Team Manmohan



As the new, energetic Manmohan Team takes charge, as the media hails the people’s verdict, shower praises on the prime minister and iconize Rahul Gandhi, it is important to observe the ground realities before we get swept by the avalanche of the buoyant reports.

It is not, by any stretch of imagination, the greatest team. With 79 members, it might end up being the largest team, though the records will have to be verified.

Below, deep below all the upbeat peons and prayers of the pseudo-secular media personalities, and its okay to stamp this adjective because they are proud about it, it has all the usual suspects of typical congress governance seen in the previous regime, if not worse.

For once, this government is still going to be headed by Sonia Gandhi, despite what Rajdeep Sardesai or Vinod Mehta want to believe. Perhaps Rahul may join her as an apprentice. Fresh from the memories of a rigged counting, Chidambaram is still going to man the home department in which he did nothing more than issuing statements containing banal aggression. Pranabh Mukherjee had been a Finance Minister from Indira Gandhi days so there is nothing much to expect from. Same is the case with the rest of the pack termed fondly as ‘veterans’.

Another tragic humour is the gang termed by the media as the young and restless. Again the media projects as if this new young breed is hand picked by Rahul Gandhi to lead Congress to the future. Most of these young leaders are sons or daughters of Congress leaders of yesteryears, dead or alive. Giving seats to sons and daughters is a simple political calculation to capitalise on the fame of the elder prevalent across India. Rahul Gandhi neither invented it nor mastered it. If Karunanidhi’s dynasty politics were to be condemned, so should this be. Terming this sons piggybacking on their father’s political wealth as the Future of Hope does not dwell much about either the future or hope.

Talking about Karunanidhi the despair about the central government gets worse. He seems to live somewhere in second century CE and believes that he is some Pandya King of Tamil Nadu. True to his delusion, he has mastered the art of dynasty politics. Three of his family members are going to be part of the ministry, the son who rules the South Tamil Nadu like a Mexican drug lord or a Somali pirate, the grand nephew whose only claim to fame is being the grand nephew, and a brother of domineering, unscrupulous TV baron, and the daughter who calls herself a poet but hasn’t done anything more than being the interpreter to what her father blathers. Finally, a non-family representative from the party A. Raja whose claim to fame is the grand Spectrum scam, about which media does not seems to speak much lest cause any embarrassment to TEAM MANMOHAN. The scam cost 60,000 crores to the exchequer and he is back manning the IT portfolio. Don’t be upset if more Satyams break out in the future.

Above all else, it is going to be highly difficult for Singh to handle a proxy PM and PM’s aide (Rahul) on the one side and a pack of 79 ministers running helter-skelter on the other. However, the media can easily overlook these things just like how they did with Spectrum, Shibu Soren, Terrorism, Satyam, Quattrocchi and scores of other blunders by the previous government, and be extremely happy that there’s after all a ‘secular’ government in place in the centre.