Nice guys do win

So the results of the Lok Sabha polls are out. The incumbent government has retained its power and that too without most of the rabble-rousing allies who had given it a rough time. It's hard to be jubilant knowing the true nature of every government that comes to power - the typical occurence of maybe two diamonds in two tons of sludge. However there is one thing that makes me happy.

It is still possible for the people to have faith in a well-educated, excessively soft spoken man at the helm of the country. I didn't vote in the election due to my absence from the country but I have my doubts whether I would have voted for anything that would cause Manmohan Singh to remain Prime Minister. Our Prime Minister is a brilliant man and economist but he just doesn't strike me as a dynamic leader that a nation like India deserves. It is quite obvious that the nation thinks otherwise even though we do not vote directly for our Prime Ministerial candidate. It is a resounding victory for Congress and its UPA allies as the BJP and the Left got creamed. I think the people to whom the policies and the effectiveness of the government at their local level really affect have spoken and silenced nay-sayers for a significant while.

My only beef with Dr. Manmohan Singh as our Prime Minister was that he seemed too reserved a person to represent the virility of a nation that is supposed to rule this century along with our totalitarian neighbour. I presumed (in retrospective, rather foolishly) that a man of such extreme civility was not the right man to navigate the murky waters of Indian politics. But his opponents were really taking him to task for all the wrong reasons. The man who called him the "weakest Prime Minister I've ever seen" has just seen his own hopes of becoming the Prime Minister of India drown. The Left parties that made such a big hue and cry over him allegedly cozying up to the USA now find themselves completely out of public favour even in their long time bastion of West Bengal. Those who persist in their belief that he is a frontman for Sonia Gandhi and a doorman for lineage dependent Rahul Gandhi's bid for eventual Prime Ministership must bear in mind that this is the guy who had the b**ls (An expression that is so much in contrast with his gentle way of speaking but strangely appropriate) to open up our economy at a crucial juncture before we collapsed into chaos like other socialistic tending economies. We as a nation took a giant leap under the guidance of this man back then. This man is anything but a push-over. Like a tight slap to my pessimistic, couch-potato face, this is solid proof that there is always a way to success and appreciation for the 'talk less, do more' variety of good men yet even in the cut-throat Indian political arena.