How the Politics of Corruption Will Ensure a Third Term for Dr Man Mohan Singh as India’s Prime Minister.
Monumental ignorance of its politicians like Akin, Palin, Ryan and Romney, exposed through their statements, shape public opinion and the course of the presidential election in the US.
In India, the ignorance of the electorate and their inability to grasp complex issues, which the political opposition try to capitalize to portray Prime Minister Dr Man Mohan Singh as India's most corrupt leader, are likely to get him elected for a third term, despite his reticence to fend off unethical and motivated charges of corruption.
In all fairness, the eighty years old Singh, who boosted India's growth rate by bold fiscal action and little ado, must be looking forward to a quiet life at the end of his term ending in 2014. However, the bizarre Indian "politics of allegations of corruption" is shaping and fostering a third term of incumbency on this reluctant economist, who the rest of the world look towards as a Guru and an honest man.
This favor will be done to him by the BJP, the main political opposition to the Congress party headed by Sonia Gandhi. The BJP tried to portray the soft spoken Singh as a "weak Prime Minister" by personal attacks in the last election and failed miserably to convince the "ignorant" Indians who promptly elected him and his party for a second term.
However the BJP refuses to learn from the experience and has mounted another campaign, asking for the resignation of Dr Singh on allegations of favoring private investors, hoping to force and benefit from an early election. This time their ploy is based on a disputed report of India's Comptroller and Auditor General, who has a penchant to interpret Government's policy decisions as reasons for assumed loss of billions of dollars.
Dr Singh himself is to blame for his plight. It was his brave admission, as India's finance minister that the country was nearly bankrupt and can't survive without opening its markets to foreign investment, and his bold fiscal steps which lead to the recent spurt in growth of the Indian economy.
This growth has lead to unprecedented demand for electric power and the need to expedite mining of vast resources of coal required to generate power, the same logic behind his push for the nuclear deal.
His government's attempts to expedite the availability of coal by auctioning the mines which hit legal obstacles and objection from states owning the mines, have lead to the new accusations of presumptive losses and corruption, which Dr Singh has contested with strong defense, politically supported by Sonia Gandhi and her Congress party.
However, despite the smear campaign of the BJP, like the complicated nuclear deal, which was the contentious issue projected against Dr Singh in the last election, the subject of alleged corruption in spectrum distribution and coal mining will have little bearing on the voting priorities of rural India. The majority of the Indian population can hardly understand the complicated issues or really bother about them. For example, A Raja, a minister accused and sent to Jail in the 2G spectrum case was actually received with adoration by huge masses of his electorate, on his return from the imprisonment.
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