Jokers in charge

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/jokers-in-charge/1108565/0

BY - TAVLEEN SINGH
SOURCE - THE INDIAN EXPRESS

Chinese soldiers are currently on a camping trip in Ladakh. The insouciance with which they crossed the border and set up their tents on Indian soil revives horrible memories of a war in which we suffered a humiliating defeat. It should have worried our government but it did not. Ministers of the Government of India handled this insidious new form of troop movement with the sanguinity they exhibited when an Indian soldier was beheaded on another troubled border. Is this arrogance, cowardice or stupidity? I leave it for those who understand our namby-pamby foreign policy better than I do to answer that question, but would like to discuss this week the domestic consequences of this behaviour.

The most important of these is that the Sonia-Manmohan government is increasingly being perceived as too weak to protect India's interests. Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rarely deign to explain their policies to the Indian public and always vanish in times of crisis. They leave it to their ministers to speak for them and when these gentlemen speak, they confirm the growing impression that the destiny of India is in the hands of jokers.

Salman Khurshid is an old friend so it saddens me to write that the 'acne' analogy for the Chinese camping expedition was inappropriate and facetious. The Defence Minister has a stock answer whenever he is asked about a border incident, and he is so inarticulate when he gives it that it takes a while to work out that he is only saying that the matter is being investigated. Not once has he said anything that sounds even vaguely reassuring.

The Home Minister says the wrong thing so often that it is surprising that he is still allowed to speak. The latest example came in Parliament recently when he tried to dismiss the brutal rape of a five-year-old girl in Delhi by saying "rapes happen everywhere". Last year, when he was in charge of the Power Ministry and the entire northern grid had collapsed, he had said proudly that we should be grateful for how quickly it was repaired.

If the Sonia-Manmohan government's legacy was just bad ministers, we might still be able to sleep peacefully at night, but there is more. In long years of covering politics and governance in Delhi, I can think of no other time, except during the Emergency, when vital institutions have been more seriously damaged. Last week, the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) admitted to the Supreme Court that they had consultations with the Law Minister while making their report on the coal scandal. This may seem like a major transgression, but it is actually just a symptom of a much deeper malaise.

On account of the peculiar situation of India having for the first time ever (and hopefully the last) two prime ministers and two cabinets, there is total confusion about who is making policy and who is accountable for what. Of course, we all know that Sonia Gandhi is more powerful than the Prime Minister and that her NAC (National Advisory Council) has overridden the Cabinet on many policy matters, but we do not know who is accountable when things go wrong. In the absence of clarity, governance has become a serious casualty. So let us hope and pray that those Chinese soldiers in Ladakh are just having a little summer holiday.

Last week, I chanced upon an interview that Baba Ramdev gave to a couple of Hindi news channels. I heard him say that he would like Narendra Modi to become prime minister because wherever he travelled, he met people who told him that they longed to see a strong leader in charge of India. I am no fan of Baba Ramdev but can confirm from my own travels in our fair and wondrous land that wherever I go, I meet people who express a similar sentiment.

In urban India, there are signs of a Modi wave and the irony is that for this he has Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh to thank and not his colleagues in the Bharatiya Janata Party. Ever since Modi started making speeches in Delhi, there is nearly as much panic in the higher echelons of the BJP as there is in the Congress party headquarters. This is because the incestuous, murky nature of politics in Delhi has made senior BJP leaders as complicit in what has gone wrong.

If this were not true, would they be stalling Parliament when Chinese soldiers have set up a camp in Ladakh? Surely at a time when there is a serious threat to national security, there can be nothing more important than allowing Parliament to function? Questions about the coal scam can be asked inside the House, can they not? Is it any wonder that ordinary Indians long these days for a real leader?

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @tavleen_singh