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Another shot at top job for Manmohan : Nuclear deal pays off |
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B.I. Saini
The Indo-US civilian nuclear deal has led to one major gain for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, even if it has alienated the powerful Left parties from the Congress. At an Independence Day function at the party headquarters in New Delhi, Congress president Sonia Gandhi clearly hinted that Dr. Manmohan Singh would be the Congress candidate for the prime-ministership, if the UPA returns to power in the next Lok Sabha elections to be held in a few months’ time. Queried by mediapersons if he would unfurl the National Flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort next year also, Dr. Manmohan Singh was diffident and said, “hopefully.” But Sonia Gandhi, who was standing by his side, asserted confidently “Certainly.”
Several factors may be responsible for Sonia Gandhi’s significant remark indicating that Dr. Manmohan Singh will continue as Prime Minister at least for a year or two in case the UPA comes up tops in the coming Lok Sabha elections. For one, if the Congress and the UPA and their new allies, particularly Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party are able to improve, or at least maintain their strength in the Lok Sabha, it would be in a way justification of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s insistence on going ahead with the nuclear deal, despite the threat of the Left parties to withdraw support, which they did ultimately. Belying reports that while Dr. Manmohan Singh may be a good administrator, but is not an especially astute politician, he kept open channels of communication with the Samajwadi Party, even when Sonia Gandhi and other top Congress leaders, on the one hand, and the Samajwadi Party top brass including Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh were not even on talking terms. This helped in a big way in the Samajwadi Party coming to the rescue of the UPA Government and the nuclear deal when the chips were down and the Left withdrew its outside support to the Government.
Sonia Gandhi’s plumping for Dr. Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister after the next Lok Sabha elections also shows that her son and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi is not yet confident about donning the mantle of the Prime Minister. Sonia and Rahul perhaps think that it would do him good to be on the sidelines for some more time. Significantly, while many leaders in the Congress like Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh have said that there is nothing wrong in Rahul Gandhi being projected as the party’s candidate for Prime Minister, the leader of a small, but crucial UPA constituent, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar has said that Dr. Manmohan Singh should continue as Prime Minister and that Rahul Gandhi is too inexperienced to take up the country’s top job at present.
In his Independence Day speech, Dr. Manmohan Singh claimed that most of the goals set out at the time when he took over as Prime Minister had been achieved. This will be disputed as the opposition parties and even the erstwhile allies, the Left parties, hold the Congress-led UPA responsible for the unprecedented inflation, which is at its highest level in 16 years, and failure to put down the menace of terrorism, manifested in a series of terrorist incidents, climaxing with the Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts. Kashmir could have been cited by the UPA as a success story, because of sidelining of separatist elements during the last four years, but the events of the last two months and mishandling of the Amarnath Shrine land allocation issue, have put the clock back. The situation is back to that in the eighties and the nineties when separatist elements and their terrorist friends were ruling the roost in the state.
It is apparent that Dr. Manmohan Singh, if continues as Prime Minister after the next Lok Sabha elections, will have to come up with out of the box solutions to the Kashmir issue and also the challenge posed by terrorist elements to the security and integrity of the country. At the same time, the Prime Minister and his Government will have to do more to create an inclusive society in which the much-touted benefits of economic reforms and a high growth rate reach the aam admi or the common man.
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