Singh is a nuclear Kinng!
Jyoti Malhotra -
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 1:49 AM
Every day that I have been Prime Minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future.
Its been such a long journey for Manmohan Singh, from Gah in Pakistan’s Jhang district to New Delhi, India, but on the evening of Day Two in parliament, one slogan was writ large all over the TV channels : Singh is Kinng !
For four years, Manmohan Singh struggled to find a face in the large shadow cast about by Sonia Gandhi’s cloak. As Congressmen of all shapes and sizes wheedled in and out of her consciousness, Singh kept out of the limelight, wincing almost perceptibly each time he had to soil his hands in the cesspool of pragmatic politics. He may have been prime minister, but she was clearly, the boss.
All that changed tonight as Manmohan Singh dared to risk everything – his reputation, his government, the political lives of a few hundred members of parliament who owe allegiance to the UPA – and he won. With Sonia Gandhi behind him “one thousand percent”, Singh gambled with the idea of shaping a new India.
If he’d lost, he would have been condemned as a latter-day Yudhisthira, who didn’t stop to think as he gambled it all away in that moment of dice-lust.
L K Advani, BJP’s top leader, with whom Manmohan Singh seems to share a special, mutual aversion, would have turned the “weakest PM” epithet into a dull knife that would have hurt, especially on grey, wintry days, full of age, regret and recrimination.
But Manmohan Singh won, and history loves winners. Nations love winners, especially when they have new visions that secretly gobble up the cobwebs of the mind.
All the clichés apply tonight, to Manmohan Singh. He’s come out of Sonia Gandhi’s large, enveloping, Superwoman-like shadow, a man of the moment, in charge. With Manmohan Singh, such is the euphoria tonight over the vote of confidence engendered by the Indo-US nuclear deal, we could even argue that India’s time to share the international high table has come.
Pity Manmohan Singh wasn’t allowed to read out his speech in parliament, although looking back, it seems of a pattern in his relationship with the BJP. Over the last four years, each time the PM and Advani have met or spoken, they’ve spat. Advani has used all kinds of unparliamentary language with Manmohan Singh, reserving the “weakest PM” quote for specially tender moments.
Listen to the PM’s reply that-would-have-been if the BJP hadn’t disrupted the Lok Sabha tonight : “The Leader of Opposition, Shri L.K. Advani has chosen to use all manner of abusive objectives to describe my performance. He has described me as the weakest Prime Minister, a ‘nikamma’ PM, and of having devalued the office of PM. To fulfill his ambitions, he has made at least three attempts to topple our government. But on each occasion his astrologers have misled him. This pattern, I am sure, will be repeated today. At his ripe old age, I do not expect Shri Advani to change his thinking. But for his sake and India’s sake, I urge him at least to change his astrologers so that he gets more accurate predictions of things to come."
Astrologers? Advani? And we thought that former prime minister H F Deve Gowda, who took the Congress’ help to secure seats for his party in Karnataka recently and should have, according to the honour-among- thieves credo that politicians usually uphold, reciprocated the gesture by voting with the Manmohan Singh government tonight – and didn’t – because the astrologers had told him not to !
There’s no doubt that tonight belonged to the PM. Lalu Yadav may have decimated the combined Left-BJP opposition, and it was a pity that he hadn’t been unleashed earlier on them, but it was Manmohan Singh’s decision to dare to dream – and ask what you can do for your country – that has perceptibly changed the balance of power in Delhi.
Sonia Gandhi will still be queen of the UPA, but the PM will definitely command new respect. He began this controversy 11 months ago by telling a journalist from the Telegraph that if the Left parties don’t agree with the nuclear deal, “…so be it,” and he’s lived to complete the tale.
In one of the most acerbic lines in his unspoken speech tonight, Singh said, “Our friends in the Left Front should ponder over the company they are forced to keep (with the BJP) because of miscalculations by their General Secretary.”
Singh’s pistols are still smoking from the verbal assault on Prakash Karat. Clearly, all those “pehle aap” days are now over. In this new movie that’s just hit town, Singh is the newest nuclear Kinng!