: Last week was without question the worst week in the life of the Sonia-Manmohan Government. The stock market crashed again. Inflation continued its ominous rise. Jammu and Kashmir went back on the boil. Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Indore and Naxalites massacred 40 police commandos in Orissa and got away. It should have been a week for the Prime Minister to go on national television and reassure the aam aadmi that things were not as bad as they seemed. This, too, shall pass, he could have said borrowing from Indian philosophy. Or don’t worry be happy from that popular song. He did neither. He could do neither because he was too busy ensuring that his Government stayed alive.
Commissar Karat and his ideologically atrophied comrades had gone too far even for our gentle Dr Manmohan Singh. When the Commissar took to appearing daily on national television to boss the Prime Minister about as if he were a junior member of the Communist Party, it was too much even for Shrimati Soniaji. Her political inclinations, copied from mama-in-law, veer to the Left but commie intransigence, forced her finally to stand by the man she appointed to the highest office in the land on your behalf and mine. In a public exhibition of eating crow she had to go on her knees to two men for whom she has so far shown open contempt. Amar Singh whom she insulted at one of her private dinner parties by saying loudly ‘what is HE doing here?’. And, Amar Singh’s boss Mulayam Singh who once caused Shrimatiji’s worst humiliation by abandoning her when she brought the Vajpayee Government down in the summer of 1999. Counting on Mulayam’s men she announced gaily that she had “272 and many more coming” only to be publicly let down — first by Mulayam and then by the aam aadmi when later that year she led the Congress Party to its worst defeat.
But that was years ago and a week, as the aphorism informs us, is a long time in politics. To the dismay of their ‘succular’, lefty friends Messrs Amar and Mulayam showed they were willing to being wooed. They changed their position on the nuclear deal after summoning the National Security Adviser to brief them personally. The result is that battered, bruised and mostly useless the Government could survive its worst political crisis. The question is in what shape?...
