LEADERS, NOT ICONS

Sections of the international press have hailed the emergence of the Congress Party-led government after the May elections in India. But they have presented the new rulers, not as leaders, but as icons.

This is the case particularly with the British press. Even the specialized business paper, Financial Times, has made this its preference. This is, nevertheless, simply indulgence, even erroneous. Especially when seen in the backdrop of how credulity still infects minds of people of that country, on one hand, and its strife in recent years to claim its place in world comity, on the other.

The worst of it can be that the new rulers can imagine it as a loud acclaim of them by international opinion.

The affliction appears to be inflicting the new rulers en masse in barely three months of their ascending to power (gaddi).

Minister for Railways in the Railway Budget presented in July announced the setting up of a new multi-million-rupee axle plant for the network in Bihar to which state of the Union he belongs.

A few days back he went further to open recruitment of some hundred thousand people in the railways.

Great, one may say. But not when the Railway Board comprising experts and constituting the policy body for the network had expressly told the minister that a new axle plant was not wanted for the railways. Furthermore, the Indian railways are regarded as the single largest employer in the world while 60 per cent of the railway budget comprises staff’s expenses.

But as deliverer the minister must turn towards his people!

Minister for Human Resources, perhaps taking a cue from his predecessor in the outgoing government and possibly in order to do one better, is set out to rewriting curriculum and course of studies and textbooks in schools and colleges as well as rules for admission into advanced management institutions. The rewriting is not by way of annulling what his predecessor did, but to what he thinks is right and proper.

In other words, the educational order that existed is to lie buried.

This is regardless of what the Prime Minister thinks of it, or whether it is the agreed common program of the parties in the government and others, like the communists, who are supporting the government from outside.

Minister of State for Home (second ranking to the Cabinet minister) caused ripples to rise over deployment of Special Forces to address acts of terrorism by groups of separatists in sensitive Manipur State in the northeast. He did this by making three different and mutually contradictory statements in ten days over the issue whereas the government at the center dispatched him to deal with the disturbances occurred in the state.

The state’s chief minister, who belongs to Congress Party, meanwhile compounded the absurdity of the central minister by announcing withdrawal of the Special Forces from the capital city Imphal and declared they would be pulled out of the state all together. This notwithstanding that whether to deploy the forces or not who fall under its authority is for the Central Government to decide.

Meanwhile, the disturbances, which followed alleged rape and killing of a 32-year-old woman by some men of the Special Forces, took the extreme turn in an explosion occurring in a movie house and resulting in death of some people and incidents of violence elsewhere.

The latest on Manipur after the country celebrated its 57^th Independence Day on August 15 was that the Central Government was to decide imposing the President’s rule on the state. Pending proclamation of this, the Central Government is asking the state’s chief minister to bring the Special Forces back in place.

The above incidents of governance by the post-election rulers occurred barely in three months of their assuming power show how their iconic imaging has come to rest heavily on their minds.