Sir — Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi rolled up his sleeves and called the Prime Minister-led Cabinet’s ordinance “complete nonsense”, and declared that it should be “torn up and thrown away”. If any senior member of an organisation had openly spoken so insultingly against his senior, he would have received the pink slip immediately. But such a regimented streak does not run through the Congress that describes itself as “the largest democratic party in the world”. On the contrary, paeans are being sung to the scion who ‘corrected a great wrong’, aligned the besieged party with the ‘public mood’ and injected a dose of adrenaline before the general election.
Mr Gandhi might have now privately assuaged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s feelings, but the politics of his public act achieved its intended objective. The Congress and the Union Government has more or less got the message. Now, there shall be no debate, even for academic purposes, on who the boss really is. Mr Singh has now indeed taken a backseat, well and proper, for the rest of his terrible tenure.