IS IT NOT THE TIME FOR THE CONGRESS PARTY TO CHANGE ITS PRIME MINISTER?

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

How much misrule will convince the Congress party that it is time for it to change its Prime Minister?

In a country of simpletons and sycophants like India, where majority voters are uninformed and misinformed and where corporate controlled media rules the roost in public information and where the election system is suspected of vitiation by maneuverable Electronic Voting Machines and where the main Opposition is a party of profiteers and communal fanatics, it was not surprising that the Congress could bag majority seats of the Loksabha to lead the alliance styled UPA and to have its own man Dr. Mnmohan Singh as the Prime Minister again.

But, Dr. Singh has given such a rule that, instead of saying him to vacate, the Congress general secretary Dig Vijay Singh has already said that it is time, Rahul Gandhi should take over as PM.

Nobody in the Congress has said that Rahul should not take over as the PM. Rather the party spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan has clarified that Rahul may take over as PM whenever he so decides.

This is reflective of the fact that the Congress party is conscious about the reality that Dr. Singh has become a liability.

In fact, his economic policy has ruined the economy of the common man. The official notifications on ever increasing consumer price index and ever increasing doses of Dearness Allowance for salaried officials is strong enough evidence of the fact that his government has no control over profiteers, over exploiters, over market mafia. The priority he has given to transform India into a grazing ground of foreign, specifically American nuke traders, is conspicuous by its absence in stopping exploitation of the common man by the manufactures and traders of consumer goods.

In every sphere of administration, galore are instances of misappropriation and malfeasances.

The constitutional authority, whose duty it is to locate these dangers to democracy through test audits – The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) – is being ignored by administration as in the case of MPLADS or cold-shouldered and criticized by the central ministers including even the Prime Minister himself.

The CAG in its latest report on MPLADS has said that, even though in its earlier reports (1998 and 2001) it had pointed out various lapses in the implementation of the scheme, the government had slept over them for ten and eight years respectively and when Action Taken Notes were finally produced in 2009, it was seen that the same were lackluster notes sans any real address to the issues raised and action against the practitioners of malfeasances shown.

“The current report reveals that many of the shortcomings pointed out in those two Reports still persist”, the CAG has stated.

The current Report has unveiled various types of serious mismanagement of MPLAD funds all over the country. These are such offenses that many MPs should have been taken to task and even censured in the Parliament for having hijacked through masked agents the funds allocated for the scheme in their respective areas. But, instead of that, and without insulating the scheme from MPs’ politico-personal dragnets, the amount of the fund has been enhanced, just to keep majority of them pleased to stay safe in power.

If MPLADS is a sample of how the constitutional authority of audit is being sloughed over or rendered inconsequential in real terms, the 2G spectrum is a matter where even the Prime Minister has not hesitated to embarrass the CAG.

When the apex audit reported a massive loss of about Rs. 1.76 lakh crores to the nation’s exchequer by mishandling of the allocation of the 2G spectrum in 2008, Dr. Singh had came down quite rudely upon its conduct, almost rejecting its report on the 2G spectrum scam without making any mention of it, as inaccurate, imbalanced and unfair. In a CAG conference itself, on the very same day its Report on the scam was tabled in the Parliament, he had told the CAG that it must “ensure that its reports are accurate, balanced and fair”.

He disapproved the way the audits are being conducted.

“We may benefit more if the focus of audit is not so much on minute, individual transactions”, he thundered, because the 2G spectrum audit was minute audit of individual transactions.

As if the CAG in its report on 2G spectrum had indulged in fault finding, made a mere guess of the quantum of loss to the country and therefore had made an unreasonable estimate, he said, “Very often, there is a very thin line between fair criticism and fault finding, between hazarding a guess and making a reasonable estimate, between a bonafide genuine error and a deliberate mistake”. He wanted the CAG “to distinguish between wrong-doing and genuine errors, to appreciate the context and circumstances of decision making process”, as if the CAG’s report on 2G spectrum was a product of lack of its comprehension of “the context and circumstances of decision making process”!

Such Prime Ministerial attempt to demoralize the apex audit body of the country created by the constitution had never been made by any Prime Minister.

Before the seriousness of this vicious assault on CAG is fully grasped by the people, the country is rocked by bomb blasts in Mumbai.

When the central home minister P. Chidambaram has said that, “despite the vast intelligence machinery that is available ………. this one slipped through”, he has also said, “Having no intelligence in this case, however, does not mean that there was a failure on part of the intelligence agencies”. This shows how the central government is running under utter confusion.

Chidambaram’s statement has different ramifications.

On one, it is being assumed that the series of blasts were aimed at derailing Indo-Pak talks. The union home minister also does not differ. This possibility “is not ruled out”, he says.

On another, it may also be assumed that the blasts might have been planned to divert public attention from the growing demands for extinguishment of corruption and retrieval of the monetary wealth of India secreted in black coffers in foreign banks by the traitors in politics, in public service, in trade and industry and their lobbyists.

Whatever be the ramifications, the reality is that, “despite the vast intelligence machinery that is available”, so many persons have been killed and injured in the series of blasts in the same city of Mumbai that was brutalized by Pak terrorists on November 26, 2008. Had the surviving culprit of that attack Ajmal Kasab been hanged in honoring the court order, in time and in the spirit of the verdict, the July 13 attack might have not taken place. But Dr. Singh’s government has, by not helping diligently the President to reject his mercy petition, created a situation for the Supreme Court to save his life. This has emboldened the enemies to terror attack again.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that if mercy petitions are not disposed off within three months of receipt of the applications, the Court would be constrained to commute death sentences to life imprisonments if moved by the culprit.

A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in Triveniben vs State of Gujarat had refused on February 7, 1989 to place a time cap on disposal of mercy petitions. Yet, on September 18, 2009, in Jagdish v State of Haryana it has said, “A self-imposed rule should be followed by the executive authorities rigorously, that every such petition shall be disposed of within a period of three months from the date on which it is received. Long and interminable delays in the disposal of these petitions are a serious hurdle in the dispensation of justice and such delays tend to shake the confidence of the people in the very system of justice” and, thus has justified commutation of death sentences to life imprisonment in various instances, in one instance, even saying, “These delays are gradually creating social problems by driving the courts to reduce death sentences even in those rarest of rare cases in which, on the most careful, dispassionate and humane considerations death sentence was found to be the only sentence called for”.

The government of Dr. Singh, by delaying the execution of death sentence “found to be the only sentence called for” in Mumbai 26/11 offense, is foiling the sentence inasmuch as Kasab, the guilty Pak-terrorist, because of the tremendous delay in disposal of his mercy petition, is likely to use the Apex Court orders quoted supra to judicially escape the gallows.

Meretricious sympathy of Dr. Singh with the victims of the 13th July blasts is not going to show that he is not responsible for the climate of Pak-terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Because of self-defeating politics in Parliament, the country could not know the real role Dr. Singh had played as Reserve Bank Governor and Finance Minister in the matter of the notorious Pakistani Bank of terror funding, the BCCI, which had, despite warning from RAW, been allowed to operate in and from Mumbai.

But if the 13th July blasts in Mumbai took place “despite the vast intelligence machinery that is available” as the Union Home Minister has said, it was because of lack of appropriate monitoring and coordination amongst the intelligence agencies. To make the intelligence agencies accountable, the Home Minister has submitted a proposal to create a National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC); but Dr. Singh has not cleared it as yet.

Both the Prime Minister and Home Minister are confusing the country by using the term ‘terrorism’ against both the enemies and patriots of the country – against the terrorists from beyond the border and against the Indian progressive radicals – leading to common man’s failure in differentiating between the two types. Therefore, the intelligence agencies have been failing in spotting the cross border terrorist though the common man.

If the difference is not distinguished in the Home Minister’s proposal, the envisaged NCTC will be of no utility for betterment of India, as and when the PM clears the proposal and the central government constitutes it.

But, at the moment, relevant it is that Dr. Singh is sleeping over the proposal of the home minister to create NCTC for ensuring accountability of the country’s intelligence agencies, which might have made them alert enough to catch the culprits before the blasting took place.

No further proof of misrule is necessary. Look at any area, people are in ruins. But the people had never given majority mandate to the Congress party to ruin them. Hence, is it not the time for the Congress party to replace Dr. Singh with anybody that can try to change the scenario and retrieve the country’s dignity?