It is becoming a bit of a joke to witness the BJP going hammer and tongs at Sonia Gandhi who is a real force that they are unable to reckon with. She has taken the wind out of their sails and the sting out of their tails each time they have crossed the fine line of dignity in public space. Till they get over this insane hatred for her they will gnaw at the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy. They will go down as a footnote in history for having polluted debate, confrontation, discourse and opposition in the public domain. Their desperate attempts to have Sonia Gandhi ?disqualified? on any and every ground only shows their weakness. BJP leaders continue to expose their personalized, and therefore limited, agenda for India. The more they activate this diatribe the faster they get discredited.
The National Advisory that the opposition damned as a profit centre, was an attempt by Sonia Gandhi to create a forum where those outside of the apparatus of government could engage in sharing ideas which could lead to solutions for the problems that beset India. The BJP and the SP have been shown up because they neither have such fora nor do they have the intellectual and democratic wherewithal to appreciate the new institutions that their political opponents are endeavouring to build. Sonia Gandhi?s political positions rattle her rivals because their values and ethics differ from hers. India clearly applauds her transparent persona when juxtaposed with the criminality that Indian political parties seem to nurture. She stands apart even within her own party and may well, with her personal moves, make Congressmen feel ashamed of themselves and thereby begin the restoration of clean values in the Congress.
Hungry for progress
If the BJP were to readjust its strategy and show itself as a mature party that does not take instructions from the sangh parivar that believes in debate, discussion and the basic democratic norms of functioning, that endorses the supremacy of parliamentary debate and interaction as a means to participate in decision and policymaking, there would be an immediate revival of dignity and probity. Instead, we have two faces of the same coin ? the CPI(M) and the BJP ? polarized in their rigid, unchanging positions and therefore fast becoming irrelevant in a young, dynamic India hungry for progress on all fronts ranging from agriculture, rural development, public health, education and infrastructure to airport modernization, in retail, in the service sector in its broadest definition and the stock market. That is the call and any political dispensation that addresses all these areas together, much like Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh have attempted to structure and do, the generation next across the subcontinent may well follow and give this kind of a combine a mandate that will free their shackles of constant ?blackmail? thereby allowing them some space to govern and hopefully, deliver. It is a risk worth taking.
In all of this sits a spoilt, intellectually inept and pampered bureaucracy, no longer the ?steel frame? but alas manipulated by those political bosses who choose to use them as such, corroded and corrupted, presiding over every social and economic activity, stultifying enterprise, polluting methodologies of governance. The police are exposed each day for having protected illegalities indulged in by political personages and their henchmen. The administration is known to fiddle files, break rules with impunity, debase the system. Rape, killings, female infanticide and other similar acts spell a breakdown of civil society. This constituency too needs correction before it stalls change and growth for its own petty personal ends as it realizes that in a new environment it will soon be whittled down to size, and rendered irrelevant.
