India is ready for a Congress-mukt Bharat
"Hum to doobe hain sanam, tumko bhi le doobenge."
This is a mantra that the Congress party seems to have mastered to perfection. For the entire term of the UPA-II as the country went to the dogs, India's Grand Old Party was busy projecting Rahul Gandhi as the saviour, even to an extent of discrediting its own prime minister. It didn't matter that Indian credibility around the world declined and it didn't matter that ordinary Indians suffered due to mal-governance all around. So long as the dynasty could be projected as the next best thing, all was fair game! It didn't work and the party has been staring at an abyss for the last year and a half. Rahul has shown no sign of maturing, the regional leaderships are in disarray and the party moves from one issue to another without any sense of direction.
So what is to be done. The bright minds in the party decide that the best way now is to give some lessons to the heir apparent in elocution and to use its strength in the Rajya Sabha to stall the government. There is no way to match the prime minister's popularity, so target his governance agenda. And what's the best way to do it than to make sure that Parliament doesn't function and bills are not passed. Then what will Modi have to show when 2019 comes along? His governance agenda will be discredited and the dynasty can claim its rightful place in the Indian polity.
One charade follows another. The great intolerance debate is ignited after every few months and before every state election. The intelligentsia that has been nurtured over the last several decades is asked to come to help and it obliges. The Parliament is disrupted on one pretext or another. It's not even subtle the way the whole debate on intolerance has disappeared so soon after the Bihar elections. Months old remarks by VK Singh were brought in to derail the Parliament.
And, of course, then came the National Herald fiasco. The panic in the Congress rank and file is perfectly understandable. After all, what else does the party have left today other than the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty? We are being told that the allegations and insinuations against Sonia Gandhi and Rahul in the National Herald case were deliberately orchestrated, "patently false" and "defamatory" as they had "not received a rupee". If so, the party should file a defamation suit and fight the battle politically. The nation is being made to suffer because the mother-son duo have had to hear negative remarks from a court. Of course, the Congress party knows all about deliberate orchestration of cases against rivals. After all, that has been the party's modus operandi for the last several decades.
After getting bad press for days, the Congress party tried to suggest that the disruptions in Parliament were actually about the Vyapam, Lalit Modi and other controversies involving the BJP functionaries. It's balderdash and the Parliament will continue to be disrupted with the hope in the Congress that eventually the Modi government would do some backroom deal to get the Parliament to work. If that happens, then the government will also lose credibility and it should be wary of such deal making howsoever desirable it may seem in the short term.
This strategy of disrupting Parliament is reportedly the brainchild of party luminaries like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ahmed Patel, Moti Lal Vohra, Oscar Fernandes, Kapil Sibal, and Abhishek Manu Singhvi. These are the people whose sole claim to fame is their proximity to the Gandhi family. They have never fought nor do they intend to fight Lok Sabha elections. No wonder they have come up with a master-plan which will end up destroying whatever little credibility the party has left.
A party which was decisively rejected by the Indian electorate in 2014 is now making sure that Indian Parliament doesn't work. And the Indian intellectual establishment is largely silent about this "murder of democracy." A party that gave India one of its worst ever governments in recent memory can now claim credit for giving the nation its worst ever Opposition. The BJP may or may not succeed in making this country Congress-mukt but if the present trends continue, the Indian electorate will have no option but to think seriously about a Congress-mukt Bharat.