Sonia Gandhi’s health can’t be a state secret. It’s not about privacy - FIRSTPOST

There are only questions, and no answers so far, on Sonia Gandhi’s illness that required a surgery. One, how can the nation’s most powerful political leader, virtual chief executive of the ruling party, not let us know that there was something for us to be concerned about? Two, how is it that when so many people knew about it—her immediate family, close political advisors, doctors and hospital staff, and personal attendants—the media never got a whiff of it? And if it did, why did it choose to keep so quiet about it? Three, is news about the illness or medical condition of the people who run our country a state secret? When the main reason for keeping a PM out of Lokpal is that the top executive should not be distracted by nitpicking concerns, is it legitimate to have our No. 1 political leader being unfit through illness? Four, what makes us—as a people—particularly afraid to learn the truth about our leaders’ medical condition, whether it is politicians or businessmen? Are we happier living in a state of denial? Five, why is it that even when we do know something now, there is a strange reluctance to reveal the full truth. A Congress party statement merely said: “Sonia Gandhi has been recently diagnosed with a medical condition that requires surgery. On advice from her doctors, she has travelled abroad and is likely to be away for two to three weeks.” That’s it? At a time when the newspapers are already speculating that the operation is over, we are merely told by the party that she left for the US. For God’s sake, she is not away on vacation that she needs this privacy. What if she had actually been the PM? Would she just have left the country with Rahul without telling anyone? There is something clearly wrong with us – and it’s not about Sonia Gandhi. A similar thing happened when Manmohan Singh’s angioplasty suddenly surfaced as a problem in January 2009. We came to know about Singh’s coronary bypass and previous heart problems of the 1990s only in 2009. Even when Singh went under the scalpel, the party in power made no effort to clarify the chain of command by appointing a caretaker PM. What if Pakistan had launched another Kargil that day? Would a de facto No. 2—Pranab Mukherjee —have sufficed without the formal authority of a PM? Or would we have spent the first day of war electing a leader? The same thing happened with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A few months after losing his premiership in 2004, he took mysteriously ill and nobody—not the party, not the people—knew anything about it. Whoever knew chose to keep quiet. To say that he is anyway not PM now is no excuse for silence. What if the same illness was dogging him when he was PM? What if we had a chief executive who was not fully fit, or worse, had moments of mental disability or some other debilitating affliction? What if this had been the case even when we were fighting Kargil? In the US, the health of the president is not a matter of private concern. Every candidate makes it a point to declare his fitness, especially if he is a bit older and, thus, more likely to be susceptible to some form of disability or disease. In fact, US candidates go out of their way to show they are fighting fit by getting themselves filmed jogging or playing strenuous games. When he was a candidate for the presidency in 2008, John McCain produced volumes of medical records to show he was fit. The records showed that he had a healthy heart and had cancerous melanomas removed four times. It is, of course, easy to dismiss non-disclosure of illness as a privacy issue. This is what the Congress party is claiming today, having been stunned by Thursday’s announcement. But this argument does not wash. The health of the head of the country’s political formation is not a private matter. Her party, her government, her country have to know if something is wrong, and what it is. And it’s not about politicians alone. Employees and shareholders need to know if their chief executives are fit to perform. The case of Steve Jobs is instructive. Everyone knows what Jobs’ value is to Apple – which is why the company allowed him a six-month leave of absence three times to allow him to fight his ailment. Andy Grove, the iconic former boss of Intel, wrote volumes about his fight with cancer. He didn’t keep quiet. But in India? Shareholders and the public knew little about Dhirubhai Ambani’s health till the end. Everybody could see he was not in great health when he appeared at the company’s annual general meeting, but nobody said anything about it. The press, which went into paroxysms of anger when confronted with his barely-legal initiatives, was completely mum about his illness. Aditya Birla’s fight against cancer was known only to close family members almost till the very end. Today, it is quite apparent that Ratan Tata has his share of medical problems. But do the shareholders of the country’s biggest business house know anything about his medical problems? The problem of keeping health a secret is clearly an Indian affliction. We try to keep the truth away from all till it is impossible to hide it, and this is what we should be concerned about in a modern democracy. When you know, you can be better prepared. But can there be good reasons for powerful people to keep their state of health hidden? A case in point is Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s health just before partition. We know now that he was dying even as he was getting his Pakistan. But would Indian leaders have played the game differently if they had known that? Maybe, it could have changed the course of history? But the chances are when you head a movement, it is not the individual that matters, but the mood. It is highly unlikely that even if Jinnah had died before freedom, and Congress leaders knew about it, the course of history would have changed. This was proved when Jinnah died. The country lurched even more to the right. In fact, the probability is that Jinnah was our best hope of avoiding partition – and we blew it. Business leaders, like Jobs or Ambani, fret that telling shareholders the whole truth can be injurious to share prices. Moreover, it could lead to speculation about who will succeed the big boss, and make the second line of managers edgy about the future. This is certainly true, but is that not the case even in an Infosys, where we know a Narayana Murthy is going to retire? In any case, has speculation about Jobs’ health not affected the price? These are uncertainties and transitions that cannot be avoided. Getting to know something enables us to mentally prepare for a succession or the future. Not knowing can lead to shocks that we can do without. Source: http://www.firstpost.com/politics/sonia-gandhis-health-cant-be-a-state-secret-its-not-about-privacy-54738.html

Manmohan Singh - India's saviour or Sonia's poodle'?

Once credited with rescuing India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now finds himself accused of abject failure Andrew Buncombe Monday, 16 July 2012 He was hailed as the man who saved India. Twenty-one years ago, with the authorities in Delhi obliged to fly 47 tonnes of gold to London to be secreted within the vaults of the Bank of England as collateral for an emergency loan for food and fuel, Manmohan Singh, then serving as finance minister, got to his feet in the country's parliament to deliver a budget that broke, shatteringly, with the past. "We shall make the future happen," said Mr Singh, announcing a series of liberalising measures that cut away India's notorious red tape and ended the so-called Licence Raj. "Let the whole world hear it loud and clear - India is now wide awake." The reforms introduced on 24 July, 1991 - the privatisation of some government companies, the reduction of import duties and the introduction of foreign investment - are credited with sparking the economic regeneration of the country and improving the lives of millions of people. In something of an air-brushing of history, Mr Singh received the lion's share of the credit, while the role of the prime minister of the day, PV Narasimha Rao, was omitted. But two decades on, the quietly-spoken Mr Singh, who studied by candlelight in a small village to secure a place at Oxford University and then the World Bank, finds himself accused of abject failure. Critics from business say his reforming zeal has evaporated and slowed the country's growth, while political opponents say he has overseen an administration that has revealed itself to be mired in corruption. From within his ruling Congress Party there are repeated, if oblique, demands for him to step aside ahead in favour of his presumed successor, Rahul Gandhi. Last week, in the latest insult heaped up the 79 year old premier, Time magazine, which only in April placed him 19th in its list of 100 most influential world figures, splashed the front cover of its Asia edition with a forlorn image of Mr Singh and the headline "The Underachiever". "India is stalling," the magazine claimed. "To turn it around, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must emerge from his private and political gloom." Indians are not unique in being more sensitive to criticism from afar than that directed at them domestically, but the magazine article hit a particularly tender nerve and the party's representatives took to television studios to defend the prime minister. Manish Tewari, an MP and spokesman for the Congress party, said the story had "deliberately" overlooked the solid and concrete achievements of Mr Singh's two terms including consistent high growth averaging more than eight per cent, a flow of foreign investment and a flurry of social programmes. "Stories that break on Sunday evening…acquire a certain momentum of their own," he said. Meanwhile, the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its eyes on general election scheduled to be held by 2014, seized on the controversy. Spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said: "We are clearly of the view that in terms of economic management, inflation and our sense of direction, the government has failed. We did not need the verification of a foreign journal." In truth, the article contained nothing that was new but it refocused people's attention on a man whose reputation is at risk of being permanently damaged. Along with his ministers, Mr Singh, who first became prime minister in 2004 and is now in his second term, has received increasing criticism from various quarters as the country's growth has slumped from a soaring nine per cent in 2007-08 to a "mere" 5.3 per cent in the first three months of this year, the lowest since 2003. The administration has been accused of sitting on reforms that could bring in new foreign direct investment (FDI), such as the opening of the food retail sector, and failing to create a sufficiently stable investment, leading to a plunge in FDI of up to 38 per cent in the first part of the year. A decision this spring by the then finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, to allow retroactive taxation of companies was seen as particularly harmful. Last month, the ratings agency Standard and Poor's threatened to downgrade India's investment category and pondered whether it could become the first "fallen angel" of the so-called Bric nations. Inflation is high and there is a trade deficit of around $13bn. A Delhi-based business source who works with both Indian and international firms, said India had slipped in the last couple of years from being a priority destination for any foreign firm looking to expand its business, to one of several potential locations including Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey. "It is still at the point where India can turn it around," said the source, over a pot of Assam tea in the lobby of a hotel. "[But] there has been no growth and no reforms but there is corruption and uncertainty." Observers say one of Mr Singh's problems is that he has no genuine political power. Rather, he owes his position to Sonia Gandhi, widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, mother of Rahul and Congress Party chairwoman, who to the delight of India's middleclass selected him for that role when her party won a surprise victory in 2004. This has meant he has sometimes been unable to even control his cabinet and his failure to more quickly address the actions of a coalition minister, accused of defrauding the country up to $40bn in a telecom licence scam, led to him being accused of further weakness. Those who defend the prime minister say he is caught in a difficult position. Against a challenging international climate, he has sought to continue his party's policies of reform while also trying to provide for the country's poor, overseeing employment, education and health programmes. They point out that for all the stories of "Shining India" that adorned magazines such as Time during the first half of the decade, the country still has hundreds of millions of people living in utter poverty. "The criticism of him in the media comes from one section of society, the business community, which thinks it should be given everything," said one former official who has worked closely with Mr Singh. If anyone is to salvage Mr Singh's reputation in the two years he likely has remaining, it can only be him. While he may unfairly have become the target for criticism of an entire administration, it is he who needs to do something if he wants to secure a favourable place in history. He says he intends to do so. As Foreign Policy magazine reported, on 27 June, a day after he handed himself the finance ministry portfolio following the resignation of Mr Mukherjee, who is now the party's candidate for head of state, Mr Singh's official Twitter feed claimed he intended to "revive the animal spirit in the country's economy". The monsoon rains have finally arrived in Delhi, creating a sticky backdrop to this latest political heat. In the cool interior of the red sandstone office on Raisina Hill, Mr Singh is said to feel that the US magazine article was "unfair". Aides have declined to comment directly on the controversy but a spokesman, Pankaj Pachauri, said the prime minister was confident he could turn the situation around. "There is unanimity that for the inclusion of India's poor in development, you have to have growth," he said. "How to achieve that growth is the challenge." The Path To Power 1982 Appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, holding the post until 1985. Later becomes the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India. 1991 Elected to the upper house of parliament. Named Finance Minister by Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. 1998 Leader of the opposition in the upper house of parliament while the Bharatiya Janata Party holds office. 2004 The United Progressive Alliance coalition – formed after the 2004 elections and led by the Congress party – nominates Dr Singh as Prime Minister. _the Independent, UK