Thus, while the first decision is a serious reflection —if not a formal indictment— on the functioning or non-functioning of the cabinet headed by Dr Manmohan Singh in matters relating to the award of the licences, the other two decisions need not cause any discomfiture to the government for the present.
One would have expected the government and the Congress to accept without any attempt at rationalisation or prevarication the negative implications of the SC verdict and set in motion correctives by way of action against ministers responsible for the conscious distortion of the formulation and implementation of the telecom policy.
Instead of doing so, the government and the Congress have initiated an exercise to claim that there were no policy misdeeds on the part of the government and that the vitiation of the process for the award of the licences was due to the government inheriting a policy—since found arbitrary and unconstitutional—from the previous government headed by Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Since we are in the midst of the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress would be committing a hara-kiri if the government were to accept responsibility for the policy misdeeds pointed out by the SC bench. An exercise in rationalisation and prevarication, however unfortunate, was therefore inevitable.
The only way of making the government and the Congress pay a price for their established misdeeds is by making this an electoral issue. The implications of the SC decision have to be explained to the rural voters in a simple language with simple arguments which they can understand. No amount of TV debates in high-flown English with rhetorical arguments and flourishes will make the rural voters realise the gravity of the misdeeds of the government and the Congress Party.
Instead of refashioning their election campaign in an appropriate manner to convince the rural voters, the spokesmen of all opposition parties have been busy scoring TV debating points which is not going to have any impact on the rural voters. The opposition committed a similar mistake after the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai. Instead of taking the sins of commission and omission of the govt directly to the people, they took them to the TV studios and anchors. The result: No impact on the election results.
The Congress is calculating on the opposition committing a similar mistake this time. It suits the Congress to keep the debate confined to the TV studios. TV debates have some impact on urban, but not rural viewers.
If the opposition does not effectively exploit the issue in the election campaign, the Congress is hoping to avoid a rout in the elections and that could be the end of the government’s and the Congress party’s discomfiture.
In a democracy, the proof of the pudding is in the voting. The Congress understands this better than the opposition.