Looks like everyone is getting talkative by the day! suddenly almost everyone in this world has something to say to the other. India is suddenly willing to have a dialogue with Pakistan. To me that just sounds cool, and it ends there.No matter how much I try, I am never too sure if anyone in Pakistan is ready to listen to what our cabinet ministers have to say. And I can only take refuge in the assumption(which again,is purely mine),that our diplomats are not dead, they are just no diplomats anymore. The problem here is everyone in the UPA regime is utterly confused.
Winning a general election by the clearest of mandates that Federal India can now deliver,The United Progressive Alliance is just out its wits today.With inflation in food items rising exponentially since their election and reaching nearly 20% to end 2009,Mr. Sharad Pawar today is a lonely man. He has been blaming anything and everything under the sun for the Rs.116/kg pulse ,excessive cricket matches,the IPL's schedule,lazy farmers and a sleepy Prime Minister during the food fiasco damage control meetings. Having read a newspaper daily after these guys got elected to Parliament, I remember this gentleman talking of some 100000000 billion tons of wheat, rice, and every variety of pulse that can be, 'stored' somewhere in Utopia , the 29th state of the Indian Union. And as luck would have it a kg of ganga's hilsa is cheaper today than that elusive dal. A super market I recently visited in kolkata put an apt label to section on foodgrains.
It read:
'It'll set your PULSE racing!!'.
The Bombs, the fast-unto-deaths and the landmines
The Ministry of Home Affairs, headed by the Harvard Educated ex-Finmin works in a rather unusual way I would say.I perfectly understand , and with all humility,that managing Home Affairs is not a joke. However, Mr. Chidambaram's department is turning the whole thing into a really poor one.With all the hype and hoopla that they created over the National Investigation Agency post 26/11 what we have today is another agency that's a high profile “fire extinguisher”. So, where's the problem? The problem lies in the fact that the Fire Broke in the first place. The NIA essentially is a noveau post mortem therapy and not the preventive medicine India expected.
These days, a typical terrorist strikes at will, and the irony of the matter lies in the fact that the Home Department is in a state of an Intelligence Overload. And that makes one think, probably, for once he was right when he spoke of splitting the Home Ministry . Probably, Mr.Chidambaram is now aware that this is getting too much a pain for him to handle alone.
People in general donot laugh at bad jokes, but one couldnt help but laugh at the Telangana Fiasco over the last couple of months. On a personal note, I would definitly feel cheated if you promise me a thing and then tell me that it was a Joke. Atleast KCR didnot quite enjoy it. I mean, think what KCR went through, after so much stomach spasms that he resisted (atleast seemingly so) what he achieved was a Joint Action Committee . And if that wasnt enough, today he has lost all support from the Congress MLA's from Telangana, and the Committee, the only “take away” from the massive violence perpetrated by the TRS and Telengana supporters, is only studying the feasibility of a Telangana and a United Andhra(United Andhra??,well ,until the Committee appeared, i thought it was already there!).I am not too sure what the Pro-Telangana people want to do from here really, since, to do the least, they're waiting until December 2010, the deadline for the committee headed by Mr B.N Srikrishna to deliver something fruitful.
Andhra Pradesh is making news everyday, but for a very different set of reasons than what used to be its favourite subject once, the Maoist Problem. Again, probably the Maoists there have found real competition in KCR and company and ever since have ramped up their struggle for uprooting the Indian Union in states like West Bengal. Its a complex situation here in WB, since these maoists in the borders of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa have discovered local support and it has become increasingly difficult to say who's a maoist and who's not. The Centre probably saw a solution in the much talked about operation GreenHunt. But the states like Jharkhand and West Bengal, are not too keen on resorting to force since the contemporary leadership of such states finds a considerable share of votes from the maoist affected areas. So the age old problem of the center-state relations in a democracy, and however hard Mr. Chidambaram might have tried, a effective solution is still not in sight. Both sides , the center and the maoists want to talk and have gone on the record emphasizing it too, but the real thing is just not working.
For me, I am not surprised, since the UPA has not been able to stop anti-political parties like the Shiv-Sena, the Maharashtra Nav-Nirman Sena and other such fundamentalist groups tendering violence and hate speeches just to make it to the primetime , One cant really expect them to cover any ground in the real time issues of the Maoists in states that are to top it, are under a different party rule.
Probably, we have a full view of a democracy in function these days, Coalition Politics at its best, and a grilling opposition ready to pounce over every question that's asked in the Parliament and an underconfident government, which is faultering at almost every decision that matters.
