There are again strains in the coalition. While Congress president Saif-u-Din Soz has accused NC of not doing enough to empower the panchayats, the union minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has blamed the government for a slow pace of the development works. This has provoked an equally trenchant response from the NC with its impetuous additional general secretary Mustafa Kamal terming these accusations as unwarranted. The sudden Congress onslaught has also taken CM Omar Abdullah aback who has now warned that the repeated public utterances by the Congress against the government would affect the coalition. Omar has counseled the Congress leaders to take up their issues with the government in the Coordination Committee. The current rumblings within the coalition is no great cause of alarm and constitutes a routine mode of conducting politics in a democratic space. More so, in the case of Congress-NC coalition which despite an intermittent doze of unease has gone along well so far. And at times, when things looked like exceeding the limit, the High Command has stepped in to get the situation back on rails. But if now the senior Congress leaders are talking, do their accusations, which no doubt are of serious nature, merit attention beyond their politics. They do. True, Panchayats, dubbed as one of the major achievements of this government remain far from being empowered. And the record on the development isn’t easily visible on the ground if not an outright failure.  But the real question arises whether the Congress, being a coalition partner, can absolve itself of its own role in the government’s non-performance. Does it really lack the levers of political influence to goad the government in a desired and desirable direction? No, this is not the case. The coalition primarily comprises these two parties and without the support of the either, it will cease to function in one day. And to rub it in, if the Congress can and also get away with the folly of its senior minister helping his son copy in the examination, what makes it claim such a unilateral moral high ground on other matters of governance.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 IST