During the days of Lalit Modi row, BJP’s prominent leader Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister of India, had famously said, “this is NDA, not UPA, our ministers won’t resign”.
And if we roll back some years and reach the UPA’s time, we could recollect that one of the prime responsibilities of BJP leader Ravi Shanker Prasad then was to ask for the resignations of UPA ministers whenever some controversies arose in their names. And some minsters did resign, due to intense agitations from the opposition parties and continuous guard from the media.
Cut to the present day and you have Ministers like Mr. Singh who openly say, which should be nothing but party policy, that whatever be the allegations against any minister, no one will resign under any circumstances.
Allegations of corruption charged by the opposition is one thing, which could be rejected as baseless accusation, but dereliction of duty, as in the case of Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar in the Dera Sacha Sauda fiasco, is a matter of serious concern, where accountability has to be fixed on the political leadership.
As was the case with the Gorakhpur tragedy (on which we will come back later), political leadership made scapegoats out of the officialdom in Haryana and absolved themselves from any blame. When the total administrative failure is so obvious for any discerning eye, when the High Court itself has come down on the government and the CM in particular, any democratically elected CM would generally be forced to resign. But that is for ordinary political parties, not for BJP, which is, in their own claim, “party with a difference.”
High Court has given a rap on the knuckles of Haryana CM Khattar and Indian PM Modi. When it came down heavily on the CM for his inability to prevent the riots, the High Court also reprimanded the PM Modi and asked whether he is the PM of BJP or that of India. However in this case one must understand that PM Modi is helpless and he can’t ask for the resignation of Mr. Khattar, for he hadn’t resigned during the Gujarat riots of 2002. When that is the case, on what moral ground would PM Modi ask for Khattar’s resignation?
Gorakhpur tragedy is a far worse case. 70 children dying in a week, most deaths because of the unavailability of oxygen in a hospital due to non-payment of bills by the government, is a tragedy that would have warranted the resignation of the head of the government in any functioning democracy, but not in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh.
Instead of serious introspection, the UP government at first came up with the bizarre argument that the deaths were not due to unavailability of oxygen, even when it took actions against head of the medical college, Rajiv Mishra, and also on Dr Kafeel Ahmad Khan, head of the Paediatrics ward, for not making enough oxygen available.
If the deaths of innocent children in Gorakhpur were really due to encephalitis, as the UP government claimed, then why did it take action against the aforementioned doctors?
So it is clear that the deaths were due to lack of oxygen availability in the hospital. And the reason for the unavailability was that the government didn’t the pay the bills for the oxygen. That makes it clear that the UP government is directly responsible for the tragedy, but still no resignation of CM Adityanath or Health Minister Siddharth Nath Singh.
Speaking about accountability and resignation on moral grounds, one mustn’t forget to mention Railway minister Suresh Prabhu. Under his watch 8 major rail accidents have happened till now. After two rail accidents last week, Mr. Prabhu offered to resign on moral grounds, while PM Modi rejected his offer.
While the BJP wants to judge other parties on the basis of lofty moral grounds, it rarely applies the same standards to itself. In its alacrity to impose bigoted Sangh ideology in India using their political power, BJP has abandoned its commitment to the people of India.
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