The Union Government should come clean over the Pegasus fiasco claiming its credibility rather than remaining calm. On whose orders and instructions did the Israeli spyware conduct mass surveillance? Why only those critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime were tagged, targeted and tarnished, ranging from prominent political figures like Rahul Gandhi to psephologist Prashant Kishor.
The central government should come out with a statement and not a sentence on why it was allowed to let go as this controversy has erupted at a time when the establishment is itself finding itself at a weak wicket, from mismanagement of a pandemic to anxieties over social, economic and political despair, GDP, to brewing divides between regions, classes and communities.
Rather than closing the gap, it is only getting wide with each passing day with PM Modi involving himself in electoral exercises enhancing and enriching his political party’s prospects and possibilities in the eyes of common and ordinary.
COVID vaccines should have been made readily available, but they came at a price after many innocent lives were lost in the second wave. Posters and pamphlets acknowledging PMs efforts could have waited for a while as for the damage and dent to his office.
I personally maintain that PM Modi should address the honourable members of parliament on the house floor, calling for a committee to look into the excesses of the Pegasus snooping along with the irregularities discovered in the Rafale deal. Let things be out in the open rather than being debated and defeated with one point of opinion muscling the other.
Modi Ji is anything but a high spirited sensible statesman fully apt in painting a picture primarily separating from being an RSS pracharak to mukhiya who is always willing to make hard choices and decisions, leaving aside vote bank considerations.
So what if his constituents calm and compose themselves — demonetisation and COVID fiasco are illustrations of how he has chosen to go out in the open — resting contemplations aside.