RAHUL GANDHI’S JAIPUR SPEECH - CONTRADICTION 6: THE DRUM, THE DRUM, THE CONGRESS DRUM

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (VI)

The Past, the Present, the Future – summed up..

The Green Revolution restored the voice of the farmer.  Bank nationalisation restored the voice of the poor in the market for credit.  The IT and telecom revolutions literally gave the people voice, millions of people’s voice.  And if you have a cell phone in your pocket today, it is result of that revolution.  And it’s an honour that Manmohan Singhji is sitting here because he spearheaded another revolution.  In 1991, he unleashed the voice of thousands in the field of entrepreneurship and changed this country forever.

The Food Bill will ensure that no mother sees her child go hungry at night; the RTI allows every single Indian to personally take on the battle against corruption; MNREGA has given millions of Indians pride in their work; Right to Education enables every child to aspire to greatness.  All of these radical innovations were possible only because of the growth provided by the Congress Party and the UPA.

Now how many times Mr. Gandhi? What you speak of so authoritatively and so possessively is not yours. Everyone knows and realizes it. You run to beat the drum but why don’t you see the wisdom and compulsion that every big decision in India was either a follow-up or a compulsion. We are still not leaders of innovation in the technology sector. We are still nonentity in the public infrastructure. Just do a simple research on what the Independent India have added to the existing railways infrastructure left the British. It is shamefully incompetent.  And the grand old party has ruled the country most of these years. We are just writing on the scripts devised by others. We are not creating. We are not innovating.

It is not about ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is about claiming the legacy. The Mahatma never claimed the legacy even if he remained the central figure of India’s liberation from the colonialist rule. His family is nowhere to claim the legacy. That was what made Mohandas Gandhi a Mahatma. And you and your family, using the surname of the Mahatma, is spread across the length and breadth of the country to claim a legacy that owes to the process only; a process that any republic follows to nurture its population, to strengthen its sovereignty; a process that began spontaneously on August 15, 1947.  

I would like to borrow from a previous article* that I wrote on the subject:

..staking claims for achievements like mobile phones or computer revolution in the name of the glorious history of the Congress party is equally counterproductive.

Now no one is going to buy these statements. As said earlier, these are basically consumer-driven industrial policies and have to be followed and promoted by every government.

Like the retail FDI decision, every such decision to introduce a new format of businesses or a new technology for commercial purposes is taken in the global environment. It is not about who let the television technology come to India or liberalized industrial policies for the private players to play larger role in the business sectors like telecom, information-technology and now retail.

Such decisions are driven by the incumbent internal and external factors. The decision to allow the multi-brand retail FDI is the telling example in hand. The slowdown of domestic and global economy and the pressure of countries like the US played the major role in it. Had it been the NDA government at the helm of the affairs in the circumstances, it would have done the same.

And claiming benefits of such decisions, the outcomes of which are so huge, spread over a long period of time, dissected and diversified, to a single party or a single or group of persons, is another thing that one should avoid while writing speeches (India may be a half-baked democracy but certainly it is not a North Korea or China) – no singing paeans please.

1991 was a c0mpulsion. The country had no other way but to open the economy. China began on it in 1978. What Manmohan Singh did in 1991 was already delayed by over a decade. All this while, the country had your party’s government from January 1980 to December 1989.

Also, it took years of struggle (over two decades) to get the Right to Information Act passed.  Why didn’t you speak of Lokpal? After all, your government is going to burden the country with yet another unproductive administrative while elephant.

MNREGA and Right to Education are grey areas. Scams are routine. The corpus of fund involved in such populous and routine schemes could have achieved much better scale provided you and your government would have thought of ‘transforming’ the systems before introducing them.

There is nothing radical in these overstated and hyped achievements. The only radical element is the scale of easy money that public welfare schemes have provided to the corrupt officials. From few crores, now the scams run in multiple thousands of crores.

Also, why don’t you introspect and talks about the negatives? Your party has cursed the country with appeasement politics. What the Congress party has done is dangerous enough to divide the country on the lines of religion and caste. The social affirmative action, an innovation in the beginning, has become a political tool promoting social aberration.

Then there are other blunders like gifting China membership of the UN Security Council, the Emergency, the Sikh riots, blindly following a model of mixed economy with socialist pangs, and above all, suppressing the democratic soul in the country, by promoting the dynasty politics. This list is not exhaustive Mr. Rahul Gandhi.  

* http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/12/rahul-gandhis-love-for-potato-potato_19.html

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/