Sonja wrote: > Is the replacing government well equipped to make changes?
Well, we don't know what the composition of the govt. would be [other than it would be predominantly Congress] but there are some good men in the party and they do have long years of experience in governance. > Or is it just > more of the same but with a different undercurrent? Last I checked, the Congress is slightly less efficient than the BJP, is slightly more idiotic on a few fronts *but* it is also infinitely less dangerous for its policies are not quite as divisive as the BJP's. Congress, for all its faults, is a secular party and that is the basic difference between the two parties. > I still don't > understand how an originally born Italian can be a well > equipped prime > minister of the largest democracy in the world. Can she really have > enough background to handle this? I don't know how well Sonia would do but my reservations are based more on the fact that she is untried and was uninterested in politics [to put it mildly] than the fact that she was born an Italian. She has been in India for more than 3 decades and her circumstances have been such that she would have been hard put to avoid information about Indian politics and polity. What I don't know is how well she can translate that information into sound policies but if she does become the next PM, we'll find that out too. Fwiw, I was far less sanguine when her husband became the PM - he had been handed the post on a silver platter by a grief stricken nation. Sonia, otoh, turned down that offer 13 years ago when Rajiv was assasinated and if today she is in the same position, it is because of her own hard work, strategy and campaign. She has spent the last 6 years trying to lead her party out of the wilderness and somewhere along the way, she seems to have struck a chord with the people of India. Sonia's Italian origin was a prominent electoral issue for the BJP and they had launched many an attacks against her. But apparently, a vast majority of Indians don't consider her an outsider. It is an ages old tradition : 'she married into our family and now she is our daughter'. Peronally, I think she would be shrewd to recuse herself from the post of the PM and remain the party leader. Not only would that deprive the BJP of a major issue, her children would be able to make their own way up to wherever. But the fact is that Indians have voted for Congress knowing that she is the party leader and she does have the mandate to lead us. Ritu GCU Ain't Democracy Grand?
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