We are back taking a gamble on the monsoon. Sixty-one years after independence, the rains matter as ever before. Even in May, there were power cuts in middleclass Delhi. Do not therefore take stories of India 2020 taking over this country or that country seriously. Power cuts and water shortage in Delhi are hardly a tribute to India Inc. The poor, of course, don’t have electricity but they have to pay through their noses for water.

The problem is that India’s governing elite could not give a damn about how people live. They—MPs, and MLAs, municipal councillors, apparatchiks of all parties—are not affected by these cuts. They have their ACs and their lawn sprinklers in their Lutyen’s gardens working fine. They will mouth slogans of inclusive development but not suffer a jot. What is the point of all those ‘sacrifices’ if one can’t be immune to the hardships the ordinary people outside politics (that is 98 per cent) suffer?

Is it credible that when the monsoon is delayed and there is real hardship, the Cabinet Minister for Agriculture is in London? He was notably absent on the issue of farmer suicides and still he has been reappointed to a post in which he signally failed. What is the point of Sharad Pawar? Why does he not just stick to cricket and be done with it? Why do Indian farmers have to bat not even twelfth man but the last millionth in his scorebook? Why doesn’t the PM’s 100 days programme include sacking Pawar? Is he worried by the nine MPs the NCP has? Is this a serious way of running a government?

... contd.