One nation, two legal systems
Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde’s letter to chief ministers to ensure that in the fight against terrorists, care is taken to prevent harassment of innocent Muslims and the “innocent” should be released at once is yet another instance of the ruling Congress’ divisive agenda even in an areas of national security. As expected none of the “secular” parties or academics have protested against the grossly communal missive.
Had the home minister expressed concern over innocents being harassed irrespective of their religious or any other identity that would have been understood as a legitimate expression of the government’s concern at wrong being done to any citizen in the authorities’ enthusiasm to secure India against terror from any source.
With the BJP naming Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister, as its leader to take the party to a resounding success in the battle of the ballot coming May, the Congressmen have been donning the robe of being great democrats. They will not name their leader, they tell the media right and left. In true “democratic” spirit the party would wait for the election results and choose the party leader after the polls. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the world knows who their leader is.
With 42-year-old Rahul Gandhi running around beating the drum for the Congress government’s achievements and an entire war room filled with Oxford and Harvard boys and girls planning the strategy, there is no question who really is calling the shots in the outfit. That makes us ask why are then they not crowning him even though the bugle of the battle has been already sounded. Even prime minister Manmohan Singh has publicly said that Rahul Gandhi is the right person to become the prime minister if the party wins and that he (Singh) would be only too glad to serve under Rahul.
Going by the events of the previous few weeks in India, whosoever had coined the expression “secularism” must have turned in his/her grave many times over. In Uttar Pradesh, a nine-year-old functioning temple is razed to the ground by the administration. And there is not even a whimper of protest. A week later, in the same area the Uttar Pradesh administration demolishes just one of the walls (illegal) of a mosque under construction, all hell breaks loose. There is a war cry of “secularism in danger”. The ruling Samajwadi Party leads the charge. The UP government promptly suspends and charge sheets the IAS officer concerned, Durga Shakti Nagpal, to demonstrate its “secular” credentials.
Not to be left behind, the “secular” government of Rajasthan, around the same time, orders the transfer of IPS officer Pankaj Choudhary, who had dared to take on Gazi Fakir, the 79-year-old father of Pokhran Congress MLA Saleh Mohammed. Fakir has been under the scanner of intelligence agencies for over four decades. The victimized police officer told the media, “My predecessors have made damning comments about Fakir in the files.”
Fomenting divisive politics
For the Congress the events of 2002 in Gujarat seem to have become the only peg to hang its electoral fortune on. That is understandable. The party dares not speak of its achievements because statistics are no substitute for the food on the plate of the common man. That food is shrinking with inflation refusing to plummet.
With the economy in a shambles, the rupee at its lowest value in a decade, the desperate roadshows of finance minister Chidambaram not getting even a single dollar flow, several large projects like steel plants proposed by POSCO and Arcelor-Mittal, Vedanta, etc. cancelled, the current account deficit in trade is widening. The RBI has in a desperate measure to save the rupee, again raised interest rates. The market response is that this remedy is not working. The Congress has pushed the economy to the ICU.
बेखबर-बेअसर भ्रष्टाचारी सरकार
कोयला घोटाले को लेकर सर्वोच्च न्यायालय द्वारा की गई टिप्पणी से पूरी सरकार कटघरे में खड़ी हो गई है। कोयला घोटाले की जांच कर रही सीबीआई को सर्वोच्च न्यायालय ने जांच की प्रगति सरकार से साझा नहीं करने की हिदायत दी थी। किंतु सीबीआई जिस जांच रिपोर्ट को अदालत में पेश करने वाली थी, उसे कानून मंत्री और अन्य सिपहसालारों द्वारा काटछांट कर सरकार के अनुकूल बनाया गया। इस पर विगत मंगलवार को अदालत ने कड़ी फटकार लगाते हुए कहा है, ‘‘यह इतना बड़ा विश्वासघात है कि उसने पूरी नींव को हिला कर रख दिया है...यह सामान्य नहीं, बल्कि जानबूझकर किया गया धोखा है। पहले ही तय कर लिया गया था कि अदालत को इसकी जानकारी नहीं दी जाएगी।’’ सरकार के इस छलफरेब के कारण पूरी दुनिया हम पर हंस रही है। स्वाभाविक है कि सत्ता के षीर्ष स्तर तक फैले भ्रष्टाचार से सर्वाधिक क्षति भारत की साख और उसकी छवि को हुई है। किंतु बड़े-बड़े घोटालों के सामने आने के बाजूद कथित ईमानदार छवि वाले देष के प्रधानमंत्री शर्मसार नहीं हैं। क्यों?
आतंकवाद के खात्मे के लिए सत्ता अधिष्ठान के कथित ‘दृढ़ निश्चय व ठोस इरादों’ की कलई फिल्म अदाकार संजय दत्त और आतंकी लियाकत शाह को लेकर चल रही मुहिम को मिल रहे सरकारी समर्थन से खुल जाती है। भारत-नेपाल सीमा पर उत्तर प्रदेश के गोरखपुर से पकड़े गए हिजबुल मुजाहिदीन के आतंकवादी लियाकत शाह से हुई पूछताछ के बाद दिल्ली के जामा मस्जिद इलाके में स्थित एक गेस्ट हाउस से भारी मात्रा में गोलीबारुद और असलहे बरामद किए गए। आतंकियों की साजिश होली के अवसर पर दिल्ली को दहलाने की थी। मुंबई हमलों की तर्ज पर दक्षिणी दिल्ली के भीड़भाड़ वाले इलाके में अंधाधुंध गोलीबारी और ग्रेनेड से हमले की साजिश रची गई थी।
The current controversy over the Italian Marines who have effectively escaped from the Indian government’s custody is not the only one where the Congress-led government has invariably come a cropper in bringing to book foreign offenders on Indian soil though latest media reports say that Italian government has changed its stand and will allow the Marines to return to India. The same media reports also quote Italian officials have received “ample assurances” from Indian authorities “on the treatment that the marines will receive and the defence of their fundamental rights.” This gives rise to doubts as to whether the change in the stance of the Italian government is a victory for India’s diplomacy, as the UPA leaders claim, or the result of a behind-the-scenes deal.
An ill-advised Bangla visit
The UPA government should take full responsibility for the wrong timing of President Mukherjee’s visit to Bangladesh. Like many other instances of incompetence of this government, the Presidential visit might also go on record as ill-timed, ill-prepared and causing grave embarrassment both for India and Bangladesh. For the last one month the protests in Dhaka were going on in what is known as the Shahbag event. In the first few weeks it was a massive demonstration of the Bangladesh people’s anger at the collaborators and conspirators of the 1971 ravaging of the country when it was seeking to assert its own cultural nationalism from subjugation to Pakistan’s irredentism, going scot free for forty years after the liberation.
While the liberation of 1971 brought a secular and liberal constitution, within five years the Islamists provoked a coup that decimated the liberation’s father figure and most of his family members in a display of barbarism typical of extremist Islamist violence. Only Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Hasina who happened to be then in India hence escaped.
The UPA-II has created a record of sorts. Its nine-year rule has not only bequeathed the country an uncontrollable inflation of prices but also an inflation of scams. Going by their number and the amount involved, the scam inflation seems to overtake the price inflation. Counting their number and the timing, it is possible to predict that the helicopter scam, the latest in the series beginning with the 2G scam, the scam graph would keep going northward.
The most significant aspect of the AgustaWestland scam is that increasingly the so-called honest-to-god ministers in this government are getting drawn into the vortex of these incidents of loot of public funds. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh barely escaped being arraigned in the 2G corruption case. Though he was aware of how the then telecom minister, from coalition partner DMK, was distributing the 2G licences, he did not act proactively to stop this loot.
Failure of the state in Bihar
Who is responsible for what happened in the BJP’s Patna rally? Were the serial blasts merely the display of incompetence at the Union home minister’s level? The entire self-styled secular gang should share the blame for it. That as many as 18 bombs could be planted in and around Gandhi Maidan just before the rally exposes more than Sushilkumar Shinde’s incompetence.
