M D Nalapat
The
Ides of March proved fatal to Gaius Julius Ceasar more than two
thousand years ago, when he was felled by a large group of conspirators
in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Several of those that stabbed him were
his closest friends, people who may have been expected to defend rather
than to murder him. These days, within Delhi and Mumbai, a similar
group of conspirators has been active over the past eleven months,
seeking to take away not his life but his job from Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh. And as in the case of Ceasar, many of those scripting
his downfall are from his own party, and claim to be his ardent backers,
often going before television cameras to “damn him with faint praise”.
Deja vu! A quarter-century ago, many of the same group that are nowadays active against Manmohan Singh were expending considerable effort on unseating his mentor, then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. The Congress Party’s second non-Nehru Prime Minister (after the short-lived 1964-66 tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri had incurred the anger of loyalists of the family that owned the party, by his refusal to step down after two years in office and hand over charge to a faithful retainer, Kunwar (Prince) Arjun Singh, who had been Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh when the Bhopal disaster took place, and who made arrangements for the safe escape of Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson from Bhopal. Despite the fact that it was on his watch that the world’s biggest industrial disaster took place, his 100% loyalty to the Nehru family ensured that Arjun Singh was given his fill of important jobs, ranging from chief ministership to Union Cabinet status and also Governor of important states.
