Is Digvijaya Singh really so deluded?
15 May 2013 1:41 AM GMT
The Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh is known to be a loose canon, with a recurring and annoying habit of putting his foot in the mouth. However, this time around he has managed to discredit not just himself, but has, in fact, torn off the last fig leaf of integrity from the almost naked emperor that is the UPA-II government. Digvijaya’s admonition to the Supreme Court, saying that the apex judicial body was ‘belittling our institutions’ when it observed, very rightly, that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was a ‘caged parrot’ of the establishment, taking dictats from its political masters when it should ideally behave as an autonomous body, committed to pursuing the truth. The Supreme Court’s recent slew of unpalatable verdicts, including on those on the former union law minister Ashwani Kumar, who the court observed had ‘changed the heart of the coal block allocation scam draft report’, precipitating his resignation, has of course come down hard on the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government, which has been sinking deeper into a bottomless pit of innumerable corruption and swindling scams. In the light of the CBI revelations, the latest being the bribery allegations that forced Pawan Kumar Bansal to quit from the post of the union railway minister, the Congress general secretary should have ideally issued an unambiguous apology for the matchless misdemeanors and malpractices of this government. But instead of looking inward and trying to correct the wrongs of the past, Digvijaya Singh chose to cast aspersions on the last bastion of truth and integrity in this country.
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Singh’s churlish jibe at Supreme Court, advising it to ‘give verdicts, not observation’, is not only unbecoming of a distinguished member of Congress party, it is also done in a rather poor taste. Singh should be upset not about Supreme Court’s rather innovative metaphors describe the CBI, but his own party’s kneck-deep involvement in the nexus of countless fraudulent scams, and its brazen intervention in the investigative agency’s internal probe into the matters. In fact, without the Court’s scathing comments, a nonchalant UPA government wouldn’t have been compelled to sack the two tainted ministers, particularly with Manmohan Singh’s permanent blindness and inertia towards taking any hard but correct decisions on his own. It is appalling that Digvijaya Singh, who usually worries about issues such as the ‘dual centre of power’ within the Congress party and the government, is getting his hands dirty by sneering at an institution that has time and again proved its integrity and commitment to truth and justice. Judicial activism in India is not a new phenomenon, and is based on strict principles of justice, credibility as well as safeguarding the fundamentals of democracy. It is not the function of the judiciary, which along with the executive and the legislative bodies forms one of three pillars of democracy, to merely interpret existing laws, and bring criminals to book, but also to change and amend laws according to the changing need of the times, as well as give sound observations whenever it deems it necessary.
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Singh’s churlish jibe at Supreme Court, advising it to ‘give verdicts, not observation’, is not only unbecoming of a distinguished member of Congress party, it is also done in a rather poor taste. Singh should be upset not about Supreme Court’s rather innovative metaphors describe the CBI, but his own party’s kneck-deep involvement in the nexus of countless fraudulent scams, and its brazen intervention in the investigative agency’s internal probe into the matters. In fact, without the Court’s scathing comments, a nonchalant UPA government wouldn’t have been compelled to sack the two tainted ministers, particularly with Manmohan Singh’s permanent blindness and inertia towards taking any hard but correct decisions on his own. It is appalling that Digvijaya Singh, who usually worries about issues such as the ‘dual centre of power’ within the Congress party and the government, is getting his hands dirty by sneering at an institution that has time and again proved its integrity and commitment to truth and justice. Judicial activism in India is not a new phenomenon, and is based on strict principles of justice, credibility as well as safeguarding the fundamentals of democracy. It is not the function of the judiciary, which along with the executive and the legislative bodies forms one of three pillars of democracy, to merely interpret existing laws, and bring criminals to book, but also to change and amend laws according to the changing need of the times, as well as give sound observations whenever it deems it necessary.
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