Ghulam Nabi Azad jolts Congress; Hemant Soren in knot; Inconclusive Pegasus probe
Opinion Watch
Ghulam Nabi Azad severed his over 50-year-old ties with Congress, and in a parting shot he wrote that the party is collapsing under the weight of Rahul Gandhi.
Predictably, Congress brought a full battery of its leaders to charge a counter-attack, with same missiles fired at the veteran from Jammu and Kashmir that he’s an ungrateful person.
Indeed, Azad should have quit Congress on the day Rahul Gandhi tore the Cabinet note at the Press Club of India. That was one of the reasons which riled Azad.
But politics is all about striking at an opportune time to maximize the gains. Azad had no future in Congress left. The Bharatiya Janata Party offers better prospects in exchange for a Muslim face crutch in Jammu and Kashmir to walk into the restive valley.
The Indian Express and the Times of India have commented on the top news of Friday.
IE advises Congress to listen to Azad. The daily has given a big chunk of space to Azad on its Op-Ed page to reproduce the five-page letter to working president of Congress Sonia Gandhi.
The daily has faulted response of Congress leaders against Azad, calling them “narrow and dispiriting”.
The daily also recalled Sharad Pawar’s quitting Congress on foreign issues, while arguing that the critique of the Maharashtra strongman was about the institution. It notes that Azad’s critique in contrast is about inner life of Congress.
ToI claims in its Edit that Azad’s quitting of Congress is a final warning for the party, attributing the veteran’s walking out to the organization developing cold feet on the presidential election.
The daily also brings in the reports that the Gandhis wanted Ashok Gehlot to become the party president to argue that schism is too deep among the leaders to accept a non-Gandhi as the head of the organisation.
The bottom line, however, remains that Congress is no more in sync with changing India.
Hemant Soren in knot
History is repeating in Jharkhand. Also, proving the old saying ‘like father, like son’ true, the incumbent Chief Minister Hemant Soren is also set to lose his membership of the state Assembly in office of profit case. His father Shibu Soren too had faced the same fate.
Worse is the fact that many of the members of the Shibu Soren family are embroiled in such land, mine cases, which reflect poorly on the state of affairs of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and also the state.
The Hindu in its Edit has called upon Soren to quit forthwith.
“The awarding of a mining lease to himself was a brazen act of self-service, misuse of office and breach of people’s trust,” the daily commented.
The Chennai-headquartered daily turned its focus on Soren showing the middle finger at probity in public life.
“One cannot also not take note of the innocence of his thought that such a transparent act of corruption would go unnoticed or unpunished — reminiscent of his father Shibu Soren going to a bank and depositing the cash he had received as bribe,” stated the daily.
The case against Soren pertain to him awarding a mining lease to himself as a Minister for Mines in 2021.
Inconclusive Pegasus probe
India proves time and again that the country has a few clear ailments which include selective amnesia and short-lived furor. The idea of the audacity that the government agencies can snoop onto the people without any authorization hit hard the popular conscience for a few weeks only to fade away soon from the public memories as if it belonged to the medieval era.
Deccan Herald in its lead Edit has noted that the Supreme Court indeed tried to go to the root of the Pegasus scandal, which remains inconclusive, while adding that the BJP has “disingenuously sought to portray this to the public as proof that the Narendra Modi government did no wrong in the matter of the spyware being used to snoop on citizens, and the court’s comments as a ‘clean chit’ to the government”.
Retired Justive RV Raveendran Committee appointed by the apex court did state that five of the 29 devices which were examined had been infected by malware. However, the committee wasn’t sure if the malware was Pegasus.
“The government has refused to answer in public, in parliament and in court the question whether it had bought the spyware from the Israeli company or not. It had cited national security as the reason for its refusal, though the court had clearly said that it could not invoke that bogey on every issue,” added DH in its Edit.
The people in the country would need to know that the national security clause cannot be invoked on a daily basis to trample upon their basis rights, including privacy.
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