PAINED at the criticism showered in recent times on Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi called it “despicable”. Strong language unworthy of a Congress leader who holds both the reins of office and the whip, but let that go. The tragedy is that, on the 125th anniversary of the birth of the party, it has no leadership worth the name. Dynasticism is becoming increasingly irrelevant as Sonia Gandhi must have realised following the Bihar elections to the State Legislature. In the last six years of Congress rule at the Centre the country has steadily been going to pieces and the Congress Party has been unable to provide either moral or administrative leadership. It has been reduced to adopting mud-slinging at the Opposition as a mission.
That, if Sonia Gandhi does not mind being repeatedly told, is the problem. William Butler Yeats put it just right when he wrote: “Things fall apart, the Centre cannot hold”. This is not said in anger, but in despair. It is not just a charge against Dr Singh, though he may deserve it. It is a charge against a party that, after 125 years, has lost its way in the thicket of corruption, and thinks it can regain support through some of the most despicable behaviour and thinks it can regain support through some of the most despicable behaviour of party stalwarts like its general secretary, Digvijay Singh who had the nerve to indirectly suggest that the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (MATS) leader Hemant Karkare was done away by Hindu extremists. Just as despicable is Digvijay Singh’s likening of the RSS to the Nazis, betraying not just the man’s ignorance of European history, but his lack of character. How many Muslims has the RSS put in the gas chamber? Singh is on record as saying that the RSS and the VHP are “insidious in their effort to break India”, little realising that it is through continuous weakness and cowardice shown towards minority terrorism that India’s break-up is hastened.
How many more years do we have to wait until Afzal Guru is hanged, Home Minister P Chidambaram’s pious explanations for delay, notwithstanding? Running down the RSS is an old hat. It is one more – and witless – way of pandering to Muslim communalism. Neither Digvijay Singh nor his party associate Rahul Gandhi know anything about the RSS which has close to a century of record of public service. Ask the Hindus who were driven away under murderous offensive, from Pakistan. Ask people who were in grievous trouble following several national calamities, as after the super-cyclone in Odisha. Ask who salvaged the bodies of victims after two planes collided midair a short distance from Delhi? All the dead were Muslims. How many schools and development programmes does the Congress run in tribal areas?
Forget Jayaprakash Narayan, of all people, who heaped praise on the RSS. Do the cheap politicians who run the Congress know that none other than Rahul Gandhi’s great grandfather had invited the RSS to participate in the Republic Day Parade in 1963 for its unstinted assistance to the government during the 1962 war with China? Has any Muslim Body run such aid when India needed it so badly? The RSS raised the morale of the people. The RSS, goodness knows, may have its shortcomings, but its patriotism is incomparable. The Congress cannot hold a candle to the RSS which received the unqualified approbation from Jayaprakash Narayan, no less. If there is Hindu anger, it is out of disgust for the way the Congress has been kow-towing to the so called 150 million strong ‘minority’ and that anger is not confined to the RSS but is widespread among Hindus within the Congress itself, only the likes of Digvijay Singh and Rahul Gandhi, surrounded as they are by sycophants would not be aware of it.
Rahul Gandhi has described the demolition of the Babri Masjid as a “criminal act”. How does he describe the demolition of scores of temples by Muslim rulers? As a ‘social act’? The Muslim community showed a total lack of grace, being egged on by our ‘secularists’ not to give in to Hindu pleas. Every Muslim leader should be ashamed of himself. There are lots of things that the Congress has done that one can only consider as despicable. Not having the portrait of PV Narasimha Rao among the banner of Prime Ministers’ portraits exhibited behind the dais at the Congress session, is despicable. The suicides across the country of 17,363 farmers during the UPA regime in Delhi is despicable. Maharashtra, governed by the Congress, is the worst state for farmers’ suicide for the 10th successive year. Maharashtra has logged 42,276 farmer suicides since 1997. What does that tell of Maharashtra’s Congress-led governments?
The 2G Spectrum scam resulting in the loss to the country of Rs. 1.76 lakh crores is despicable. Has Sonia Gandhi heard of that? The inaction of the UPA government in regard to over $ 1,500 billion stashed in Swiss Banks is despicable. That amount is about thirteen (thirteen) times India’s foreign debt. With this amount, 45 crore people can get Rs. one lakh each for the mere asking. India’s entire foreign debt can be repaid in 24 hours if that much money is recovered. India with $ 1.4 trillion in foreign banks has more money stashed away than the rest of the world combined. Can we call that despicable? Through the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Act (HRCE Act) of 1951, state governments have appointed managers to the Boards of Temples in the name of better administration, while masjids and churches are completely autonomous. According to a foreign author, Stephen Knapp (Crimes Against India) “even the world famous sacred temple at Tirumala-Tirupati is not spared”. It collects over Rs. 3,100 crore every year and the state government has not denied the charge that as much as 85 per cent of this is transferred to the state exchequer much of which “goes to causes that are not connected with the Hindu community or Vedic temples”. The Andhra Pradesh government apparently allowed the demolition of at least 10 temples for the construction of a golf course. How does one describe it? As secular? Or as despicable? Worse still, it has allowed just one woman to destroy India’s fair name. Who is responsible for that?
Suresh Kalmadi is allowed one entire year before his homes are raided by the CBI. Are we to believe that in all those months he kept open damaging correspondence on his table for the CBI to take away? How does one describe government action in this case? As despicable? It is no pleasure to recall all these events. It is too bad that Congress Party did not dissolve itself after independence, as Mahatma Gandhi wanted it to do. He knew his Congress even then. He must be crying in his heaven watching the depths to which Congress has demeaned itself in 60 years.
