MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was, in fact, addressing the nation indirectly while talking to the TV editors on Wednesday. The newspaper editors now-a-days are hardly known outside their offices and hence ignored! The PM spoke like a lamb about to be sacrificed, zealously guarded by his press secretary who kept a hawk-eye on all the editors, including Times Now’s Arnab Goswami, the chief trouble-maker for scam-tainted ministers and crony bureaucrats.

On the whole, it looked like a full-dressed rehearsal rather than the finale. Whatever the prime minister may say and however eloquently he may put it – assuming the PM is eloquent – the slow pace at which the Wheels of Justice are moving signals a mirage: the closer we approach, the farther it goes. Like the ghost of Bofors that appears and disappears! .

V P Singh came to power promising to put the guilty behind the bars; Singh came and went; Chandra Shekhar came and went; Narasimha Rao came and went; Vajpayee came and went; but Bofors refuses to go! From V P Singh to Manmohan Singh, it was a relay race. The hawalah and Tehelkha scams, though of the same magnitude, failed to capture the imagination of the nation.

What’s intriguing is while Ramalinga Raju of Satyam computers is in jail, B S Yedurappa is in office; while Spectrum Raja is in judicial custody, Kalmady is roaming free; while a poor man called Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged charged with rape and murder, the killer of two innocent children and the Australian missionary Graham Staines was spared of the gallows, presumably because he had a noble cause behind it. The irony is that a mass murder with political clout goes scot-free while the one with no political clout even if he commits only one murder goes straight to the gallows, especially if he is poor and cannot afford a criminal lawyer!

The prime minister promised to eliminate corruption, but think of what happened to Gulzarilal Nanda. Nanda was a Union home minister in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet, who said he will eliminate corruption in two years. It was not corruption that got eliminated but Nanda! Dr Manmohan Singh is a brilliant economist who steered the country out of global recession with minimal damage while America and Europe are still reeling under its impact. But brilliance is no guarantee for longevity in office. If Dr Singh earnestly tries to get rid of corruption, the winner will undoubtedly be Corruption, not Dr Singh – who could be the sacrificial lamb! .

ALI BABA AND FORTY THIEVES!

Don’t tell Hassan Ali that Pranab Mukherjee is looking for him. He was looking for him in every nook and cranny of the Parliament House, and even on Parliament Street. On Janpath where foreigners descend for shopping, at India Gate where sight-seeing fellow countrymen converge, at Raj Ghat where all pseudo-Gandhians and even genuine ones pay homage, and at Red Fort where Prime Ministers ritually unfold the national flag. Strange are the ways of Hassan Ali!

The vigilant Income-tax men are swooping in on Hasan Ali, who is nowhere to be found. Mysterious are Hassan Ali’s ways. In the meantime, Arnab Goswami’s Times Now found him betting in the horse race in Pune. With his forty thieves around, the man feels absolutely secure; some of his thieves in the Cabinet, in babudom, in the police, in the judiciary. He owns the world’s biggest laundry where men of all political parties ledge their ill-gotten wealth. Noise, they all must make and the show must go on. Strange are the ways of Hassan Ali!