By Badri Raina

The campaign mounted by forces, homegrown and foreign, to discredit, damage and oust the UPA government at the centre in India has worked essentially along two planks: one, that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, not being his own man, has been prevented from carrying India into the next generation of “reforms” by Sonia Gandhi and her socialistic civil society spoilers;  and, two, that, not doing so, it must be declared that this has been the most corrupt Indian government post-independence.

This essentially corporate agenda, buttressed by right-wing Hindutva organisations, has received thumping support from India’s corporate electronic TV channels day in and day out, to a point where the hypocritical upholders of the freedom of speech have tended to stifle, hound, and heckle dissenting voices on a plethora of debates mounted speciously by the said channels.

The least thing attempted to be said on behalf of a malnourished, jobless, houseless, drinking-water-less, sanitation-less, health-care-less, redress-less India (some seven out of ten Indians if you like) has been sniggered at and dubbed a liberal-bleeding-heart conspiracy to keep the aspiring nation in the backwaters, tantalizingly out of reach of its superpowerly destiny.

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