SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 6,
1947
IT is now over five months since Sri Omandur was elected
leader of the Congress Legislature Party. The election of leader under the
Party rules is for a year. For more than five months out of the year, the Party
has had no executive committee. The executive committee is as much an integral
part of the Party machinery as the leader and it is an unheard of thing that
such an integral part should be allowed to be missing for so long a time.
* * *
Now at last a meeting has been
arranged for election of the executive committee. The meeting is fixed to take
place on the thirteenth. The legislature is to meet on the fifteenth. If the leader had intended that the Party
meeting should be attended by the smallest possible number of people, he could
not have pitched upon a more favourable date. Travelling allowance is not paid
to legislators if they arrive in the city more than a day prior to the meeting
of the legislature. It follows that except at the cost of their T.A. members of
the Congress Legislature Party cannot attend the meeting scheduled for the
thirteenth.
* * *
It would appear that it was
pointed out to the leader that by postponing the date of the meeting by one day
a far larger attendance could be had. But the date remains unchanged evidently
for the simple reason that a large attendance is not desired. The smaller the
meeting, the easier the maneuvering so as to get ‘safe’ and acceptable members
packed into the executive committee. The Premier seems to have studied his
legislators at least to the extent of knowing that the majority of them are not
likely to forego any allowance due to them in order to attend any meeting.
Honest man that he is with a far from flattering opinion of the honesty of
others, he has taken to capitalizing that greatly self-advertised virtue of his
to political ends in ways novel and unique unrecorded in history as ever having
been thought of previously by others in a similar position.
* * *
The establishment of a Premier’s
Secretariat is a stroke of genius on Sri Omandur’s part that secures for Madras
an innovation not found elsewhere in India. Other Premiers are content to treat
the whole of the Secretariat as their own and the attractions of a Secretariat
within a secretariat are lost on them.
Exercise of power by proxy is inevitable when power is greatly desired but the
knowledge and experience required for exercising it competently is lacking. One
of our publicists with a very big reputation found at an early stage of his
ambition that his brain was not equal to his opportunities. He loved to deliver
addresses and have them well thought of and reported in the papers the next
morning with commendatory comments. But on his own resources he could never
prepare a speech. Secretaries were therefore engaged. He had a regular
secretariat at work collecting ideas for future speeches, and when occasion
arose they would put up drafts of speeches, but the great man who had to
deliver them was hard put to it when it came to deciding which speech to
choose. So he appointed another secretary to select one out of the various
speeches for actual use.
* * *
Advisers tend to multiply as high
offices are occupied by persons lacking capacity to discharge their
responsibilities properly with their own resources of judgment. An economic
adviser is an inescapable adjunct to a Minister for Finance when the Minister
on account of ignorance gets lost and has to be helped out. There is an adviser
in the offing for every Minister not knowing what to do with the power that has
come to him. The dispersion of administrative control among innumerable known
and unknown advisers has led to a veritable chaos of cross purposes, in the
midst of which food has become scarce despite plenty of production, corruption
has become rampant, communalism a flourishing political gospel and blackmarkets
established institutions in the economy of the day.
* * *
The limits of Sri Omandur’s capacities for leadership stand
unfolded before the public in a record singularly barren of any good to the
people governed. He was supposed to be a saint indifferent to material
inducements who could be depended upon to renounce his title of leader at the
appropriate time at the bidding of the makers of his fortune. He has sorely
disappointed those that banked on this assumption. And as the Congress High
Command themselves were among those that shared such an assumption, he has
become a problem to the High Command who want to get rid of him but do not know
how. Power has gone to his head and become an intoxicant, as it is naturally
bound to do in the case of persons unfamiliar with it and not endowed with the
largeness of vision required for sustaining its strains without loss of equilibrium.
What with prodigious concentration of effort over small things he has brought a
great office down to a comical level. Most of his colleagues must by now be
feeling him to be an extremely irritating and impossible leader to get along
with. He seems to have placed reliance in the rousing of communal passions for
maintaining his position—a Justicite in Congress garb. A misfit if
non-communalism is to be the sheet-anchor of Congress politics.—(September 6,
1947) S A K A.
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