This pertains to the perceptive picture that T N Ninan paints of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government (“Beyond the mid-life crisis,” October 29). Manmohan Singh has seldom been short on ideas and enactments; the UPA’s Achilles’ heel has been the tepid implementation of strategies. Singh staked the survival of the UPA-I government on the Indo-US nuclear deal, but almost three years later the benefits of the deal are nowhere in sight. The government’s social legislations on the prevention of domestic violence against women and employment of child labour, and the protection to senior citizens from wayward relatives won applause, but have they changed the conditions on the ground?
Its ambitious Rs 1,000-crore National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is mired in malpractices. On certain matters, the government suffers from paralysis of perseverance — labour law reforms and check on corruption and unproductive subsidies, for example. If the government has not collapsed, it is because the opposition, too, is in disarray. BJP is undecided about its secular role in the new polity and has a surfeit of prime ministerial aspirants. The Left is not prepared to get rid of the albatross of a dead ideology and the regional parties are steeped in narrow vision. This may be good news for the Congress but a bad one for the country. How long can a democracy survive with drifting rulers and weak opposition?
Y G Chouksey, Pune
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