Opinion The imperial Congress
The editorial in the latest issue of Organiser,titled Congress Bureau of Investigation, says: Congress has built institutions...
The editorial in the latest issue of Organiser,titled Congress Bureau of Investigation, says: Congress has built institutions,used them to its advantage whenever it chose and destroyed them whenever it found them inconvenient. But for the interregnum of the Janata Party in 1977,V.P. Singh government in 1989 and the NDA in 1998,Indian democracy would have taken a different shape,had Congress been in power uninterrupted. Perhaps,we would have been a banana republic. Only that the focus now is on the CBI. In the last five years this has perhaps been one of the most useful and active institutions for the party and so it is always in news for the wrong reasons. Its utility is such and so overweening that a former Congress chief minister on a campaign trail in UP threatened the state chief minister by citing the power of CBI. It is natural that the agency has not been found wanting when it came to exonerating the darling of the establishment accused of the Bofors kickback. As a consequence the CBIs image as an independent and autonomous investigative agency,which was impervious to external influences,has once again come under a cloud. In the latest instance it had sought the withdrawal of the Red Corner Notice against Ottavio Quattrocchi,the Italian middleman who is an accused in the Bofors bribery case. Even friendly parties of the ruling alliance are now finding it difficult to defend the Congress.
It adds: Accusing the Manmohan Singh government of undermining the autonomy of crucial institutions such as the Election Commission,Rashtrapati Bhawan and the CBI,BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley has promised that,if voted to power,his party would set up a commission of inquiry,to be headed by a Supreme Court judge,to investigate cases of collusion of the CBI with the accused in all sensitive cases and suggest steps to restore and re-establish the agencys autonomy.
Advantage BJP
In a piece titled NDA the front-runner,BJP to emerge the largest party R Balashankar writes: The Indian voter has always been bountiful to the underdog. He hates to miss an opportunity to punish the haughty establishment that takes him for granted. He is not enticed or misled by propaganda,which money can buy. The Congress and its track-II campaigners in the media predicted an easy win for the incumbents even before the first vote was cast. After three rounds of the Lok Sabha poll it is an entirely different story…. But a senior Congress leader was so confident of forming the next government that he told this writer that the UPA will form the government just because the Congress has enough money this time. His logic was like this Last time we were without enough money even to pay the electricity bill of our central office. We never expected to make it to the top. But this time round the scene has changed. We have funds to manage up to a hundred members.
He further adds: To me it looks like the Congress is meeting its Waterloo in all its traditional strongholds and it is not making any major inroads into the NDA turfs. Whereas the NDA led by LK Advani is holding on,if not improving in all the places where it fared better in the 2004 poll,and is making heady gains in the states which blessed the Congress in the last election. The fall of the Congress is more discernable than the gains the BJP is making because the fall is steeper. The game changers in this election are going to be Maharashtra,Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. This is not psephology. In fact,the professional pollsters are refusing to stick their neck out. After talking to a cross section of political field workers and an extensive coverage of the countrys electoral canvass one is struck by a definite undercurrent that is bound to influence the outcome of the 15th Lok Sabha poll There is a widespread desire for change. Equally striking is the admiration for the NDA prime ministerial candidate LK Advani for his long and dedicated political career.
Compiled by Suman K Jha
Share
