By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
A rail accident of bizarre type took place hours after the Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi presented his Budget on March 14. This time the ‘casualty’ was the Railway Minister himself. Moments after he parroted ‘safety concern’ throughout his budget speech, his party supremo and Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, fired or rather faxed a letter to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking him to immediately sack Trivedi. The latter realized how unsafe he himself was, but that was too late.
As a replacement she suggested the name of Mukul Roy, who had served as a minister of state in the Rail Bhawan till Trivedi stepped in on July 12 last year, that is, just two days after the oldest express train of the country, the Kalka Mail, met with an accident near Fatehpur in UP killing more than 70.
But if Mamata overshot all the red signals and rammed her own train into disaster, none else but the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Congress High Command––which allowed all these things to happen––too are no less responsible. What kind of control room they were managing? Why was the overworked––or worked up––driver of the train, Mamata Banerjee, not replaced much earlier?
After all Mamata is known for her behaviour, and many in Bengal Congress had openly been critical of her. Deepa Das Munshi, the Congress MP, is one among them. A couple of Trinamool MPs too are upset over the way she is running the state government. No need to highlight the Left’s view about her.
She and Jayalalithaa had a history of causing non-stop trouble to the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when their parties were with the NDA.
However, the first time Mamata landed Manmohan in serious trouble was when she presented her first Railway Budget under UPA on July 3, 2009. She questioned the figures of profit earned by the Railways during the five year tenure of her predecessor, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and promised that the Ministry would come out with a White Paper. The media, perhaps suffering from Lalu-phobia, did not pay much attention to this serious aberration. Many even in UPA thought that this would be the best way to further cut to size Lalu Yadav, whose party in the May 2009 election ended up disastrously with just four seats in Lok Sabha.
The railway ministry did come up with the White Paper in December that year claiming that the Railways in the previous five years did earn the profit but that figure was much less than what Lalu Yadav had been claiming in the repeated Budgets.
But there is nothing like Lalu Yadav’s Budget or Dinesh Trivedi’s Budget. Budget is a government’s document and as the leader of the cabinet it is not the Railway Minister but the Prime Minister who is responsible for it. So whatever Mamata did was not against Lalu Yadav, but against Manmohan under whom she was then serving as the Railway Minister. Yet the Prime Minister remained a mute spectator.
Similarly, her express order to get Dinesh Trivedi sacked is a direct challenge to the Prime Minister. How can a chief minister ask a Prime Minister to remove the Railway Minister? Is there any such provision in Indian Constitution?
Manmohan realized the 2009 mistake much later when in the last week of January 2010 the then Cabinet Secretary issued an order that from now on no ministry can come out with White Paper without the cabinet nod. But by then the damage had been done. By the time Mamata completed one year or so in Rail Bhawan dozens of major rail disasters took place killing several hundreds––a couple of them in her own state, Bengal.
Mamata saw Marxist hands in them. Not only that when a complaint came up that a cockroach was found in the food supplied by the railway canteen she shouted back: It is the handiwork of the Marxists.
Many in the UPA simply looked the other way round as they all wanted Marxists to be thrown out of power in West Bengal. They did not realize that Mamata had embarrassed Manmohan on the White Paper issue too and has the potential to do something more.
What the Congress leadership failed to appreciate is that cutting the political stature of opponents is one thing and indulging in hysterical behaviour quite other.
Today even those who are extremely critical of Dinesh Trivedi’s Rail Budget stand behind him simply because this is not the way the politics is run. After all it is Prime Minister’s prerogative who should be the minister and who not. Nobody is prepared to accept that Mamata was not aware of the hike in fare till the Budget was announced.
When she was he Railway Minister the number of accidents increased many times from her predecessor’s tenure. This was simply because she stopped fixing responsibility on the officials and employees. Rather than she would end up blaming Marxists. This was bound to create disobedience and anarchy in rank and file of the 14 lakh strong Railway machinery. A feeling crept into them that nobody would be held accountable for such tragedies.
Similarly, when a rape took place in a moving vehicle in Kolkata last month she proclaimed that it is a conspiracy to defame her government. This gave a clear signal to the criminals that the state government is not going to do anything to them. They took full advantage of the situation and a number of rape incidents followed.
As Mamata is in the habit of overshooting all the red signals she overran the foreign ministry too when she refused to accompany Manmohan Singh to Dhaka to attend talks on sharing of Teesta water. Left in lurch the poor Prime Minister had to adopt the policy of Ekla Chalo Re and went to that country with egg on the face.