At times, I am surprised by the short sightedness and miscalculations made by our politicians. The UPA chairperson and Congress Leader seems to live in a different world and her analytical skills are something which are awesome and amazing and, ahem, positively myopic.

The leader made a master stroke by making an intellectual and unblemished politician as the Prime Minister and the entire country went ecstatic on her strategy. But, what followed was something more than ridiculous. The intellectual who had been assigned an extraordinary responsibility started behaving like a stooge in the hands of the leader. He became just a shield to protect the leader and to take all the blame of the leader’s misgivings apart from his own.

While Tamil Nadu politics had gone into hands of the two Dravidian parties long before and a national parties like Congress and BJP just try to piggy ride on them, suddenly Congress realized that they have been dictated by the Dravidian party in matters of allocation of ministry and sharing of seats during elections. The politically shrewd Dravidian leader demanded not only plump ministries, but also those to be given to his son, daughter or grand nephew. When the assembly elections came, the bargaining of seats was made and the Congress put maximum pressure on the local party to get more seats and got it also. When the magnificent scam exploded and arrests were made, the Congress leadership thought that the scam and arrests will reflect on the ‘righteousness’ of Congress and Tamil Nadu people will vote for them. But, alas, the results turned out to be disastrous for the Congress and the Dravidian party.

Now the Congress leadership thought the corruption charges and CBI enquiry will smear dirt on the rebel congress leader of Andhra Pradesh and staged it before the elections. But here it turned otherwise. The acts of haste and thoughtlessness of the leadership were clearly visible through these so-called strategic moves.

The young Congress leader’s whirlwind tours in UP to win the elections once again proved to be a fantasy and failed to translate into votes. The Congress is still under the belief that the Godhra Carnage will draw water in Gujarat elections to trounce the Gujarat Chief Minister. The repeated court cases and slamming of new allegations and constant media tirades, the Congress feels, will bound to pay rich dividend.

The Congress party’s and its leadership’s acts are absolutely shortsighted without understanding the individual cases. Same formula will not give the right answer as this is not pure mathematics. It is an arithmetic coupled with public psychology. As long as the Congress fails to understand this, their efforts will only prove to be counter productive.