CONTRADICTIONS IN
THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (V)
All our public systems – administration, justice,
education, political systems – all of them are designed to keep people with
knowledge out. They are all closed systems. Their design promotes mediocrity
and mediocrity dominates discussion while the voices of insight and thought are
crushed by the loudness of those who possess neither understanding nor
compassion.
And every single day all of us are faced with the
hypocrisy of this system. We all see
it. And then we pretend that it is not
there.
The time has come to question the centralized,
unresponsive and unaccountable systems of decision-making in governance,
administration and politics. The answer
is not that people say we need to run the system better. The answer is not in
running these systems better. The answer
is to completely transforming these systems.
So far so good! But how (HOW)?
By promoting good-for-nothing populist measures like the
one that your government brought in 2008 to score electoral mileage in the 2009
general elections or the attempted present incarnations of similar
mediocrities?
After four years, now the reports have started pointing
out large scale scams in the farm debt waiver scheme launched by the United
Progressive Alliance government in 2008. A Business Standard* report on January
28, 2013 said: “Senior CAG official confirmed the reports detailing how UPA
could not deliver on the loan waiver scheme. CAG conducted an audit of over
90,000 farmers’ accounts between April 2011 to March 2012. Of the audited
accounts, over 34% were not issued debt waiver certificates, over 8.6% were not
eligible but still got the waiver and around 13% were disqualified by banks
despite being eligible.”
Now, implementation of this scheme has been a high-talking
point of your government Mr. Gandhi.
You have been talking emphatically about the direct cash transfer.
The food bill is Sonia Gandhi’s brainchild.
The fear that the direct cash transfer of subsidy and the
food security bill, some more election-oriented populist measures, would only
deepen the purse-strings of the corrupt bureaucracy and the political class
with the real beneficiaries used as pawns to siphon-off the money.
Don’t you know that majority of the Indians are illiterate
when it comes to the ‘quality education’ like learning and realizing their
rights? There is no dearth of such studies done independently. How can they ask
for their due in a system that breeds corruption at its every level? How can
they bypass the middlemen present at every level of implementation of such benefit
schemes when over 65 per cent of them cannot earn even Rs. 3500 a month? Remember,
we are in a country where bribing has become a norm to get anything and
everything done.
Now projected as the PM-in-waiting, I should assume that
you are aware of this aspect of India
How can you allow then diverting the scarce public funds
in such mammoth projects when the track record has been so poor? Every such
project is inundated with reports of misuse and corruption - take any, be it
MNREGA, NRHM, highways development projects, universal education scheme,
mid-day meal scheme, Antyoday or so many others.
Isn’t it hypocrisy to call the systems ‘closed’ and at the
same time, feeding these ‘closed’ systems with lubrication of easy prospects of
under-the-table money?
Don’t you see and hear of these scams? Your government is
aware of the scams and has ‘dutifully’ tried to suppress them from coming into
the public domain as long as it could.
Is this how you and your government intend to make the
system better?
You talk of the ‘closed’ systems yet your government
denies naming the criminals stashing black money in foreign tax havens.
You talk of questioning the centralized,
unresponsive and unaccountable systems of decision-making in governance,
administration and politics – yet you represent the biggest face of
centralized decision-making system in the country – the Congress party.
Yes, all our public systems are in urgent need of change.
But the precedents set by the Congress party and others in political fraternity
tell us they want to maintain the status-quo.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
