Priyanka - the front-guard leader who spelt doom for Cong

Tanvi Nalin writes for Youngisthan.in

Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra is seldom seen in the political circuits although she has been a part of important Congress meetings and deliberations. She is the ‘blue moon’ of Amethi and Raebareli, or rather the seasonal frog, who croaks unnecessarily during rains.

The last time that we had seen Mrs Vadra was during assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. She campaigned vociferously for Congress in the home seat of her brother Rahul Ganhi and mother Sonia Gandhi. The Congress party uses her as the perpetual defendant who cajoles, commands and invokes emotion among the people.

But the result was a disaster. So much for her ‘savior’ figure that the Congress family tries to portray her as during elections, the Samajwadi Party swept the Gandhi bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli in central Uttar Pradesh, winning eight of the 10 Assembly seats in the parliamentary constituencies.

The party is again pitted for the same kind of defeat. And yet again it has launched Priyanka as the front-guard who can talk to the voters as a daughter, a sister and as an Indian wife to defend the family and its sins. It may be called dumbness of the Congress party in the era of public awareness. But the worst part is that Priyanka too has started to believe in this mythical portrayal of herself.

She has been quite ‘innocently’ telling people that her husband Robert Vadra was ‘not even considered’ for any business proposal or dealings in BJP prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi’s ‘vibrant’ Gujarat. To top it all, she has been warning all the political opponents to ‘leave her husband alone’ for he was ‘just a businessman’.

It was an opportunity that she threw herself to her opponents’ side and who grabbed it quite gleefully with both hands. Now #DamaadGate is in news all over and Priyanka is not able to defend her family anymore with a single cogent argument. Playing a martyr is not always good as she should learn from the new, and veiled, allies of Congress.

If fierceness of Manmohan Singh at a wrong time, appeal of Sonia Gandhi for ‘secular’ votes seeking help from a person of dodgy secular credentials, Rahul Gandhi’s utter non-sense jibberings at every rally has been menacing for Congress, Priyanka’s poor defence has pushed the party to the edge.

For the first time, Amethi is facing a real battle in electon where BJP's Smriti Irani and AAP's Kumar Vishwas are against Rahul. But Priyanka has ensured that Congress is at the point from where it will fall to oblivion. And Vadra, well, let the Modi government come to the centre.

Rahul Gandhi is lying to nation on Modi-Adani factor

The Pioneer Writes

By now it must be clear to the Congress that its persistent attack on Mr Narendra Modi over his so-called magnanimity to industrialist Gautam Adani has failed. 

Bharatiya Janata Party spokespersons have pointed out on more than one occasion that the allegation of Mr Modi gifting away land to the Adani Group is false; the land transfer being alluded to happened during Mr Shankersinh Vaghela's regime which was supported by the Congress. Mr Vaghela is today a prominent leader of the Congress. 

Moreover, the other, equally ridiculous charge that Mr Modi gave away the land at one rupee per acre (or hectare, nobody even in the Congress seems to be certain) has not been backed by evidence. Yet, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has made the accusation a pet theme in his election speeches. 

It is not selling — and not the least because his party itself has been accused of promoting crony capitalism through various scams such as the one that involved the awarding of 2G Spectrum licence and coal block allocations to business enterprises without following the due process of law. 

The Congress's emphasis on the ‘Adani factor' perhaps stems from its desperation to deflect the BJP's criticism of the questionable land deals that Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra has been allegedly involved in. Mr Modi has repeatedly raised the matter in his campaign to drive home the point that members of the Nehru-Gandhi family have not just mismanaged the affairs of the country but also engaged in questionable business dealings. 

If, as the Congress alleges, there has been wrongdoing in the Gujarat Government providing land to the Adani Group through dubious means, it should have probed the issue. That never happened, because some allegations sound good to be levelled but not good enough to stand scrutiny. On the other hand, there is anecdotal evidence of Mr Vadra's land deals not being entirely clean. 

The shunting of intrepid IAS officer Ashok Khemka, who initiated a probe into Mr Vadra's deals in Haryana ruled by a Congress Government, is just one indication that all is not clean. There is no point in the Congress pointing to court verdicts that did not maintain petitions against Mr Vadra, because those rulings were on legal technicalities and did not really give a clean chit.

The Congress has been left holding the wrong end of the stick after Mr Modi candidly said in an interview recently that, while he openly lobbied for the State with industrialists, Congress leaders engaged them away from public scrutiny because they had dark secrets to hide. 

The question, therefore, is not whether a politician is close to the corporate world. It's whether those engagements are for the larger good of the people or to promote self-interests. 

Allegations that Mr Modi has been close to corporate India does not end with Mr Adani. Are we to believe the silly charge that corporates have been bought over lock, stock and barrel, by the prime ministerial candidate? Obviously, the Congress and other rivals of Mr Modi are on the wrong track. They must have realised it by now. But perhaps it's too late for them to change their strategy. Or maybe they just do not have anything substantial to hurl at Mr Modi.

Now It Is Time To Affirm Sonia Gandhi's Story

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T J S George writes

It is easy to say that two new books have “betrayed” Manmohan Singh. Sanjaya Baru was a confidant of the Prime Minister while P C Parakh was coal ministry secretary when the coal scam scarred the country. But their books are not political exercises. They are recordings of information by professionals who found themselves witnesses to action. Books by such insiders—one by former Comptroller & Auditor General Vinod Rai is eagerly awaited—are the stuff of history and would be so hailed by civilised society.

Baru’s pages are essentially empathetic. He cites chapter and verse to show how Sonia Gandhi often usurped the powers of the Prime Minister. Parakh shows how passivity can also be culpability at times. Overall, we can see that Manmohan Singh was not always a passive puppet in the hands of a scheming Sonia Gandhi. He could be quite scheming himself when an issue dear to his heart came up. The passing of the US nuclear treaty is the most quoted example. Almost all parties, including sections of his own, were against it, but the Prime Minister stuck to his guns and had his way. So did he with FDI in retail which was, and still is, opposed by most states. He used craftiness, guile and every ounce of power at his disposal to push these measures through. Recent reports suggest that it was Manmohan Singh’s willpower that allowed field trial of GM (genetically modified) crops in defiance of prevalent government policy, public opinion, experts’ advice and even the legal rub of the matter being before the Supreme Court. It cannot be an accident that all three subjects are America’s core policy priorities in India.

America wants US equipment suppliers to be not accountable if something goes wrong with a nuclear installation (like Union Carbide refused to be accountable for the Bhopal gas disaster). FDI in retail is unacceptable to many for fear that foreign monopolies will disrupt India’s grassroot economics. GM crops trials have come to mean domination by companies like Monsanto. Seeds technologies developed by India’s own agricultural research institutes are ignored. Manmohan Singh chose to dismiss the warnings of molecular scientist Pushpa Bhargava who told him in 2008  that “India would cease to be a free country if its agriculture is brought under the control of foreign multinational companies”. This is a powerful Prime Minister who knows how to get what he wants if he wants it badly enough.

So, how come he did not want to fight corruption badly enough? The biggest scams in the history of India unfolded under his nose, but he didn’t seem to care. Even when the economy took a nosedive, the great economist in him didn’t seem to care. Did he ignore corruption because the highest in the land were neck-deep in it? Was he under pressure from family and friends to keep the chair for the trappings that went with it? The questions that rose around Manmohan Singh wrecked his reputation.

Baru and Parakh have merely provided confirmatory details of what was public knowledge. Parakh said, for example, that Manmohan Singh was in favour of auctioning coal blocks, but didn’t care when “junior coal ministers” Shibu Soren and Dasari Narayan Rao overruled him. Similarly Baru explains how the PM lost his importance when the PMO was stuffed by Sonia Gandhi’s flatterers—M K Narayanan who kept friend and foe in line by announcing “I have a file on you”, and Pulok Chatterjee to whom India was the same as the Gandhis.

What is needed, for India’s sake, is a factual, professionally written insider view on Sonia Gandhi’s handling of power, how she turned India into her private fiefdom, how great leaders became her courtiers. No political aide is man enough to do it, and she is not woman enough to let an independent person do it—like V S Naipaul let Patrick French do his “authorised” biography, though he didn’t approve of the book in the end. But we shall not lose heart. That book will one day be written. India has a way of prevailing.