Backseat Driving India

I am a happily married man.

Does this mean that I and my wife do not disagree? We disagree on most things yet we are not uncomfortable with our differences, save one. The way I drive a car is the subject of most of our disagreements.

I have often offered to let her drive or use our chauffeur. However she insists that I drive in a manner that suits her expectations. The only problem is that in 30 years I still have not figured out what exactly it is that I must do. Backseat driving is common all over the world. No one is happy and the results are often disappointing and sometimes dangerous.

The situation is not restricted to couples alone but also to organisations and even nations.

We Indians face the same situation in our nation's decade old leadership.

Though not husband and wife, they make a political couple. Dr. Manmohan Singh and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi*. Sonia is a person completely lacking in personal merit, therefore not surprisingly the puppet of a group of powerful people and lobbies with vested interests. She has become the president of the Congress party by default under freak circumstances.

Manmohan Singh hand chosen by Sonia Gandhi and plonked into the Prime Minister's chair is a pliant and spineless man, this makes him the perfect puppet. Being intelligent he however has a mind of his own which he occasionally uses only to be overruled or simply ignored by one and all.

The office of the Prime Minister is not something trivial. Sonia and Manmohan by their acts of omission and commission have damaged very seriously India's immediate and long term social, and economic health.

It is said that a person with one watch knows the time, but the person with two watches never knows the real time. So it is with leadership. Two incompetent and unsuitable people coming together has only compounded the tragedy of incompetent individual leadership. Now who is in charge is any ones guess.

Imagine that India is a bus with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the driver. Sitting behind him and leaning on him is Sonia a person without any knowledge, experience or competency in driving or the rules of driving, indulging in direct back seat driving.

Further visualise that Sonia herself is now joined by a group of manipulative cunning advisors with their own individual agendas. Now load the space immediately behind the driver's space with very strange coalition partners each forcibly wanting to hijack the bus through their strange individual routes towards even stranger destinations.

Sitting at the rear of the bus are you and me, and a billion plus passengers, some panic stricken, some amused and many appearing carefree. This is the great Indian political circus, immensely entertaining and nation threatening.

Now with the imposed entry of the inexperienced and rather immature Rahul Gandhi into the bus and his occasional grabbing of the steering wheel, and the near total abdication of Manmohan Singh from driving, the circus ride promises to get wilder and even more dangerously close to the abyss.

Maybe this is a good time to start praying.

* Sonia Gandhi and her family are not related to Mahatma Gandhi in any way.

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