Congress will face the music in Parliament now
The Congress faces troublesome days ahead with the Budget Session resuming on April 22 after a break. As always, the party has itself to blame for the situation. It will no doubt put up a defence over allegations that it tried to influence the text of a status report that the Central Bureau of Investigation is to file before the Supreme Court in the coal block allocation scam. It will also seek to dismiss the charge that the draft report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 2G Spectrum scam is a sham because it glosses over the role that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Minister for Finance P Chidambaram played in the rip-off. And, the Congress will find methods to justify the ‘good work' that Delhi Police, which works under the Union Home Ministry, has been doing regardless of the police's shameful conduct in probing the case of the brutal rape of a five-year old girl. But the Congress must know that neither the Opposition nor the people of the country are in any mood to buy the party's shallow arguments. The Congress-led UPA has been so thoroughly discredited that, regardless of the verbal pyrotechnics that its more articulate members in Parliament may indulge in, the Government cannot save face, and that it can only go into the next election with a huge blot on its track record of governance. Union Minister for law and Justice Ashwani Kumar will have a lot of explaining to do in Parliament, and much of what he says is naturally going to be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, he had summoned officials of the CBI to discuss the status report on the coal block allocation scam, when he had no business to interfere with the issue. He and his Government may now say that his meeting with the CBI officials was “routine” and that it had nothing to do with the status report which the probe agency is to present before the apex court. Unfortunately for the Congress and the Government which it leads, there is already too much material in the public domain for the people to be misled by official assertions of innocence. The fact that Government spokespersons and the CBI have been elusive on credibly clarifying the matter, points to a wrongdoing.
As for the farcical draft report of the JPC on the 2G spectrum scam, the cover-up is so obvious that the Congress may as well not expend energy in defending it, and scrap it altogether. But what should really agitate the MPs is the shocking rape and mutilation of a five-year old girl in Delhi and the subsequent, equally shocking, conduct of Delhi Police. While the BJP-led NDA and the left parties are certain to put the Government on the mat, will those like the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the DMK, who have shored up the regime in the past, show some resolveIJ After all, they claim to represent the aspirations of the common man. Do they want such an insensitive and ineffective regime to survive any moreIJ