Congress, allied to trouble



Some years ago, around half-way through the life of UPA I, I was on a flight with a very senior minister in the Cabinet. The talk turned to the Indo-US nuclear deal which the Prime Minister had just announced that he had secured from George Bush. Manmohan Singh regarded the deal as a huge achievement for India and prided himself on having wrested concessions from the Americans.

As it happened, my own views were mixed. I agreed with Manmohan Singh that the deal was a good thing. I agreed also that we needed to strengthen our ties with Washington if we were to take on the challenge of China in the 21st century.

But I also disagreed with him. I did not believe that the Americans were doing us a huge favour or that we had only a small window within which to conclude the deal. I thought the Americans were as keen on nuclear cooperation as we were. Nor did I agree with Manmohan Singh that the deal would transform India and lead to an inflow of billions of dollars in foreign investment.

And finally, I was not sure that the deal was worth risking the future of the UPA.

I said as much to the senior minister. I knew that the minister had been put in charge of speaking to the allies (the Left, in particular) to sew up the deal. And in public at least the minister had been strongly supportive of the nuclear deal.

So, I was a little surprised when he offered his own assessment of the situation. “The deal is a good one,” he said. “But Prakash Karat is right. And Manmohan is wrong.”

How could that be?

“In a coalition you must never assume that the largest party has a mandate,” he explained. “If the Congress had a mandate, then we would not be in a coalition. We would be part of a single-party government.”

I asked him to expand on that.

“A coalition is formed when nobody has a mandate. You sit with other parties and you work out a programme for action. When you want to deviate from that programme or you want to do something new, you first consult your allies. Our problem is that Manmohan thinks he has a mandate. In fact, he has none.”

I asked how this related to the Left and the nuclear deal. “I support the nuclear deal but I know that it is not part of our common minimum programme. Just because Manmohan wants it, that does not mean that Prakash also has to like it. In a coalition, or in a minority government, you cannot do anything unless all your allies like it. And the truth is that not only our allies, but even large sections of our own party, do not favour the nuclear deal. So, where is the mandate for it? If we had a Presidential system or if Manmohan had won the election like Indira Gandhi used to, then you could say that India elected him and his views are those that matter. But that is not the case.”

The minister in question is one of the wisest men in government. So, I pushed him further. Did he think that the Congress laboured too much under the misapprehension that the electorate had given it a mandate?

“When the BJP came to office,” he said, “they knew that they had no mandate. So, all the things that mattered to them like Ayodhya, Common Civil Code, special status for Kashmir, etc. were never pursued. They went by a programme that their allies had agreed to. Our problem is that the Congress is not used to allies. We think that the people only elect us and that we are doing a favour to the allies by giving them a chance to support us or to join our government.”

The minister is still around – if anything, he is even more influential – so I will not name him. But his words came back to haunt me as the drama over the Lokpal Bill unfolded.

Even a child could have seen what was at stake with this bill. Anna Hazare and his henchmen were blaming the Congress for stalling the bill. The BJP had no real affection for the bill but was eager to seem on Hazare’s side so that the Congress would stumble and fall. The only way the Congress could have tackled this crisis was by consulting with its allies and embarking on a carefully-planned course of action that allowed it to steer the bill through both Houses of Parliament. Plus, there were friendly parties who could have been counted on to abstain or to walk out so that the numbers worked in the government’s favour.

Instead, as we know now, the Congress couldn’t even get its own MPs together in the Lok Sabha, leading to the failure of the Constitutional Amendment. In the Rajya Sabha, it completely failed to anticipate Mamata Banerjee’s objections or to make the necessary deals with friendly parties. Worse still, it went into the House believing that it could still win the vote.

When the hollowness of its confidence was exposed, it behaved with an utter and complete lack of grace. There is no shame in losing a vote. Yes, it shows incompetence on your part to have strutted into the House without getting your support together. But a defeat in the Rajya Sabha is not a resignation issue or one that has long-term consequences.

So, at around 10.30 pm, when it became clear to the Congress that it could not get a majority for its bill, it should have behaved with grace and dignity. The Prime Minister should have stood up and told the House something like this, “We believe this is a good bill and the Lok Sabha which passed it two days ago agrees with us. But I can see that the BJP, the Left and other parties present in the House have differences with us. In the circumstances, we are going to withdraw this bill from the Rajya Sabha so that we can bring other political parties on board. We had promised the nation that we would introduce the bill in this session and we have kept our word. I am deeply sorry that our draft has not got the support we expected. But we will forge a consensus and our commitment to the Lokpal Bill remains undiminished. I assure you that it will be the first bill we will introduce in the next session.”

Would we have been disappointed? Probably. But I think we would also have given the government marks for trying and would have appreciated the Prime Minister’s sincerity.

But, of course, none of this happened. Manmohan Singh slouched silently in the first row. The minister for parliamentary affairs offered some lame excuse about running out of time. And the suspicion lingered that the Congress had been pleased to scurry out of the House under the cover of orchestrated chaos.

I thought back to my conversation with the senior minister. When the Congress could not persuade its allies to support the nuclear deal, it broke the UPA alliance and won a majority in the House by dubious means. This time around, it was caught unawares so I guess the buying of MPs was not possible. Instead, we had the graceless spectacle of chaos at midnight.

The problem as always is that this is a government in which the leading party deludes itself into believing it has a mandate. And when the allies refuse to go along with its whims, it responds with the worst kind of behaviour.

This was true of UPA I. And sadly, it is as true of UPA II.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Satish-Chandra/100000030432561 Satish Chandra

    India’s nuclear forces say that India has been furiously stockpiling weapons grade material for over ten years.

    Stockpile or no stockpile, why hasn’t the nuclear destruction of New Delhi, Washington & New York (see below) been carried out yet? All it needs is six to seven warheads of about twenty kilotons each — one for the RAW headquarters area and one for the North & South Blocks area in New Delhi, one for New York, one for Washington — these four warheads to be exploded simultaneously — and two to three warheads emplaced in two to three additional U. S. cities with the warning that two to three additional U.S. cities will be destroyed if there is any retaliation. The only way the United States will be able to keep two to three (or more if nuclear warheads have already been emplaced in more than two to three additional U.S. cities) additional U.S. cities from being destroyed is by doing nothing in return. After this, India can do all the testing and stockpiling it wants for the coast-to-coast destruction of the United States five years later. It is the exploding of the above four nuclear warheads, with two to three additional warheads emplaced in two to three additional U.S. cities, which will make India the supreme power in the world immediately.

    Satish Chandra

    ——————————————
    ” Lokpal cannot look into PM’s work relating to international relations, external and internal security, maintenance of public order, atomic energy and space”. So the Lokpal cannot do anything about CIA rule over India, illustrated by the following:-

    I) EXTERNAL SECURITY:
    When I say the new Chief of Air Staff, N. A. K. Browne, is a CIA-RAW man, I mean he literally sits at CIA-supplied terminals to participate in crimes against India. More than a thousand Indian Air Force aircraft have crashed since 1970, the vast majority of the crashes caused by microwaves from U. S. satellites which can hack into and operate any digital equipment. In his first week in office as Chief of Air Staff, Browne caused two Indian Air Force fighter planes to crash with microwaves from satellites, to give a boost to his bid to buy worse than worthless foreign aircraft for several tens of billions of dollars of which he will get a hefty cut along with the Defence Minister and the Italian woman who gets the largest cut. The Sukhoi crash on Dec. 13 ‘11 and the grounding of the Sukhoi fleet has been caused 2 days ahead of the purchase decision as the purchase was made impossible by my opposition to it. See IndianAirForcePilotsMurderDOTblogspotDOTcom .

    II) INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ATOMIC ENERGY & EXTERNAL SECURITY:
    See InferiorIndianNiggersDOTblogspotDOTcom: “India’s government lends hundreds of billions of dollars to the U. S. government in exchange for worthless U. S. paper but seeks foreign investment and World Bank loans for projects in India, giving ownership and control of India to India’s enemies, despite the unlimited capital available to India by simply printing the money; see ‘How India’s Economy Can Grow 30% Per Year Or More’ in my blog; as is described there, the United States has been applying my proposal about money by stealth and now also openly but Manmohan Singh refuses to do so because this bugger — a CIA appointee — does what serves the United States’, not India’s, interests.” Manmohan Singh told George W. Bush, with whom he castrated India, through the nuclear deal, both militarily and economically (see my blog), that Indians “deeply love” him.

    III) INTERNAL SECURITY:
    When Atal Behari Vajpayee was prime minister, he had once gone to Bombay and spoken to the stock exchange about applying my proposal about money to India’s economy, after which he had to abort his flight back to Delhi for fear his plane will crash. The murders of several politicians by air crash have been committed by CIA-RAW. A recent example was the murder of the Andhra Pradesh chief minister by air crash. In my blog (‘Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.’ which can be found by a Yahoo/Google search with the title) I have described how Indira Gandhi when prime minister in 1980 went to her kitchen with the then U. S. Vice President and former CIA Director, George Herbert Walker Bush, to arrange for the murder by air crash of her son Sanjay Gandhi who had taken to slapping her in the presence of others under my influence and the then CIA Director, Frank Carlucci, publicly claimed credit for that air crash via a letter that appeared in National Review. See IndianAirForcePilotsMurderDOTblogspotDOTcom .

    IV) ATOMIC ENERGY:
    Former Atomic Energy head, P. K. Iyengar, who pioneered Cold Fusion research in India, died on December 21 ‘11.

    In my second addendum dated March 15, 2006 in my blog titled ‘Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.’, which can be found by a Yahoo/Google search with the title, I said:-

    “RAW suppresses, in service of the Americans, research of various kinds such as energy sources that go beyond conventional nuclear power. An M.I.T. scientist, Eugene Mallove, on an American radio program, ‘Coast to Coast’, described how Indian scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center were “going crazy” with their research and results on cold fusion–which generates energy in table top experiments with simple apparatus– but when vested interests (hot fusion, which gets multiple billions of dollars per year in funding, feels threatened, among others) in the United States had a U.S. government body declare cold fusion invalid (on ludicrous grounds such as that, under the laws of Physics, such a thing cannot occur; under such logic, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity would have been ruled invalid because it violated Newton’s Laws; within the past week, there have been reports in the New York Times about an Indian scientist in the U.S. struggling against his successful cold fusion research being declared invalid and shut down), RAW, which functions as a branch of the C.I.A., “killed it” (the research on cold fusion at BARC) [because "T H E G R E A T U N I T E D S T A T E S" (he said this in a mocking tone mimicking the Indians' reverential, awed and obedient attitude to the U.S.) says there is nothing to it]. The C.I.A. knew I was listening to this broadcast and this M.I.T. scientist, who could have been a source of support (he had criticized Einstein; I have written about Einstein stealing most of his ideas from others) was brutally murdered shortly after that broadcast. I have said before that other American and Indian scientists who have known me or could have been sources of support have died sudden, premature deaths. Among numerous new sources of energy are research results and serious proposals to get energy from empty space, that is, vacuum (before you look askance at this, know that, under modern theories of Cosmology, a branch of Physics, the entire universe has arisen out of absolutely nothing). //

    During World War II, the Germans made large scale conversion of coal into motor fuel. With petroleum prices where they are now, this old technology is highly economical and viable. But anything that lessens the United states’ control over India is suppressed by RAW. ”

    Iyengar opposed the nuclear deal. In “Objections to the Nuclear Deal” in my blog above, I have pointed to the availability of unlimited amounts of Uranium from sea water for which India had already developed the technology years ago but that has been suppressed and continues to be suppressed for the same reason; see addendum dated March 27, 2008 in my blog.

    For an instance of suppression of India’s and the world’s greatest scientist, see ‘B. F. Skinner’s Plagiarism’ and press release dated April 26, 2011 in my blog.

    V) INTERNAL & EXTERNAL SECURITY:
    “India’s greatest scientist and greatest living Indian publicly tortured in Harvard seminar, systematically and totally starved for up to 3 weeks at a time, made semi-starved and homeless and even blind for years, kept under 24-hour audio and video surveillance as well as surveillance of [and interference with] communications and electrical typewriter and computer use, document creation and photocopying, etc., by satellite for more than past 3 decades, systematically harassed and in poverty and neutralised and robbed of his work at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, robbed of crores in his money and property in India by C.I.A.-RAW, forced back into exile in the U.S., all with full cooperation and participation of India’s RAW and India’s C.I.A.-RAW-controlled prime ministers, politicians and media” and how this means the nuclear destruction of New Delhi and then the coast-to-coast destruction of the United States.”

    VI) SPACE:
    On November 22, 2009 I said (see my blog):

    “The ’space initiative’ is meant to take control of India in another strategic area — as the nuclear deal was meant to take control of India’s nuclear program. There are multifarious prongs the U.S. is pursuing to enslave India.

    One of the worst of these is bringing American universities to India (see what I have said above [in my blog] about American universities). Kapil Sibal [who sits at CIA-supplied terminals to participate in the crimes described in V) above] will be publicly tortured in a stadium full of people, disemboweled and dragged around by his intestines around his neck before he is skinned alive and fed to dogs for this and other crimes, along with Manmohan Singh, of course.”

    Lokpal cannot do that.

    VII) PUBLIC ORDER:
    On November 20, 2009 I wrote (see my blog): “While RAW has always been a branch of the C.I.A., the Tamil traitor-enemy Chidambaram has made other Indian intelligence agencies branches of the United States intelligence agencies, bringing in U.S. equipment to India to enable comprehensive real-time monitoring and interception ability for the U.S. of all communications in India, a comprehensive and total censorship power to the United States of not only what gets into the Indian media of all kinds [for example, CIA-RAW can block, partially block, alter or remove communications -- not just comments -- to news media at will and in real time and does it all the time; it can and does also alter the content of web pages, for example, published news reports] but even communications between individuals, bringing India into a colonial grip of and slavery to the United States such as has never been seen in human history. None of this will be allowed, no nuclear deal in any form, no IAEA inspections of any kind of anything in India, no guards of honour, no state dinners, no representing India for C.I.A.-RAW operatives.”

    Lokpal cannot do this.

    VIII) PUBLIC ORDER:
    A MAGICAL SOLUTION TO POVERTY: In my article titled “A Magical Solution to Disaster Relief” I gave the formula: the government should invite any and all individuals and organizations including companies to “Find a need and fill it and be reimbursed at double your cost” — in normal times a 50% profit may be enough incentive — to provide food, shelter. clothing and services to the public and be reimbursed at 50% over their cost; the only condition should be that the goods and services they provide must be ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION and not taken from existing supplies. The beneficiaries can also be employed for the production. The government has an unlimited amount of money simply by printing it so long as it is used for PRODUCTION; see my article ‘How India’s Economy Can Grow 30% Per Year Or More’ in my blog. The above applies to ALL goods and services to fill ALL societal needs.

    Lokpal cannot do that.

    IX) EXTERNAL SECURITY:
    In a press release dated June 30, 2011 titled “National Security Doctrine” (see my blog) I said:

    “An ugly white woman columnist at the New York Times wrote that she looks forward to having her columns written by “external cognitive servants” in Bangalore. The Manmohan Singh cabinet a few days ago approved a plan for bringing foreign investment and technology to create one hundred million manufacturing jobs in India, bringing essentially the entire population of India into servitude to the United States. A nation is not strong whose people are servants of an external power. The National Security Doctrine permits Indians to be neither cognitive servants nor manufacturing servants of the United States. ‘How India’s Economy Can Grow 30% Per Year Or More’ in my blog above provides the means for true prosperity and full employment for Indians.”

    Lokpal cannot do that.

    X) EXTERNAL SECURITY:
    Indians as a rule are inferior Indian nig gers unfit to talk about strategic matters, especially if it involves the White Master in any way, which it always does. That is why in his ‘Mein Kampf’ Adolf Hitler said “As for India, I would rather see India under the British than under any one else”. It is not just that a handful of the British from half way around the world ruled India for centuries; a lot of other people from various countries did that for a thousand years before that. // A modern day Babar will start each day by killing a million Indians before breakfast every morning, though some think three million will be better (this number can be herded into fairly small extermination circles and then a neutron bomb exploded over them). // I am an Indian, but as far above the other Indians as they may be above cockroaches. See InferiorIndianNiggersDOTblogspotDOTcom . //

    Lokpal cannot do anything about this.

    XI) PUBLIC ORDER:
    India can abolish poverty and be the supreme power in the world immediately; see AMagicalSolutionToPovertyDOTblogspotDOTcom and my blog ‘Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.’. The United States has been applying my proposal about money, above, by stealth and now also openly. An obstacle to its implementation in India is the fear that it will make the lower castes — who form the bulk of India’s population — prosperous and that will lead to an increasing incidence of inter-caste marriages and, since the lower castes are intellectually and morally inferior, to the deterioration and death of society. A ban on inter-caste marriages will take care of this fear and enable my proposal about money to be implemented. The caste-corruption of society and other kinds of corruption go together. There is no need for a Lokpal, just an end to caste-corruption of society. Since the bulk of India’s population is low caste, democracy necessarily means rule by the intellectually and morally inferior. Hence democracy must end.

    Lokpal cannot do this.

    In my blog, ‘Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.’, which can be found by a Yahoo/Google search with the title, there are many more examples of CIA rule over India, which keeps India poor, weak and enslaved, about which Lokpal cannot do anything but Satish Chandra can and abolish poverty & make India the supreme power in the world immediately.

    The content above was posted as a comment on Joginder Singh’s column in The Pioneer on December 25, 2011 but was immediately removed by RAW because Joginder Singh is a former head of CBI. You cannot have an independent CBI with or without Lokpal because in India EVERYBODY — including Lokpal advocates and any future Lokpal, not just Parliament, the Executive, the Judiciary, the media, NGOs, etc. — is under RAW which is a branch of the CIA; see ‘What You Should Know About RAW’ at WhatYouShouldKnowAboutRAWDOTblogspotDOTcom . As I have shown in my blog, the Lokpal movement was sponsored by CIA-RAW to divert attention from India’s War of Independence; see JoinIndiaWarOfIndependenceDOTblospotDOTcom .

    I had asked the Indian Army to arrest the top one thousand or so officers of RAW. It has not done so. But, as I have said, India’s nuclear forces obey Satish Chandra. He does not need India’s conventional forces or the rest of the government and citizenry to defend India which requires the destruction of RAW which will be done by nuclear means, that is, the simultaneous nuclear destruction of New Delhi, Washington and New York, with a warning that additional U. S. cities will be destroyed, with nuclear warheads already emplaced in them by special forces, if there is any retaliation.

    There has been a lot of media coverage of the Kolkata hospital fire that killed about 93 people and of the responsibility for it. How much coverage is there of the nuclear destruction of New Delhi and of the responsibility for it? Those responsible for the latter — CIA & RAW — are still removing my posted comments in the press that might warn people and avoid the deaths of millions. The responsibility for these deaths is the media’s.

    As I have said in my blog, killing a few million Indians in the nuclear destruction of New Delhi/ Delhi is nothing more than killing cockroaches. It will not make even a dent in India’s economic or military strength. On the other hand, it will open the flood gates to both economic prosperity for India and its nuclear supremacy over the United States and enable India to eliminate its number one enemy.

    Satish Chandra
    ——————————————–

    [Reply]

  • Kumars1

    Sudhakar it should be Sonia and her henchmen, including Vir Singhvi, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai et al. Btw, pls remember this is the same Vir Singhvi of Nira Radia fame.

    [Reply]

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JRL42KKUAFYBZSO37F3KEBLEDM Shajan

    Can’t understood your argument!! It was BJP who voted against the constitutional status for reasons well known. This would have made the Lokpal stronger. In RS, all regional parties will oppose state lokayukthas for obvious reasons. Govt is in a minortiy in RS. BJP piggy backed on Mamata and scuttled that as well. If at all there is a Lokpal, should that not be uniform to all Indians? Why should we have different aniti-corruption laws for different states? Govt should have graciously withdrawn the bill when it became clear that they would loose the vote.

    [Reply]

    Kumars1 Reply:

    Are you talking about the toothless Lokpal bill of the Congress variety? Sudhakar is right. It was a well orchestrated Congress drama and Hamid Ansari also failed. You may be fooled but I am not. They have been scuttling, obfuscating, foot dragging, bluffing for the last one year, let alone the last 43 years. They are masters at it. Remember USA nuclear deal? What was the midnight raid on Ramdev’s tent about? Why did the lady Rajbala die?

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  • Monalisa Oak

    Standard and Poor’s know India is the most corrupt country in the world. Its emerging economy is based on corrupt practices just like China’s and all other Asian and African countries. I am surprised India is rated BBB it should have been not even CCC but DDD. At the very bottom of their ratings!

    [Reply]

    Anonymous Reply:

    You are British and/or Pakistani. Did I guess correctly?

    [Reply]

  • anil

    India rates low because it’s eye sight is focused on lowly things – democracy of the corrupts for the corrupts by the corrupts!

    Most of the civilised world being focused on high sight (rule of law, ethics, accountability, responsibility etc), naturally they are cruising at high altitude.

    [Reply]

  • Silu

    Size only gives india a better rating than it deserves..

    [Reply]