Sonia Gandhi achieved an astonishing political feat last week. She became the target of her own motion of no confidence. I base this assertion on comments that drifted my way afterwards from Delhi’s drawing rooms and corridors of power. My, how confident she has become. Did you see how her Hindi has improved?She has definitely become more Indian were among the more analytical comments I heard with, extraordinary though this may sound, not a single person commenting on what she actually said. So, her presence as our political alternative number one has diminished public discourse so much that qualifications for our next prime minister are reduced to an ability to speak Hindi and an ability to be confident and Indian. Surely being a confident Indian with an ability to speak Hindi should be considered pre-qualifications and not qualifications but the comments I quote above come not from street vox populi but from retired military men, serving bureaucrats and aspiring political pundits. It is a depressing diminishment but then so was the motion of no confidence which appears to have left every one befuddled not just by its vacuous debate but by its timing. Which idiot advised Mrs. G to draw attention to flawed national security and foreign policy when peace appears to be breaking out not just with China but Pakistan too and when there are tourists in Srinagar’s houseboats for the first time in more than a decade? Which idiot advised her to draw attention to communal tensions now when it would have been so much more meaningful to have done so when Gujarat was burning? But, despite my fundamental objections to a foreigner being Prime Minister of India, I like to think of myself as a fair person and am always ready to give Sonia a chance. So, when she mentioned that our economy had slowed down so much that it would grow at no more than 4 per cent this year I hotfooted instantly to the Prime Minister’s office to seek explanations. What was going on? How had this collapse happened in the middle of the best Monsoon we have seen in years? The official I threw my questions at looked wearily at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘‘She gets away with saying anything, doesn’t she?’’ Why did nobody challenge her I demanded on Sonia’s behalf and in much the same assertive tone she used during the debate. ‘‘Because,’’ the officials said with another weary look, ‘‘she said this in her closing remarks and the Prime Minister had already answered.’’ He added, with irritation this time, that this government was very proud of what it had achieved on the economic front. Not only was the economy expected to grow at 7 per cent this year, he said, but there were achievements in infrastructure that exceeded anything Congress had ever done in its forty years of ruling India.Under the National Highway Development Project 14,846 kilometres are being added at such speed that five kilometres are being added every day. Compare this, he said, with the fact that under Congress rule we added a meagre eleven kilometres a year. And, road-building activity goes beyond highways to villages that have never known roads. Out of India’s 600,000 villages 186,000 did not have roads and for the first time ever they might get them under the Prime Minister’s Gram Sadak Yojana which involves the central government paying Rs 10,000 crore towards the building of these rural roads.Then, take a look at telephone connectivity, another vital ingredient of modern life, the official said, and yet again you see impressive growth. When Mr. Vajpayee came to power no more than 8 lakh Indians owned mobile phones. Today more than 1.5 crore Indians own cell phones and within the next year this figure should exceed 3 crores. This has not just happened on its own, the official emphasised, it is the result of a policy that sought to remove the ‘‘bottleneck’’ of licenses and make revenue sharing the method of moving forward.The official’s list of achievements of the Vajpayee government is too long to reproduce in this humble column. Suffice it to say that whoever gave Sonia her ammunition for her attack on the economy failed to mention that if comparisons were invoked with Congress rule they may reflect unfavourably.So what was Sonia thinking when she decided to choose this moment for her motion of no confidence? Its hard to say, really, because nobody seems sure except that, perhaps, she thought it was time for her to prove that she could speak in the Lok Sabha and that she could speak in Hindi and English.This is important because the average Indian, that poor creature they insultingly call the ‘‘common man’’ has almost no knowledge of Italian. So little, if truth be told, that many of our less literate, rural citizens are given to assuming that Italy must be some town in another state. This is one of the reasons why our new Mrs. G has managed to get as far as she has. The problem is that if we accept that last week’s vote of no confidence ended up with her as the target then we would have to conclude that although she may have passed the language test she failed the rest. She failed because she forced Parliament to waste precious time discussing issues that were really not issues when we should have been discussing far more important things like why we continue to have ancient, colonial laws and why the Vajpayee government has failed almost as comprehensively when it comes to things like healthcare, education and administrative reform as successive Congress governments did.Email the Author
