Prime Minister who ??

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

I hope you wouldn't mind me calling you thus. I came to know from Wikipedia that you are the Prime Minister of India and thus enlightenment dawned on me that my nation has one.

Prime Ministers are supposed to be the most prime of the ministers that rule the country. The last time that I came across one was  Mr.Vajpayee as I distinctly remember my nation being made proud by his announcement that India had blasted three atomic weapons. The next time was when he brought in the visionary 'Golden Quadrilaeral' project. Since then I have not had the opportunity to know that I had a Prime Minister as I have not been able to see anything progressive happening in the country at the behest of yourseld that would make an ordinary citizen proud of.

Well, not wishing to dwell too much on the previous PM, let me quickly revert back to your tenure.

I would like to remember something from your tenure. Apologies for stating this, but the only things that crop up as soon as I think of your tenure are the following :

1. Natwar Singh episode and the kickbacks from the 'Oil for Money' programme of Saddam husseing government. Your then external affairs minister was getting money from another government. Well, getting money from another government was nothing new for your party and I very well know that.

2. H.R.Bharadwaj, the then Law Minister giving a clearance to the Bank of England to de-freeze the accounts of Quattorchchi, the friend of Sonia. And immediately Quattorochchi withrew all his money - needless to say that the money was the bofors kickbacks money. I distinctly remember your statement then that an innocent person should not be troubled too much. These happened even when the CBI had a red corner notice against Quattotochchi. And immediately after that statement of yours, the CBI closed the case. 

3. The shoddy treatment meted out to Dr.Abdul Kalam, the then outgoing President and your backing of the current President despite all the cases pending against her and the RBI's Liquidation notice to her bank.

4. The eqally shoddy treatment meted out to the former Chief Election Commissioner's recommendation regarding Mr.Navin Chawla. Even before the President had an opportunity to go through the report from the former CEC, your law minister said that the recommendation would be rejected. And all tall talk of constitutional propriety ?

5. Your cabinet ministers speak out of turn in every given opportunity while at the same time speaking ill about another ministry - recent examples being Jairam Ramesh chiding the Infrastructure ministry and Infrastrucure minister Kamal Nath ridiculing Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission.

6. Your Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has all the time in the world to look after BCCI and IPL that he doesn't have the time to concentrate on rising prices and decreasing agricultural produce. Yet he continues to be your Agriculture Minister.

You have been blamed of inaction in every sphere be it th rising prices, the Kashmir conundrum, the Maoist menace, the China issue et al.

Wait a minute. Do you know that there is a state called Arunachal Pradesh that is supposed to be an integral part of India ? Do you know that China considers it her own integral part ? Are you aware that China does not issue visas to enter China for the Indian bureaucrats from Arunachal because it treats the people of Arunachal to be their own citizens  and therefore issues only stapled visas that are not endoresed in the passport ? Have you made atleast one statement on this ?

Additionally for the people of Kashmir ( Indian part), China does not issue visas endorsed in the passport and it just issues a stapled visa. Are you aware of this at all? I have been waitng for the last 6 years to hear from you on this.

Can you issue stapled visa to people from Tibet thus making a stand on the Tibet issue? Probably you would need to ask Sonia who in any case wouldn't know anything at all as she considers Italy her home even now.

The last person to acknowledge that China is a real threat to India was George Fernandes. Have you atleast understood the magnitude of the problem ?

Despite my best efforts, I am not able to remember any other positive achievement of yours during the 6 years that you have been in office so far.

I have explicitly refrained from writing about the CWG, Adarsh and 2G scams as enough has already been written and said about them. And it is too depressing to write only about scams and let-downs on the part of the government.

What bothers me, as a concerned citizen, is your spectacular stiff upper lip on all these. You have not spoken on any of the scams at all. Either your ministerial colleagues have said something ( I am restraining myself from using expletives here as I still have some sense of honour left for the office of the PM ) or your coalition partners have conjured-up some verbage neither of which has helped soothe my highly tensed nerves.

Neither do you exercise control on who your ministerial colleagues are nor do you seem to have control about what your ministers say.

The Radia tapes don't even mention your name in any ministerial allocation exercise. As a citizen partially literate about the ' it is the Prime Minister's prerogative to choose his minister' kind of constitutional stuff, I am constrained to ask this question : Do you realize that you are the Prime Minister of this country and the constitutional obligation to follow and uphold the constitution of the nation ?

Any ordinary worker would have quit his position / job if he would have found that he would not be able to perform his duties due to interferences etc. Are you aware that you too have that option ?

I am not as academically qualified or as intellctually bent as you are. Hence I would request you to correct me if I would have attributed anything above that should not have been attributed to you.

But I  have a confession to make. When you had assumed power in 2004, I had seen that your academic qualifications had all the permutations and combinations of the English alphabet. I had a hope that under such an academic personality, India would scale new heights in many positive aspects. But after six years of your two consecutive terms,  the only sphere in which India seems to have scored high is in corruption - corruption of un-imaginable proportions. What a fantastic feat !

In any case I have a great admiration for you. That is because of the following: When the 2G episode was unfolding itself and the Supreme Court was making you look like a school boy who had failed in all subjects yet appeared in the First-Rank list, there was this party conference of yours where Sonia was making a scathing attack on corruption. You remained stoic and calm and composed while I would have burst out in laughter on hearing what Sonia had said. Your ability to control the un-controllable laughter amidst such a hilarious joke is certainly a quality that I would want to emulate.

I don't expect to get a reply for this letter. Probably you would be too busy covering the tracks on 2G along with Kapil Sibal.

Wishing you a happy republic day when I expect to hear another version of the Presidential Speech of last year - equally lacking in lustre and equally boring as your Independence Day speeches.

I remain,

In eternal wait for a PM of action,

A concerned Citizen of India.