A Nation Sold

I remember the day when I interviewed Amar Singh (the so-called Samajwadi but a capitalist to the core) at his plush Greater Kailash house. Cutting the long story short, this interview was for a leading hindi daily of Rajasthan. The headline (in Hindi) was " Congress Shaitan Hai to BJP Rakshas". The essense of the headline was "Both Congress and BJP are Devils" and the party, having bitten the bullets from the Congress, had decided to stay at an equi-distence from both BJP and Congress. And what a coincidence it was. The interview was also published in 1999. But look at the twist after 9-10 years. The same Amar Singh, today established as a shrewd political broker, boasts of Congress as a 'secular force' ending his party's long standing association with the Indian left. This incident forces me to recall the words of the famous American writer Ernest Hemingway "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." And now read this statement in the light of the current political drama staged in Indian politics. The Amar-Mulayam duo, going from the worst phase of thier political lives and on the brink of being routed from their homeland Uttar Pradesh by the strong emergence of Bahujan Samaj Party, have now sought refuge in 10 Janpath, the fast dying Congress Head Quarter. They two are so desperate to clinch the short term benefits that today they even said that Congress shall appoint Rahul Gandhi ( the last surviving political kid of Nehru-Gandhi family) for a seat sharing in UP for the forthcoming General elections (which are yet so far from happening). Upon getting home with the magic figure of '272' (the numbers required by the United Progressive Alliance in wake of left block withdrawing their support to the former), Congress has just dumped the good men (the left) for the sake of the jokers (the Samajwadis) and both are in for short-term gains. Samajwadis, who might politically be a dead force in future in UP, is trying to gain the maximum in the next one year till this government holds the office. And Congress, which is in minority nationally (if we look at state governments and assemblies), got the golden chance to avert an immediate election as well as a chance to prove their loyalty to its US masters and George Bush in particular.

Now imagine, the state of affairs of this nation from the peak (I mean geographically) to the base and see how shamelessly a spineless puppet Prime Minister has hurriedly left to appease his master 'The George Bush' in Hokaido, Japan where the G8 summit is taking place. The Prime Minister of nation, which is suffering from acute inflation (today at 11.63 percent), a nation, which has virtually little or no food grain left to feed its proletariat, a nation which is suffering from massive insurgenices all over, a nation, which is grappling with rising oil and energy prices of unsustainable proportions, a nation where political uncertainity rools the roost, a nation where the poor and deprived are dying on the streets every minute, a nation where the basic infrastructure is not even on par with some of the developing nations, leaves without thinking twice.
What a sham on Indian polity which woke to the mesmerizing sound of Jawaharlal Nehru on the eve of independence when he delivered the famous "Tryst with Destinyspeech. In his speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly, on the eve of India's, towards midnight on August 14, 1947 he focused on the aspects that transcended India's. Even today it is considered in modern India to be a landmark that captures the essence of the triumphant culmination of the hundred-year Indian Freedom against the British Empire in India. And today this shameless Prime Minister and leader of the same House has gone miles ahead to sell the nation once more to the neo-colonial masters the US.