Thursday, May 1, 2008

The President and All her Kin




President Pratibha Patil's son Rajendra Singh Shekhawat has denied any breach of protocol by him while accompanying his mother on an official visit to Latin America. According to him it was okay to go around on his own even when tax payers finance the trip of the President and her family. If he was so inclined, he could have got a direct flight from Delhi to Florida – and avoided the national embarrassment. Surprisingly, even the President’s office has found "nothing wrong" with wasteful expenditure of exchequer’s money and the utterly uncouth behavior of the President’s son.

To make matters worse, Rajendra Singh Shekhawat’s hollow explanation that he was a mere "visitor" to some of the programmes he had attended and that there was "nothing to discuss" during the visits, raises more questions about his having been included in the President’s entourage in the first place. The President and her son have seen nothing wrong with the son making a trip on the side of the President’s official trip on his own expenditure. Did the President’s son also pay for the officer of the Indian Embassy in Washington to go and receive him at Miami where he was on a private trip? The arguments in favor of the President and her son may sound convincing to the Congress and its UPA allies who were keenly instrumental in replacing Bharat Ratna Dr APJ Abdul Kalam with Pratibha Patil, but do not seem to hold much water for their countrymen. That such goings-on have occurred during the tenures of KR Narayanan and Shankar Dayal Sharma, both Congress nominees, only gives an insight into the Congress culture of selecting the wrong people for the wrong reasons to head responsible positions they lack the merit to hold. Shankar Dayal Sharma, incidentally, holds the distinction of being the only President who refused to vacate the Rashtrapati Bhawan at the end of his tenure, unless an alternative accommodation was suitably prepared to him.

The least the shameless politicians of Congress and its UPA allies can do is gracefully apologize to the nation to stem the growing controversy surrounding the highest office of the land. It would be futile to expect the President’s office and Rajendra Singh Shekhawat to extend such a grand gesture as both have already found nothing amiss in their conduct.

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