PM emerges as the real leader

From the moment I saw those bundles of thousand rupee notes being tossed about in the Lok Sabha last week...

From the moment I saw those bundles of thousand rupee notes being tossed about in the Lok Sabha last week, I found the story told by the Bharatiya Janata Party MPs hard to believe. I found it shaming that these ‘honourable’ Members of Parliament should think nothing of defiling the House we think of as the temple of democracy with allegedly filthy lucre. But, it was more than that I found worrying so I made some inquiries.

One of the first things I discovered was that one of the three MPs, Fagan Singh Kulaste, was the same man who not so long ago was caught on camera accepting a few thousand rupees to ask loaded questions in the Lok Sabha. How did he suddenly become so honest as to turn down crores? This brought me to question number two: was that a crore of rupees they brought into the Lok Sabha? It did not seem to be, so I asked some more questions and discovered that it was no more than a couple of lakhs. Then I started to ask about the ‘video evidence’ that CNN-IBN allegedly refused to telecast under corporate pressure. I discovered that the ‘evidence’ is not telecast quality because it consists mostly of conversations among unseen people and a car driving into a gate that may or may not be that of Amar Singh’s house.

Yet, if you read the international press last week all you would have read about the debate was that the Prime Minister of India, known for his high moral standards, stooped to buy votes to stay in power. So the great ‘nationalist’, Hindutva uber alles party has succeeded in smearing the fair name of Bharat Mata in the eyes of the world.

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In the process, it smeared itself and showed us that poor, dear Shri Lal Krishna Advani, is no leader for our times. Had he been, he would have stopped his MPs from flaunting their bribes in the Lok Sabha and he would have asked his party to abstain during the vote of confidence. A real leader would have admitted publicly that they did not have sufficient objections to the nuclear deal to vote against the Government. But, because Shri Advani is not a real leader he ended up getting his party to vote along side Marxists who helped bring the UPA government to power mainly to keep ‘communal forces’ (read BJP) out of office. The BJP speakers in the debate were so namby-pamby in their objections that they ended up giving the impression that all they wanted was to renegotiate the deal if Rama gave them another chance to rule India. His mythical bridge to Lanka was dragged into the discourse just in case he was lending an ear. The BJP case was so feeble that if I had been an MP I would have defied the whip and voted on the Government’s side without the inducement of filthy lucre.

On the Government side we saw the Prime Minister emerge as a real leader for the first time. When I read in this newspaper the text of the speech he was not allowed to make in the Lok Sabha I was moved to tears by his references to his childhood in a village ‘with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads’. ‘This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future’.

As someone with strong objections to hereditary democracy I have to grudgingly concede that Rahul Gandhi’s references to Sasikala and Kalawati and the difference electricity could make to their lives were heartrending. He needs to ask himself why a country that has been ruled for more than 40 years by his family should still have people who live in such desperate poverty. Has he asked the Congress Chief Minister of Maharastra why the vast funds spent on relief for farmers in Vidharbha have made so little difference?

In the end, what matters is that the Government deserved to win the confidence vote and the Left deserved to lose. And, the BJP ended up on the wrong side of history. In the speech he could not make in the Lok Sabha because of BJP noise, the Prime Minister referred scathingly to Shri Advani’s inability to change his thinking in ‘his ripe old age’. He suggested that the best he could do now was to change his astrologers to be better prepared for the future. It was probably a reference to the astrologer who misled the BJP’s senior leaders into believing that Dr Manmohan Singh’s government would not last beyond September 2004. With a general election looming, it is too late for anything more than the false comfort of soothsayers.