The reaction of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, to the country-wide outcry against corruption and the Government's seeming unconcern is that there is no magic wand to get rid of it. A Prime Minister should be the picture of decisiveness and exude the confidence that he is determined to fight to a successful finish the evils besieging the Government, in the spirit of Pericles, about whom it was said that even when he perished, he perished great.
Instead, we in India have a Head of Government who washes his hands off matters in the same manner as was done by Indira Gandhi, who once nonchalantly dismissed corruption as “a world phenomenon”.
When the Prime Minister of a country that is seething with anger and revulsion exhibits such fatalistic complacency, it is bound to act as a sure signal for the political and administrative classes down the line that they are all absolved of any responsibility for it.
Dr Singh doesn't need a magic wand to combat corruption; all he needs is the will, made up of a raging fire-in-the-belly, testifying to his uncompromising commitment to the ancient values of honesty, truth, service, simplicity, austerity and sacrifice and a boundless patriotic fervour.
Serpent-like hiss
It used to be said of Napoleon that his very appearance on his horse on the battlefield struck terror in his foes and he didn't need any elaborate strategy to win his wars.
Coming to modern times, what accounted for the triumph of the Allies over Hitler in the Second World War was not numbers of troops, nor weapons so much as Winston Churchill's bulldog-like tenacity, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's serpent-like hiss — It's a Day of Infamy — at the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour and Josef Stalin's squeezing the last ounce of heroism in the Russian people to throw out the Nazi forces.
That is what leadership is all about. That is exactly the kind of leadership that the people expect of a Prime Minister, if he sincerely and earnestly intends to wage a relentless war against the scoundrels who have infiltrated the legislative forums and Councils of Ministers all over the country.
And that is what the people, who had put their trust and faith in Dr Singh as their first servant, are not getting. Alibis and excuses are what they are bombarded with, instead: His helplessness because of coalition compulsions, the imperative need to adhere to legal niceties, the inadvisability of second-guessing ongoing investigations and court proceedings, the inability to take action on allegations pending proof to the hilt; the difficulty of dealing with foreign governments in regard to black money.
Acquiring a stink
It beats the people why Dr Singh bends over backwards not to hurt perpetrators of heinous crimes but is so very quick in unleashing the Delhi police, notorious for its barbarism, on peacefully sleeping men, women and children who had come to join the fight against corruption and black money.
Not only that, he lets his Ministers add insult to injury by talking of teaching lessons to their own sovereign masters and deflecting the public outrage by falling back on the customary whipping-boys of the BJP and RSS. Conditions have come to such a pass that the Supreme Court had to take upon itself half the vital functions falling within the domain of the Executive.
In the light of all the above, if Dr Singh is willing to be surrounded by the likes of Hodas, Rajas, Lalus, Baalus, Deshmukhs, Pawars and Sukhrams, and is even prepared to go to the shocking extent of approvingly patting Raja on the back in public when his arrest was imminent for his involvement in the 2G scam, and knowingly puts up with malfeasance and helps it flourish, what is the point in lauding him as honest?
Doesn't he remember the saying: ‘If you are in a herd of pigs, you'll also smell like a pig,'! Is not quitting the sty better than acquiring that stink?