Sonia and Advani War against Hawala Raja’s.

Sonia and Advani War against Hawala Raja’s.

The Delhi plenary is being held at a time when the Congress-led government is facing a series of corruption scandals and controversies. While the political resolution and the statement marking the culmination of 125 years of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi on Sunday19-12-2010 announced a multi-pronged war on corruption and directed ministers and partymen to tackle the menace head-on.


The Congress plenary, which met against the backdrop of 2G, CWG and Adarsh, was turned by Sonia into a platform to claim that the Congress — which has recently been rocked by a series of scams would actually lead the fight against corruption. She sought to give this fight an institutional character by calling for fast-tracking corruption cases against politicians and other public servants, abolishing the government’s discretionary powers to allocate land (which she dubbed as the top source of corruption), transparent auctioning of mining leases and state funding of elections.


It’s perhaps not a coincidence that land allocation and mining leases are two controversies that are also plaguing the main opposition party, BJP, especially in Karnataka. Hence, Sonia was not only exhorting her party to cleanse itself, but was also opening up a front against the BJP which she lambasted for its personal attack on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the 2G scam.


Sonia Gandhi’s five-point agenda for probity in public life included transparency in public procurements and protection to whistleblowers. She told partymen ‘‘simplicity, restraint and austerity must be our chosen way’’, asked them to ‘‘avoid vulgar displays of wealth and waste’’, and lamented that austerity couldn’t be made into a law.


In Chennai on 19-12-2010 Advani recalls Emergency days in hailing Sezhiyan former M.P. He said “We live in the dangerous world of spectrum, where people in power want only Lakshmi, not Saraswathi.” “Unless the whole system is able to combat corruption effectively there won’t be any peace in the country,” he said, after releasing Shah Commission Report: Lost, and regained, compiled and edited by former parliamentarian Era Sezhiyan, which exposed the dark days of Emergency. “In the past few months several constitutional institutions and the media have functioned in a manner as to highlight one single issue (corruption) that is vexing the whole nation. The media has covered the events of the past two months right from the Commonwealth Games to the 2G Spectrum to the housing scam in Maharashtra in a manner as to highlight how corruption has become a serious malady in the country,” he said.


Taking about the dark days of Emergency, he said once as an MP he along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and another leader, were immediately asked to come down to Bangalore for a parliamentary committee meeting. “We thought we would enjoy the cool breeze of Bangalore as we were having an extreme summer in Delhi. But as soon as we landed in Bangalore, we were arrested. They jailed us for 19 months and I had never thought we would enjoy the ‘cool breeze’ of Bangalore for such a long time. That was the horror Emergency got us in,” he said.


Blaming the Indira Gandhi government for bringing democracy to the brink of extinction, he said India’s great strength was democracy. “Both India and China are now superpowers. But what they lack is democracy, which is our strength.”


Soniaji will be remembered by the people only when she has proven her statement by arresting the culprits in 2g and other scams.”A vision without execution is just as another illusion.”