Some strange things happened yesterday.
I woke up early on a holiday. I sat in a stupor watchi?g Doordarshan (another strange event) and I saw the Prime Minister giving his Independence Day speech in a foreign language loosely based on Hindi. That lulled me back to sleep.
Here is the really strange thing. The Prime Minister has the reputation of being an orator. Doesn’t he realise that ‘Aparadhik tattvon ko chunaav prakriya se door rakhenge’ (We shall keep the criminal elements out of the election process.) sounds much less euphonic than ‘Aparadhiyon ko chunav nahin ladne denge’ (We won’t let criminals stand for elections)?
The whole of his speech sounded as if he did not realize what he was talking of.
He talked about the need to move away from a ‘scarcity mentality’ to a mentality of plenty. Good point. The Public Distribution System in India was built on the premise that we are short of food, and that it has to be rationed. When we have overflowing godowns and a drought where people are starve because they cannot buy food, the solution should be to open up the godowns and send food to wherever it is needed. This requires an overhaul of the entire PDS. Was the Prime Minister thinking of that? Did he realize the practical implications of his statement?
I don’t think so. Vajpayee is a poet and is used to thinking in broad emotionally tinged concepts, rather than in action points. He is completely out of touch with implementation. So he regurgitates whatever bureaucrats feed him. He announced that 55,000 crores are going to be spent on the ‘golden quadrangle’. Now, citizens want results. Bureaucrats want budgets. The fact that after 2 years of announcing a project, the Prime Minister thinks we will be happy to hear about the budget instead of how much road has been built indicates how out of depth he is.
We need a new Prime Minister. No, not Advani. It took a young Alexander to see that the Gordian knot had to be cut, not disentangled.