False messiah’s peacocks & parrots coming home to roost

It increasingly seems to have been a bad day/week/fortnight/month/year for Narendra Modi's government. Be it the mishandling of the second wave of Corona or the subsequent messed up vaccination policy, the loss of face – and a prestigious election – in West Bengal, the failure for such a powerful regime to have a chief minister elected, the ignominy of a CBI accused visiting a designated lawyer in his home days before the case comes up in court and now the Rafael scam exploding in the face as a French judge orders a criminal investigation into the deal... nothing is going right for the so-called strong leader, nay the strongest leader, this country has seen in decades.

Nothing went quite so wrong for India's so-called “weakest” leader, Manmohan Singh, at about this time in his second term as prime minister. But I recall it was about midway through its second term that things began unravelling for the UPA regime and the rest, as they say, is history.

But no one could accuse Dr Singh of mismanagement of administration, misgovernance of the nation, disregard of his leadership for his choices of chief minister for a particular state, crony capitalism or corruption, personal or otherwise. He may have been self-effacing and non-assertive, failing to go to town with his achievements but that was the extent of his failures, certainly nothing as spectacular as that of the current regime.

I cannot help but draw comparisons. When a minister in his PMO, Prithviraj Chavan, was dispatched to Maharashtra as chief minister, the Congress faced the same dilemma as the BJP did in Uttarakhand – how to have him elected to the legislature. Now Maharashtra has two Houses of the legislature and it is with good reason that it has not personally abolished the upper House in any state, that privilege must go to other political parties.

The legislative council is a great institution to accommodate various interests, do people favours and generally safeguard and buffer the party from precisely such mishaps as has happened in Uttarakhand. So, when Chavan's six months as a non-elected CM were nearing completion, we saw party member of the legislative council Sanjay Dutt voluntarily resign his seat and give up the remainder of his six-year term to Chavan. Dutt was richly rewarded for his sacrifice, catapulted to the status of party observer in charge of various states (Tamil Nadu and now Himachal Pradesh) and generally well regarded by his party leadership for his voluntary sacrifice.

It is a matter of great amazement to me that such powerful and strong leadership of the BJP could not identify one single legislator in Uttarakhand willing to give up his seat to the chief minister. For while one might dismiss the Chavan-Dutt accommodation as a limited calculated risk, I recall in the years the Congress was out of power in New Delhi, they had dispatched Sushil Kumar Shinde, then Member of Parliament, as chief minister to Maharashtra. He decided to go the Assembly route and that necessitated a Congress MLA resigning his seat for Shinde, as also Shinde resigning his seat as MP.

It also necessitated tremendous trust in the party leadership but was accomplished with the minimum of fuss and there was neither protest, nor scandal nor the kind of ignominy faced by Tirath Singh Rawat in Uttarakhand. Obviously, BJP legislators trust their leaders far less than Congressmen do their own and that itself is a reflection on the strength and leadership qualities within the BJP which now has more internal strife and factionalism than any other political party.

Now much has been said and written about the Modi government's rank failure in controlling the Corona crisis and its vaccination policy and it really does not bear comparison with anything the Congress achieved in the past except to say that the 17 crore polio doses administered to children in a single day during Dr Singh's tenure as prime minister was done silently without any tom-tomming or Dr Singh's pictures on any certificates – in fact, I do not think there were any certificates issued at all, except for municipal workers going door to door and pulling out parents along with their kids for the polio vaccination.

It was a stupendous achievement and why ever the self-effacing Dr Singh did not tom-tom it, I will never know. Perhaps because he was the weakest prime minister this country has ever known? That could be it!

But the biggest ignominy of all for the Modi government now seems to be that all its chickens -- and parrots and peacocks – are coming home to roost vis-à-vis the Rafael scam. A French judge has just ordered a criminal investigation into that deal with India and already there is evidence that the bankrupt industrial house which was awarded the deal had neither the finances nor the expertise to produce even a wing of the aircraft and all it brought to the table was political influence -- crony capitalism at its best, or worst, in other words.

Politically, I believe Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been vindicated all these years after he first took up needling the government on the deal and, as usual (as in regard to the Corona crisis vaccine etc) has once again proved right. An earlier BJP regime tried to screw the Congress over an alleged scam in the acquisition of the Bofors gun but could come up with no evidence and the courts dismissed the case after 17 years of a fruitless trial.

This BJP regime once again moved heaven and earth to nail the Congress over the AgustaWestland helicopter deal but have made as much fruitless progress as they did in the Bofors alleged scam. But Rahul Gandhi alone could not have single-handedly made any progress in the Rafael allegations (given that even many of his partymen were not convinced of a scam) and now the French courts have obligingly proved that his instincts were quite correct.

Like I said earlier, it has not been a good year for the Modi regime, no matter how hard it has tried to bring things back to a time when people believed in a magical messianic leader who would deliver the nation from all its ills and evils and lead us to a golden future. All that we have got is too many illnesses and devilry and a bleak future.

The moral of the story is that messiahs are a thing of the past belonging in mythical times. We need a human being, an honest, competent, compassionate one to deliver us from the gloom we have been pushed unto by the “messiah”. Dare I believe that that human being could be Rahul Gandhi?

(Views are personal)