On The Gen-X Candidate for PM

The Hindu editorial 'Rhetoric and reality' today aims at the make-Rahul-PM episode triggered by Arjun Singh's recent comment. Why the paper attaches so much significance to this incident is unclear to me. Whether this is Arjun Singh trying to win brownie points with the Congress' first family or a polite way of hinting that the PM is not a charismatic personality who can win elections, the matter, in my view, merits little more attention than a brief mention of the item and the official party reaction to the proposal. The paper however uses the occasion to remind the party of some truths and give it some advice.Some truths such as the state of the party are there for all to see. Others are debatable. Here is an extract from para 2:

Who the Congress fields as its prime ministerial candidate is its own business. Outsiders cannot expect to have any say in this. It is also nobody’s case that Mr. Gandhi must be denied the democratic right to pursue politics as a career. But when a party that claims to be democratic and inclusive practises unashamed dynastic politics, it must expect to get flak from all directions.

Has the Congress claimed in recent times to be democratic? It certainly was at one time but has it said so at any point after Indira Gandhi took over? I am not sure. But is it any less democratic than other parties? I do not believe so. In most parties in India nowadays, major decisions are made based on the collective opinion of central leaders. If the matter pertains to a state, state leaders are consulted a priori before the deliberations are held. And the same system seems to prevail in most parties though minor details may vary. To that extent, all parties are democratic. But do any of them hold genuinely free elections like the American party primaries? No. So the argument made by the Hindu is questionable especially given that it makes no similar criticism as regards the CPM. Furthermore is the Congress not sufficiently inclusive? It has people from all communities under its banner and I see no ground for this charge.

Consider the state of his party in Uttar Pradesh, which he desperately wants to win back. During the run-up to the 2007 Assembly election, the Congress, with Mr. Gandhi in the lead, worked for the unconstitutional dismissal of the Mulayam Singh government. On the campaign trail, he boasted that his family had divided Pakistan.

Many a prominent leader has committed a faux pas at some point or another. Does that exclude all of them from becoming PM? Leaders from the left parties too worked for the unconstitutional dismissal of the Gujarat government during and after the riots. They worked to deliberately undermine the constitutional machinery during the Nandigram incidents in order to buy time for their cadres to reestablish their supremacy in the area illegally through brute force. Will the Hindu make the same argument that all the current CPM leaders are precluded from standing for the PM's post if the Third Front wins enough seats in the next election because of their tainted association with these incidents?

Right now, he is leading a vicious charge against U.P. Chief Minister Mayawati in a misconceived bid to wean away her Dalit base. Ms Mayawati has worked diligently and broad based her approach to get where she is. The latest evidence of her political success is the Bahujan Samaj Party’s sweep of by-elections in two Lok Sabha and three Assembly constituencies. Rather than target a charismatic mass leader, the Congress general secretary should work at nurturing genuine talent from Dalit and other oppressed and non-privileged sections so that the Congress ceases to be a party of patronage offering lip sympathy to the downtrodden.

Again, what exactly is vicious about leading a charge against Mayawati? Leading a charge is something that politicians regularly indulge in; again, it is she who has made the vile comments about him. So the advice is that he should not target a charismatic mass leader. Is the paper willing to give that advice to all other political leaders as well? Is it willing to tell the left leaders to back off from attacking Sonia Gandhi, a mass leader? Is it willing to tell the Congress not to go after L.K.Advani or Narendra Modi who are both recognized mass leaders? Instead, the paper has often berated the Congress for not going after the BJP leadership most recently during the Gujarat elections. The last sentence that it should work at nurturing genuine talent is true as much of the upper castes/OBCs as of Dalits but what is the basis for saying that the Congress only offers lip sympathy to the downtrodden whereas Mayawati has somehow done something much more substantive? For all I have seen, the only thing she has been doing is renaming everything after Dalit leaders and building more statues of Ambedkar and more recently, of herself. For the Hindu to sing her praises in the absence of any signal achievement worth mention is bewildering and typical of a strange liberal tendency in India to simply celebrate the rise of a Dalit overlooking even fundamental flaws in the individual's leadership - this is true of Mayawati now as much as it was of Jagjivan Ram three decades ago.

I am not for or against Rahul Gandhi. It is a fact that his family is very popular with the rank and file of his party and will readily accept him as PM - in that sense, he has a better claim to the post than the incumbent. But the point of this post is not that. It is to showcase the patently false assertions of this newspaper made on the basis of jaundiced views about the family and the Congress party. The party would do well to set its house in order but the gratuitous advice on political ethics rendered by the paper would hold more water if only it were to apply those principles equally to its favored groups in the political spectrum as well.

Quota Quagmire - Part 1

With the Supreme court upholding the constitutional validity of the 27% OBC quota, reservations are back in the spotlight. The electronic media have again gone into a frenzy and brainless reporters are breathlessly "debating" the fallout. In the midst of all the din, The Hindu has been pretty good in its coverage of the case. Coverage of court proceedings/legal issues is one domain which has remained relatively unaffected by the otherwise all round decay in the paper's standards.Some would say even the sports coverage is good, but I find that Sania Mirza gets far too favorable coverage even when she gets steam rolled by her opponents. This blog has also carried posts on the paper's not so India friendly position when the Indian cricket team was recently hunted by a pack of wild dogs down under.

Coming to the reservation, I think the verdict is fair and balanced for the following reasons:

1. It keeps the creamy layer out. Hence, only the deserving(poor) OBC will get the help and not a mediocre, upper middle class OBC who is incompetent to perform.
2. Seats left unfilled can be filled by the General category students: This is a huge boost for the general category students. In IIMs, the admissions are a two stage process - the group discussion/Personal interview follows the CAT exam. The IIMs, given the brains behind them, can maintain their high standards exploiting this point to the hilt.
3. A review of the OBC list every five years.

Though the verdict looks fair, the sick minds in the political establishment will ensure that every trick in the book (and even those not in it)is used to dilute the core message of the SC. There is already talk of raising the income limit of Rs 2.5 lakhs (to define the creamy layer). Though this figure must be adjusted for inflation, you can expect geriatrics in the UPA to define an unreasonably high limit ( may be as high as 5 lakh) so that the maximum number of OBCs are brought under the reservation net. This income ceiling is fraught with practical difficulties. What if the candidate lies about the income? Are the IIMs going to ask the candidates to attach the family members' PAN card details? or income certificates? What if the candidates do a la Aamir khan or Amitabh Bachchan and claim that their family members are farmers? These are times when even passports are faked. How difficult is it going to be to fake an income certificate?

One suggestion that is guaranteed to remain on paper is the periodic review of the OBC list. I must be insane to expect any govt to have the gall the remove a community from the quota list. No government would want a repeat of an ugly flare up like the Meena- Gujjar flare up. This review will never happen.


There appears to be a confusion regarding the IIMs. The court says when a person is a graduate, he/she becomes educationally forward and hence cannot avail the quota. Some papers like the ET say this effectively rules out quotas in post graduate institutions like the IIMs. But Arjun Singh has put his foot down again saying that IIMs too would have quotas from this year. Perhaps the only silver lining for the general category this year is that the number of seats will go up so that their share of the pie remains intact. I feel this OBC reservation can prove to be a blessing in disguise for the general category as there is every likelihood that unfilled OBC seats will spillover expanding their pie.I propose to cover this issue in greater depth in my subsequent posts.