaram reckons that the way to contain Digvijay's challenge is to indulge in competitive Hindu-bashing, which is perhaps the reason for his "saffron terror" comment and for his post-Ayodhya verdict observations. Neither parties nor the Congress and government realize that India is being damaged in the process.
The other battles are less individualized and more institutional but nevertheless wrecking. For example, it is difficult to fault Jairam Ramesh for his pro-environment crusade because he is the environment minister. But governance is also about making reasonable and calibrated compromises to serve a larger good which Ramesh forgets. In his ministerial duties, he puts greater faith in the judgment of Rahul Gandhi than the collective wisdom of the Union cabinet. Why have the present cabinet then? If Rahul Gandhi appears so superior to Congressmen, then it is time Manmohan Singh is pensioned off. Kapil Sibal's face-off with Congress managers also appears institutional (although Sibal is as shallow as Chidambaram) where the party has no faith in the government's education policy.
As said in the beginning of the piece, it is not that one side is entirely to blame and the other faultless. Nor is it to be expected, especially in a chaotic democracy like India's, that everybody in the ruling dispensation will have uniform views. But this daily sniping between the Congress party and government (for example, Digvijaya's most current defence of Omar Abdullah against the Centre) is becoming toxic. What commenced as a good cop/ bad cop strategy to seize the opposition space from the BJP is beginning to consume UPA-II.
Indian voters everyday are being reminded of their disastrous decision to give the UPA a second term.
N.V.Subramanian is Editor, 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.
LINK: SOURCE