Dictatorship of sycophants

(Communalism i.e. minority appeasement is on its peak... most of the English as well as so-called national media and the channels are out to "protect" the Congress party, which is most dangerous party of India. Majority is being targeted even if they are right in their demand, and at the same time minority is being caressed even if they do wrong... in this situation, a just - balanced public figures are rare. Mr. Arindam Chaudhuri is of late coming out one of such persons who can make some difference, hence putting his views that was published in the Pioneer daily - Alkesh) 

By - ARINDAM CHAUDHURI
The modern day Jallianwala Bagh at Ramlila Ground shows the demonic attitude of the Government, the weak spine of the Opposition and the hypocrisy of the media. Are we living in the world's largest democracy? Or has India become a shameless, unapologetic dictatorship of sycophants?
My question is, are we living in a democracy or in a shamelessly unapologetic dictatorial regime? Has the Government finally lost it totally? Or do they believe that the people of the country are so foolish that they will quietly accept any amount of dictatorship and vote them to power again in 2014? Is there absolutely no learning from the DMK’s huge loss in Tamil Nadu where it virtually controlled the media and yet people kicked them out? What happened on June 5 is a blot on our democracy. There is absolutely no exaggeration when people compare the incidents of the day to the imposition of Emergency or the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Today one doesn’t need to shove people inside a well and fire at them.
Descending on sleeping men, women and children, beating them up and taking the huge risk of a possible stampede and fire that could have killed thousands is Jallianwala Bagh. And this stinks of the thought process behind the Emergency.
Baba Ramdev has mostly raised very, very pertinent issues of national concern.
From asking the Government to ban the thousand rupee note (since that makes it 10 times easier to hoard black money than hundred rupee notes, a reason why countries like the US or the UK have the hundred dollar or hundred pound bills as the highest denominator for their currency) to asking the Government to bring back the $1.4 trillion stashed away in foreign banks (India has the largest pile of black money stashed abroad, the second being Russia with $400 billion, followed by the UK, Ukraine and China at the fifth place with $96 billion), the man is perhaps the only mass leader of the nation with a nationwide followership and someone whose remedies have benefited millions
of Indians for real -and they literally swear by him. Naturally, the Government had reasons to be scared -mighty scared, especially with civil societies around the world in a mood for rising in protest. So, to crush the mass movement that he was creating, they did what is unthinkable in a democracy and that too in the capital city of the country. The Government's actions are now a clear indication that it has turned demonic and is losing legitimacy to run the country with every passing day.
The incident also proves how spineless the Opposition, especially the BJP, has become. A strong Opposition would have, and should have, brought this country to a standstill till the Prime Minister tendered his resignation on moral grounds or at the least apologised for his demonic actions.
A strong Opposition would not have allowed the Prime Minister to shamelessly say that the police action was inevitable, or allowed Mr Rahul Gandhi to make statements to the effect that the Congress will not allow such protests.
What a joke in the world's so-called largest democracy. It is time that the BJP's leaders stop their infighting and show the Government its place. Had they seized this or the countless other opportunities this Government has been providing systematically, they would have been assured of a return to power. Not that it won't happen. But it looks now that if such a return to power happens, it wouldn't be so much because of the BJP but more despite the BJP.
It is sad and shameful that the Supreme Court of India, instead of giving a 24-hour notice to the Government to explain its actions against Baba Ramdev and his supporters, and taking stern action thereafter, gave a shocking 14-day notice to the Government to file its reply on the happenings. The Government was thus given enough time for manipulations and passing the buck.
But worse perhaps is the clear divide between ‘Bharat’ and ‘India’ that came across during this event. The Government wouldn’t have dared to take such action had the crowd consisted of middle class and upper middle class people. They had this audacity because the people who were there with Baba Ramdev represented the hapless and poorer sections of the country. Even the media followed the same thought process, despite the fact that a majority in the media are from ‘Bharat’ .
When the Anna Hazare movement happened, there were designer-dress clad residents of Delhi out there to support him, and the media went gaga. Yet, when the same common man who represents ‘Bharat’ took to the streets, the same media looked at the movement with suspicion and raised questions.
Finally, I just want to say that we live in a country that is proud — and often criticised — to have inherited its Constitution, laws and democratic framework from the British. Yet, it’s astonishing that one of the greatest virtues of British democracy is missing in our country. When you enter London’s Hyde Park and Parliament area, you see all kinds of protesters sitting around, staging all kinds of demonstrations. In New Delhi if one wants to protest, he is denied a place.
This is unbelievable. In the land of Gandhi, people who want to protest peacefully are being thrashed mercilessly and declared ‘tadipaars’ . This is not the democracy that Gandhi dreamt of. In simple words, it is a shameful and unapologetic dictatorship of sycophants. And it must end.
(The writer is a management guru and Editor, The Sunday Indian.)

Flawed teacher, ignorant pupil

Digvijay Singh's aggressive wooing of Muslim hardliners seems to have led Rahul Gandhi down a slippery political slope. Is it time to change the teacher? Or is the pupil beyond redemption?

 By Chandan Mitra in Pioneer

Achild does not decide the school in which he or she will study. This decision, like many others taken before the child reaches adulthood, is left to parents. For a number of reasons Mr Rahul Gandhi received his education mostly at home under the guidance of carefully chosen tutors. In recent years, his mother evidently decided to entrust his political training to the care of the redoubtable Digvijay Singh whose reputation precedes him. We do not know whether Mr Gandhi's political grooming has been formal or informal, but from all account Mr Singh has been setting the agenda for his celebrity student. In the process, Mr Singh's clout has increased manifold; most Congressmen hold him in awe, believing he has the ears of the First Family more than anyone else. Others such as the low-profile but clinically efficient Ahmed Patel are also high in the pecking order, but Mr Singh has managed to position himself as the only one who enjoys the blessings of both Ms Sonia Gandhi and her son.
In an earlier era when structured tutorial classes were not so common and school education was supplemented by individual private tutors, parents often monitored a child's academic progress by way of marks obtained in school examinations. If performance did not show significant improvement, they were quick to dismiss the tutor and experiment with another. Sometimes, the lack of improvement was not the tutor's fault for disinterested kids defeated the teacher's effort by being inattentive or playing truant.
We can safely assume that Mr Rahul Gandhi is neither. He is keen to learn, often travelling to the interiors to rub shoulders with the great unwashed masses in a contemporary re-enactment of his great-grandfather's discovery of India nearly a century ago. Mr Gandhi is also rather forthcoming in his interactions with young people in particular. He drops in at hang-outs crowded with 20somethings in metros, small towns and even roadside dhabas, pleasantly surprising them by his freewheeling comments on everything under the sun. Sometimes he provokes a controversy by arrogant assertions such as "If my family had been at the helm at that time, the Babri Masjid would not have fallen," or by proudly, even if undiplomatically, asserting that the break-up of Pakistan was his family's great achievement. Probably because some of these remarks were unrehearsed and led to storms of protest, the advisory council at 10 Janpath decided to bar him from interacting with the pesky regional media. Throughout his frenetic election campaign in Bihar earlier this year, in which he addressed as many as 19 public meetings, he carefully stayed away from speaking to the media. When the much-hyped revival of the Congress ended in unmitigated disaster with the party winning a laughable four seats out of 243, Mr Gandhi simply went underground -whether on account of depression or embarrassment we do not know. And that's where he would probably have stayed at least till the Burari AICC session this weekend, but for the unfortunately timed (for him) WikiLeaks revelations.
Much has already been said and written on the Gandhi scion's stupefying observations, made to the US Ambassador during an official lun cheon hosted by the Prime Minister in July 2009. To summarise, the remarks demonstrated (a) humungous knowledge deficit; (b) pathological hatred of pro-Hindu opinion and organisations; (c) dangerous disregard of India's national security concerns with regard to Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terror; (d) callous unconcern for the magnitude of the terrorist threat to India; and, (e) ineligibility to be considered for a responsible position in Government, leave alone be projected as a potential Prime Minister. Incidentally, it must be also pointed out that despite his deceptively boyish looks, Mr Gandhi is not exactly young. At 40, many of his contemporaries are heading big MNCs and his father was already Prime Minister at that age.
Stung by the heir-apparent's dangerously ignorant streak, Congress leaders have been busy rubbishing WikiLeaks, accusing the BJP of basing its offensive on unsub stantiated and questionable `leaks', whose timing they claim is suspect.
But this is not the first time that Mr Gandhi has revealed this trait. A few months ago at Bhopal, he got sufficiently carried away at a meeting to claim that the banned extremist outfit Students' Islamic Movement of India was as dangerous as the RSS! He later modified this to assert that he only meant that persons who adhered to hardline ideologies were not welcome to join NSUI, the Congress's students' wing.
Similarly, his unconvincing clarification on the WikiLeaks revelation merely reiterates the homily that all forms of terror and communal ideologies are dangerous, which, in fact is not what he reportedly told the US Ambassador. Mr Gandhi clearly enunciated that Hindu groups posed a "greater threat". Significantly, this observation was made in August 2009, less than eight months after 26/11, when the Indian Establishment was busy pressuring Islamabad to accept guilt for the horrendous Mumbai carnage and crack down on the LeT and related organisations such as Jamaat-ud-Dawa'h. Also, this was the time that the apparently senile Congress leader AR Antulay levelled a fanciful charge against Hindu outfits for the death of celebrated policeman Hemant Karkare.
Over the last few years, Mr Gandhi's tutor Mr Singh has been on a Hindu-bashing spree, questioning the Batla House encounter, visiting families of suspected terror merchants in Azamgarh and repeatedly claiming that so-called Hindu terrorist groups enjoy RSS patronage. Much of this has been outrightly rejected by public opinion because it is well known that, even assuming some misguided Hindu freelancers were involved in a few bomb blasts (though nothing has yet been proved against anyone), the RSS has nothing to do with such people.
Clearly, by repeating lies ad nauseum, Mr Singh hopes to attract fulsome Muslim support for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh. Not only is he the senior party leader incharge of the State, but Mr Singh also knows how crucial the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly results are for Mr Gandhi's political future. It appears he has convinced his pupil that unless Muslims vote for Congress en bloc, other groups such as upper castes would not consider the party to be a potential winner and thus continue to stay their `hand'. So, Mr Gandhi is parroting his teacher's line and hoping the first set of examiners, namely voters of Uttar Pradesh, will give him high marks.
There is no evidence that appeasement of Muslim hardliners will yield the community's votes.
Bihar certainly didn't; in fact, more Muslims voted for JD(U)-BJP than Congress. But in the process, Mr Gandhi is steadily acquiring the image of an unabashed Hindu-basher. Most Hindus may have no sympathy for the community's radical fringe, but to suggest that SIMI is as dangerous as the well-regarded RSS or that Hindu groups are a greater threat to India than Pakistan-sponsored terrorists is bound to offend even the most avowedly `secular' Hindu. Has the time then come to change Mr Gandhi's tutor lest his flawed teaching sends the pupil to his doom? Or is the pupil beyond redemption anyway?

Rahul's comments call into question his understanding of issues

By Swapan Dasgupta in Pioneer.

When the second volume of the Mitrokhin Archive was W published in 2005, there was understandable nervousness in Whitehall over its possible impact on bilatera relations with India. The contents of Vasili Mitrokhin's notes o KGB's worldwide operations, as gleamed from the agency's own archives, were hugely sensitive. This was particularly true of the sections on India, where the KGB had managed to penetrate deep into the political establishment. Having carefully vetted and sanitised the papers to negate any possible damage to reputations of the great and good and facilitated its publication, the British Government was nevertheless worried that that the erstwhile `friends of the Soviet Union' would direct their ire at the messenger, if only to divert attention from the explosive details of how India wa systematically compromised.
Whitehall's apprehensions turned out to be completely unfounded. The Mitrokhin Archive attracted some editorial comment but didn't create even a political ripple. The attempts by some concerned Opposition MPs to raise the subject was peremptorily disallowed on the astonishing ground that it was not the job of Parliament to deliberate on books of `fiction'.
Compared to the indifference that greeted the Mitrokhin Archive, the WikiLeaks files emanating from the US Embassy in New Delhi have created a political storm. Some of the excitement is understandable: Mitrokhin's revelations centred on events that were regarded as history while the WikiLeaks disclosures have a contemporary resonance.
Moreover, those who vetted Mitrokhin's notes were meticulous in ensuring that names of politicians and officials who served as KGB `assets' were not divulged. The WikiLeaks releases aren't CIA reports; they are Embassy cables concerned with either political assessments or conversations with `open' sources, sometimes in structured meetings. As such, the cables aren't squeamish about the identities of politicians and officials.
Despite these obvious differences, it is worth noting that throughout last Friday the Congress spokespersons fell back on a variant of the `fiction' argument that killed the debate on Mitrokhin in 2005. Although the authenticity of the cables wasn't questioned (except by the gentleman who whiffed a "conspiracy"), it was argued that there was nothing "official" about WikiLeaks. Therefore, the disclosures weren't worthy of being dignified. They were, Congress spokespersons claimed insouciantly, at best, individual assessments peppered with reports of conversations torn out of context.
There was, predictably, no mention of the fact that just prior to the first instalment of WikiLeaks, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had alerted world capitals of the possible embarrassment from their disclosures. It is possible the Congress wouldn't have bothered with WikiLeaks had Rahul Gandhi's conversation with the US Ambassador at a lunch hosted by the Prime Minister on July 20, 2009, not featured in the disclosures.
The earlier release of a report on the Congress trying to play identity politics with the 26/11 Mumbai attacks hadn't resulted in a flurry of clarifications and explanations. And rightly so since the US Embassy cable was an assessment based on public statements. on public statements.
Nor was there excitement over the unflattering assessment of Sonia Gandhi's leadership during the stalemate on the nuclear debate. The colourful charge that the Congress president doesn't miss any opportunity to miss an opportunity was the Ambassador's assessment. Envoys are expected to provide such blunt reports to headquarters in confidence. Just because WikiLeaks breached that confidentiality doesn't undermine the validity of the exercise.
Nor does it suggest that any US desire to be implacably hostile to the lady. Diplomacy is rarely conducted on such black and white terms, not even by the US.
The importance of Rahul Gandhi's conversation with the US Ambassador won't be found within the framework of India-US bilateral ties. Rahul's suggestion that "radicalised Hindu groups" posed a "bigger threat" to India than the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba didn't lead to the US immediately discounting all that India had said about the 26/11 attack.
The US has its own counter-terrorism establishment that does its own assessments, and it is highly unlikely that any of its functionaries had reason to conclude that Abhinav Bharat was the new Hindu Al Qaeda. The conversation was important not for what it reveals about the Government's approach to internal security, but for its insights into the mind of India's "elusive" heir designate.
Rahul is not merely "elusive" for American diplomats; he has also eluded all meaningful interrogation of his views by Indians. Apart from his template speech on the two India's, Indians know precious little or nothing about the heir designate's views on subjects of crucial importance to the country. What does he think of Jammu & Kashmir, apart from his friendship with Omar Abdullah? What has he to say on foreign policy, economic strategies and education? Indians are as clueless about the man tipped to succeed Manmohan Singh. Rahul has kept his views severely rationed.
Unfortunately for Rahul, this non-scripted account of his view on internal security doesn't suggest a grasp of the subject. If Rahul thinks that the terror version of the kachchhabaniyan gang that worked the badlands of Uttar Pradesh is a "greater threat" to India than the LeT -and that too just eight months after 26/11 -it calls into question his understanding of issues. Worse, by revealing his zany views to the Ambassador of a country whose assistance has been sought to tame Pakistan, he has shown an incredible lack of judgement.
Some people have greatness thrust on them. This Emperor-to-be, it now emerges, has no clothes.