Chaitra Krushna Chaturdashi, Kaliyug Varsha 5112
Arrogant. It’s the most common word used these days to describe the Congress party. The personification of its hubris is the Union home minister, P Chidambaram (the royal family wisely keeps a low profile). His thigh-slapping challenge to the Naxals resulted in the massacre of 75 CRPF jawans in Dantewada, and this subdued him to the extent that he offered to resign. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh naturally rejected Chidambaram’s offer, not because he didn’t have another candidate for what’s turning out to be the toughest job in government, and not because he wanted Chidambaram to answer to Parliament, but because of a simple question: Why should he? He is after all one of the indispensable stars of the natural party of governance.
Chidambaram, however, is no worse than his party, which behaves as if the UPA-2 was a single-party government. Its behaviour is surprising when you consider how much in the doldrums the party was not long ago, in the post-P V Narasimha Rao years. At that time, it seemed that diminishing parliamentary presence would force the Congress to shed its hubris and behave the way political parties are meant to: building democracy from the ground up. How quickly things change. Nowadays the Congress under Sonia Gandhi with 206 MPs behaves the way it did under her late husband Rajiv Gandhi, with 411 seats: as if no one else mattered.
Some of you might recall that after the Bofors scandal broke out, Rajiv tried to muzzle the press with an anti-defamation Bill. We in the media protested, and the Bill was withdrawn. (We suspected this fascist legislation to be the handiwork of Rajiv’s pompous little minister for internal security, one P Chidambaram). How things have changed. Nowadays, Sonia couldn’t care less what the media thinks. You can’t blame her; it took the massacre of 76 jawans for the media to stop obsessing over Sania Mirza’s marriage.
(Permit me a digression. The marriage drama ended when her beau agreed to divorce a wife he previously claimed he never had. The explanation: it was “in the interest of the community”. In 1986, when the Supreme Court decided that a divorced woman named Shah Bano ought to get proper alimony, the community became upset. Rajiv tried to appease it with a Bill that denied even the poorest Muslim woman a proper alimony. Then he tried to appease Hindus with a shilanyas at Ayodhya; you know where that led. How things have changed. This week everyone was sanguine about the divorce just a week before the second marriage as well as the Rs 5,000 a month alimony [“personal matter”, everyone chirps]; they were more interested in the reality-TV way in which Shoaib Malik’s lies were exposed. So much for our enlightened middle class.)
Even if Sonia can safely ignore the middle class, there’s that minor inconvenience called Parliament. It speaks volumes that when Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee calls an all-party meeting to discuss introducing the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha, he has to assure the other parties that the Congress will not use marshals to evict unruly members. This assurance, political commentators tell us, came not because it was an undemocratic practice but simply because there were too many Yadavs in the Lok Sabha to be physically thrown out. Not even Barack Obama, president of the country that went around invading other nations, had legislators evicted so that his landmark healthcare reform bill would pass. It makes you wonder about our society: though we have democratic institutions, we don’t seem to have democratic instincts. Even our prime minister, world-famous for his mild manner, gets strangely arrogant when it comes to legislation relating to nuclear energy, be it the Indo-US nuclear deal or the nuclear liabilities Bill, which the PM now says he’ll modify in committee (rather than submit a fresh new Bill).
The epitome of the party’s arrogance is Chidambaram. For a long time most Indians put up with his behaviour because he gave the impression of being efficient; many have now realised that being an efficient accountant is not the same as being a good home minister. Not one terrorism case has been solved on his watch (the breakthrough in the 26/11 case was Ajmal Kasab’s arrest that same night). Chidambaram’s only achievement as home minister has been to effect the removal of another arrogant fellow close to the Congress: the former national security adviser. Chidambaram’s own family members are not immune to arrogance: thankfully his son’s lackeys have been decimated in the Tamil Nadu Youth Congress elections, a poll on which Congress princeling Rahul Gandhi has placed much hope.
Chidambaram’s arrogance was on display on Sunday when he announced that he would finish off the Naxals within three years. The Naxals struck back in a deadly way, and you would agree that had 76 jawans been killed in Kashmir, India would have verged on an incident with Pakistan. Perhaps that’s a clue to what the Congress wants: it wants the middle class to focus so much on tribal warriors that it forgets about jihadis. Making people focus on the impoverished tribal removes their focus on the impoverished Muslim, and this probably fits into the Congress party’s electoral strategy. All those conservatives who fulminate against the Naxals and want the air force to be used to clear the forests of Naxals (so that big business can start strip mining the land) ought to keep this in mind.
Chidambaram may have offered to resign, but it seems to be a case not of penance but of a man asserting his authority by taking full responsibility. He knows neither the PM nor Sonia will let him leave government, and you can bet that soon he will return to his arrogant ways. This does not portend well for Chidambaram’s plan to tackle India’s “gravest internal security threat”, as the PM called the Naxals. Like Chidambaram this week, the hubristic Congress party is also headed for a serious jolt in the near future.
Its seething political opponents are willing to bury the hatchet with one another to make common cause against the ruling party. There are signs of something brewing in Maharashtra, where the Congress rules in coalition with the NCP, a UPA ally made prickly by allegations that the agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, allowed food price inflation to spiral out of control. Sanguine Congressmen are confident that nothing will befall their government; at worst they can split the NCP and bring the dissidence into the Congress. This is the kind of hubris which blinds a person to a gathering storm. And the Congress party’s arrogance is allowing several storms to gather.
Source: Expressbuzz
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