The Legacy of Y S Rajasekha Reddy!

In an era of fractal politics in the macro context in India & the rock solid oligarch at the Congress High Command,YSR's rise to the top was unprecedented in the recent decades of Indian politics. But the even after 60 plus years after Independence we still get overawed by the populist planks.

In a nation elevating politicians to demi god status after a few soul stirring speeches and generous splurging of tax payers money in the form of free ( Today all most every thing from TV,Rice to even Cash) is seen as a major contribution , YSR does stand tall. But how much of the pre election sops reach the masses. What go done in his 5 year 110 day tenure , is it enough for us to anoint his stature as a great politician and statesman of our Great Indian Nation.

Consider this only a day before Dr.YSR left on his ill fated chopper journey the suburbs where he erected a swank home office was flooded with rain water and homes sunk in knee deep water.


Generous praise has been a part of most eulogies but certain fact remain indelible. Many forget that his assent to power in 2005 was largely due to the dissonance of the rural masses after three successive seasons of worst drought and the fact that Chandrababu was fighting the anti incumbency wave.

The scale of scams and corruption charges during is 5 year rule is unprecedented and unrivaled. The famed NREGA , Rajiv Arogya Shree schemes which wooed the vote banks were vehicles of siphoning government funds by few select corporate hospitals and district mandal in charges. The conceiving of populist schemes is one thing but administering the same to help it reach the last needy hand is quite another.

Measure should be from here on about our politicians success of not how many votes he garnered or the many populist schemes his government launched or if he stood tall as a regional leader in a Oligarchic National party but on the end results produced.

From where he took up office from Chandrababus Government, very little seems to have been achieved. In fact the price rise is unabated, job losses mount , farm suicides higher than the previous government tenure and very little in terms of vision for the future. Even the 2020 Vision document purported by the previous government was shelved as was several e Governance projects.

Policy and nation building policies must be seasonal as they are today by a few individual rain makers like Dr.YSR. But rather the political machinery function independent of the hallowed individual bias and influence. Progress then we will as a nation.

Little do people realize & recall about the bloodied faction rife past of Dr.Reddy and the way he single handedly struck down the party organisation leaving behind lilliputians as remains.

That he has cleverly wooed vote banks and grew his stature and kick started a few generous programs on development for the downtrodden is the legacy he leaves behind.

There is no denial that a few lakhs benefited from his good work and a few made lakhs . But is this enough. 60 years after Independence dont we voters think that what was delivered is expected by default in any case...?

The image on top should rather read as "Congress is coming to govern" rather and take the seat of power.

If vote banks and seat of power is a sole measure then West Bengal ruled by the Left Government for more than half of India's post Independence Years should be the most prosperous or Dr.Karunanidhi's 50 year political career brought at the least drinking water to Chennai instead of tax payer bought Color TVs..

Lets Imagine an India beyond our nascent 60 plus years of Post Independence and levitate the benchmark of greatness of the Indian Political leader. After all we had such Gaints as leaders who won us our treasured Independence.

Need to move from A 2 A to next A to B

Ambani & Ambani need to look next to Ambani & Customers & Shareholder minus government. Here is a reflection of one of Indias sharpest yet reasonable media minds. Ladies & Gentlemen what follow are thoughts from Vir Sanghvi - Read On .these make sense..only that I altered the heading to a plan Ambanis instead of Anil.

Why is Ambanis headline news day after day, week after week? (NEW)

Posted By: Vir Sanghvi | Posted On: 15 Aug 2009 12:12 PM | Views: 25766

Whenever people tell me that India has changed after the liberalization of the 1990s, that business is now independent of government and that India’s industrialists now get on with the job quietly, I always say, ”Well, up to a point…”

Older readers may remember a business-politics battle that dominated the second half of the 1980s. Dhirubhai Ambani was emerging as one of India’s top industrialists. While many people reckoned that he had bent the rules and paid off politicians to get there, only one industrialist really took him on.

That was Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing. Because Wadia had close links with politicians in all parties (he knew BJP leaders well, he had friends in the Congress, etc.) and in the media (he was something of a godson to Ramnath Goenka) he was able to put Dhirubhai on the defensive.

The Ambanis retaliated with a counter-attack that rocked the foundations of India’s government. By forging letters which Amitabh Bachchan delivered to his friend Rajiv Gandhi, they were able to convince the government that Wadia and finance minister V.P. Singh were really targeting Rajiv. The government went after Nusli Wadia in response. Wadia joined up with V.P. Singh to defeat the government.

Eventually, Rajiv Gandhi did lose the election, largely because of a coalition created by anti-Reliance forces and Nusli Wadia made it his mission to destroy Reliance.

You might think that 20 years later, everything has changed. And certainly, Nusli Wadia seems to have buried the hatchet with the Ambanis and gone on to find success in other fields (biscuits, property, etc.).

But looking at the way the Ambani battle has raged over the last couple of months, I am beginning to wonder if India has really changed that much. In this version of the story, Mukesh Ambani, with his Congress links, is playing the Dhirubhai Ambani role. Anil Ambani is playing the Nusli Wadia part. Like Wadia, he has friends in the BJP (he thinks Narendra Modi should be Prime Minister), in UP politics (just as V.P. Singh backed Wadia so Mulayam Singh is backing Anil) and the Congress.

Just as Wadia was consumed by his mission to destroy Dhirubhai, Anil seems consumed by a desire to destroy Mukesh. Wadia was constantly launching salvos against Reliance just as Anil does these days. Wadia would attack Congress ministers for their closeness to Reliance; Anil is doing the same. Wadia would hire such lawyers as Ram Jethmalani to fight Reliance in the courts; Anil has done the same thing.

And the impact on India in the 21st century is not that dissimilar from the impact on India in the 1980s. Already, the papers are obsessed with this battle – it gets far more coverage than it deserves. Already, we are looking at ministers in the government and deciding who is on which side. (“Shinde is in Anil’s pocket, Mukesh knows Pranab well,” etc.)

Anil has done what no industrialist since Nusli Wadia has dared to do: he has openly taken on the government of India and he has made no secret of his links with the Opposition, allowing Mulayam Singh to disrupt Parliament on his behalf.

All this is ostensibly a battle over rates charged for gas. I don’t know who is in the right in this case: Mukesh or Anil. My friend Tony Jesudasan who represents Anil took me out to lunch and made out a case for Anil. I was totally convinced till my friend Niira Radia, who represents Mukesh, gave me the other side, which frankly, seemed just as convincing to my inexpert ears.

The truth is that the vast majority of Indians are not qualified to judge the rights and wrongs of this very complicated issue. It’s a matter that judges and top lawyers should settle away from the glare of publicity.

So here’s my point: why should the people of India be expected to judge who is right or wrong? We are rarely asked for our opinions on corporate battles. And when other companies have a problem with a ministry, this rarely merits much attention.

"When a corporate war begins to emerge as the biggest news story in a country that faces so many problems, then you know that something has gone badly wrong."
Why then is Anil Ambani headline news day after day, week after week? Why is Parliament disrupted because of the battle? Why is the government of India being forced to defend itself at public fora?

Who are these people, anyway? And why do the Ambanis think that all of us should take sides in their battle? Or that we should care what happens to them?

Our problem, I fear, is that we have forgotten the lessons of the 1980s. In that decade, we allowed Nusli Wadia and Dhirubhai to turn their corporate war into a national issue. We allowed corporate greed and financial manipulation to threaten the very foundations of the Indian government.

Nothing good came out of that experience. When the dust cleared, the corporate situation was exactly what it had been before the fight began. Dhirubhai continued to rise. And Wadia continued to be edged out of the textile business.

But the rest of us all lost out. Rajiv Gandhi’s mandate was frittered away because his ministers took sides in a corporate battle. The Indian middle class was conned into backing V.P. Singh, who gave us a few disastrous months of governance, leaving us with a Mandal legacy. The bureaucracy was corrupted and spoilt. The media were forced to take partisan stands.

My worry is that history is repeating itself. When a corporate war begins to emerge as the biggest news story in a country that faces so many problems, then you know that something has gone badly wrong.

Worse still, the rest of the world has begun to question the India story. Last week, the Financial Times (London) featured the Ambani dispute and wrote that if oligarchs could create so much havoc in India, then there was something wrong with our system. It made the familiar point about how India’s natural resources were being hijacked by oligarchs.

So, here’s my advice to the Ambanis: I like you guys. I’ve known you for a long time. But please fight your battles elsewhere. They have nothing to do with us. And you are damaging India with your media campaigns and with your political friends who disrupt Parliament on your behalf.

And here’s my advice to the politicians: Don’t make the same mistakes all over again. Are you Samajwadis or Ambaniwadis? For India’s sake, let the Ambanis solve their problems on their own.

Just do the jobs we elected you to do. Because your loyalty should be to the people of India not to Mukesh, Anil, or any other industrialist.


It is us you represent.

_______________


source : http://www.virsanghvi.com

Line of Control -Seal it once and for all.

I simply loved the way this man thinks on this subject and made it a point to feature this for my friends

The secret life of foreign secretaries
28 Jun 2009, 0024 hrs IST, M J Akbar

Secret extra-terrestrial sources, with reliable knowledge of the future, have revealed the full text of the dialogue between the Indian Foreign

Secretary (IFS) and the Pakistan Foreign Secretary (PFS) on the sidelines of the next non-aligned summit. We offer this exclusive to our readers:

IFS: Hi! All well, my friend?

PFS: (Shrugs) Is sarcasm your normal opening gambit, or do you reserve it for the Indo-Pak dialogue?

IFS: We don’t do sarcasm in Delhi, not with a monsoon lost in transit.

PFS: You could have fooled me. As for all being well vis-a-vis the Taliban, read the papers. Your chaps getting on well with that little war against the Naxalites?

IFS: Well, at least our intelligence agencies didn’t fund the Naxalites to kill innocents and blow up hotels in Pakistan.

PFS: Actually, we are quite good at that ourselves; don’t need foreign expertise. Frankly, the Taliban were a terrible investment. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you...

IFS: The bite hasn’t got septic, has it?

PFS: Well... shall I be honest?

IFS: That would be such a pleasant change.

PFS: Very droll... You do seem to have acquired a splendid sense of humour since we last met. Very nice. Not in the manual for foreign secretaries, is it?

IFS: Ha ha. I take your point, however. Every country in our heavenly subcontinent is trapped in a desperate civil war — apart maybe from dear little Bhutan. Time for a little cooperation, then?

PFS: Precisely what I was thinking! We always have been the biggest poverty pit in the world — that’s where the Naxalites come from, isn’t it? Now we are also the bloodiest.

IFS: Not to mention the blood of innocents. Your only consistent export to India is terrorists. You ramp up the supply or scale it down depending on your political GDP requirements. You got a bit defensive after Mumbai, but you’ve put them back in business, haven’t you?

PFS: You give us too much credit. These militias have their own agenda. And unless you settle the root cause, Kashmir...

IFS: It seems to have escaped your notice that for the world — including your ally America — that this ‘‘root cause’’ argument has long crossed its sell-by date. You want to get stuck on this, we might as well use the rest of our time discussing which movie you last saw.

PFS: Saw a sexy picture of Angelina Jolie the other day in one of your newspapers! Wow! Our newspapers are so vegetarian compared to yours. It’s those mullahs, I’m afraid. Will neither have fun themselves nor let us have a bit on the side.

IFS: Oh, we’re getting some moral police as well, but our elections sort them out, so that’s a relief. You are good at changing the subject, my friend, but won’t work. Why do you get collective amnesia when it comes to Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Prof Hafeez Mohammad Saeed and his associate Colonel Nazir Ahmed? They were released because you ‘‘forgot’’ to include al-Qaida in your list of terrorist organizations! The lawyer you deputed for Sarbjit Singh ‘‘forgot’’ to appear in court. Forgot! Do lawyers get paid extra for forgetting?

PFS: Ah, the familiar blame game. Why don’t we move on? We are ready for demilitarized zones on both sides of the border — say five miles on either side. That would send such a massive signal of peace, and take your Army off the backs of the Kashmiri people as well. You don’t want me to dwell on that bit, do you, after Shopian? DMZs could enable Kashmiris to share electricity, get on with trade and increase travel on basis of special travel permits.

IFS: All so convenient: our Army moves away so that your surrogate militias and self-styled jihadis can breathe more easily. Simultaneously, you want us to dilute symbols of Indian sovereignty wherever possible. But you will not compromise on your absolutist stand. Why don’t we declare the Line of Control the border and really get on with life? That would close the chapter, and bring peace.

PFS: Peace! What a brilliant thought! But we can’t accept the LoC as the border. It would only mean that for 60 years we have fought for nothing.

IFS: I know it, and you know it, that the LoC is the only answer. The rest is keeping the ball in play to fool the world if not to fool ourselves.

PFS: (Gently) That’s not our decision, is it?

IFS: True.

PFS: (Smiles) Tell me, how long will it take if our political masters really want peace?

IFS: About six minutes.

PFS: And how long if we keep talking the way we did?

IFS: Another 60 years.

PFS: Touche! See you at the next meeting

Catalysing India from Point A to Point B