People stranded at railway stations. An ambulance caught in traffic. Public property worth crores damaged. All these sad scenes on TV. What’s more, economic damage of 1000’s of crores. Ironically, scores of daily wage earners may go hungry today. The very people whom these shrewd politicians claim to want to protect. But in reality all they wanted to do was to show their might. That they can still hold the public to ransom. No, the bandh was not to protest price hike. If that was the case it should have happened atleast a few months ago when prices of items of daily consumption started galloping at double digits. But they were ‘sleeping’ at that time. The fuel price hike seems like some blast which has woken them up from the slumber.
It was so disgusting watching Arun Jaitley, AB Vardhan, Manohar Joshi, Gopinath Munde and others on TV. They all had only one thing to say – that the govt. has failed to control prices. Like a tape being repeated over and over again. None of them has anything to offer by way of solutions. Does any of our honourable lawmakers have any inkling of why prices are rising? Has food production been less? Have input prices gone up? Are middlemen hoarding the food and jacking up prices? No. And they can’t be bothered by such trivialities when they have the onerous task of playing cheap politics on hand. Neither have our journalists bothered to analyse facts. They are too busy covering ‘Breaking News’. Which leaves the common man feeling confused, betrayed and disgusted.
Surely, something needs to be done to control price rise. But a bandh is the worst possible way the opposition could have thought of to protest the govt. inaction. The solution was even worse than the problem. I hope someone files a case in the SC against this bandh and makes these parties pay for the gross injustice they meted out to India today.
