When Indian soldiers were fighting Pakistani marauders in 1947, they didn’t have enough jeeps. So orders were placed with its British company and supply demanded immediately. Our High Commissioner Krishna Menon, a blue-eyed boy of Pt. Nehru messed it up. Jeeps reached a year late and with a taint of hot money exchanging hands.

That was the first scandal of Independent India.

We lost Gilgit, Baltistan and Skardu. We lost Aksai Chin, because the government at Delhi didn’t know the exact boundaries and no patrolling was taking place.

In total, we have lost one lakh twenty-five thousand square kms to the Pakistanis and Chinese during Congress rule.

And we had a bad dream called 1962.

At that time our ordnance factories were making coffee machines as Pt. Nehru had openly opined against having well-equipped large army for defence. Who is going to attack us, he asked.

Still we say that Pt. Nehru was the ‘architect’ of modern India.

And people remember the mysterious ‘murder’ of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee in Srinagar, who simply wanted Kashmir to be a part of India like Bihar or Bengal and permit system to enter the Valley be abolished. There were two rulers in Kashmir; the Chief Minister was called Sadr-e-Riyasat or ‘head of the state’. Two flags and two laws for the Valley. Mookerjee’s martyrdom compelled the Nehru government to remove the permit system and two heads for the state. Post-jeep scandal, we saw Mundhra scandal, Nagarwala case, L N Mishra murder. The Jan Sangh’s fast emerging leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya was murdered. All the cases were suspected Congress conspiracies.

When the portrait of Dr. Mookerjee was unveiled in Parliament, with utter disregard to parliamentary propriety and civility, Congress leaders, including Dr. Manmohan Singh boycotted the function, though Vajpayee and Advani had been attending programmes to mark the birth and death anniversaries of Pt. Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi.

The only Prime Minister they had running a government for full five years successfully was insulted even in his death and his body-in-state was not allowed to enter the Congress headquarters in New Delhi and an airport in his home state was opposed to be named after him by Congressmen though the proposal was put forth by an Opposition leader. This is how they treat their party leaders not belonging to the Family.

They amended, abused and twisted the Constitution, put the entire Opposition behind bars for an undisclosed period and revenged harshly on the unyielding masses.

Yet, they are the democrats and secular lighthouses of freedom of expression and liberty.

They kept India backward in such a planned manner that even after sixty-two years of Independence we are yet to have a spacious functional airport in the national capital, seventy thousand farmers committed suicides in one year, brave decorated soldiers returned their medals in protest and a movie on our poverty-stricken ’slumdogs’ fetches a British Oscar in 2009. And they love the illegal Muslim infiltrators just for the sake of their votes – and still they say they are the inheritors of a freedom struggle that demanded ouster of the aliens.

More than anything else they tried to wreck the morale of the assertive Hindus who have been facing the onslaught of the invaders for the last twelve centuries with unparalleled brevity showing an invincible spirit to protect their culture and the fragrance of the land. They deserved to be comforted most after a fractured independence and a massacre that was thrust upon them by a weak Congress leadership. Yet a large section of the Hindus today feel cheated and anguished.

Pandit Nehru was not in mood to encourage Industry. They have stopped Tata to produce war weapons like War Tanks which Tata was providing to Britishers in second world war. But Nehru was ready to pay lots of money to foriegn companies for providing weapons like “Boforce”. So domestic industries were not to allowed to make profit while on other hand international companies were given order for trains,tanks bus etc.

When Nehru’s two protégés, V.K. Krishna Menon and Gen B.M. Kaul, failed the nation during the 1947 war (remember the infamous jeep scandal involving Menon?) and after the 1962 defeat at the hands of the Chinese, Maneksahw was called to take command of the eastern sector. His first order was: “No more withdrawals, march to the posts and recapture.” This re-energised the demoralised troops but both Kaul and Menon tried their best to make life hell for the brave Manekshaw, though they couldn’t succeed beyond a point. I was told by a senior military officer that they also instituted an inquiry against him for committing “anti-national activities” when Manekshaw replaced the name of a Gandhi Hall with Sardar Patel’s at Wellington (though there are other more interesting stories for that inquiry having been set up).

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