After the initial shock, the UPA government appears to have decided to weather out the latest WikiLeaks tsunami by dismissing the US diplomatic cable revelations like some other countries did — as evident from the remarks of Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, who said the dispatches on alleged payoffs for votes were sent by a “fairly junior officer” in the hierarchy.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is, therefore, unlikely to make any statement in Parliament on Friday even if the Opposition keeps up the tempo and disrupts proceedings in both Houses in continuation with their demand for his resignation.
Speaking at The Indian Express’ Idea Exchange programme, Rao said the cable was sent by a political counsellor in the US embassy, who is a “fairly junior officer”.
The same contention — which underscored the line that not much credence should be attached to the “assessment” even if there was indeed such a despatch — was made earlier in the day by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in the Rajya Sabha when he said the government had no means to verify the authenticity of the cables.
Rao also said the cables diplomatic missions send to the home country are “privileged communication” and they fall in the category of “diplomatic immunity”. When asked who gets the diplomatic immunity, she said, “the US diplomat”.
She said even in the legal sense, “these are hearsay, and can’t take this as evidence”. Rao said WikiLeaks’ making the US diplomatic cables public is a case, where “codes were broken, codes of diplomatic practice and convention were broken” and went on to add that Indian embassies had similar assessments made. “They are very well-written...yes, they contain candid assessment,” she said.
The political assessment within the Congress and the UPA, however, was that the latest episode had only added to the embarrassment of the government, which was still trying to recover from a spate of corruption scandals.
That there was some amount of disarray in the government was only accentuated by the fact that Congress president Sonia Gandhi is out of the country and the top echelons had to fall back on the wisdom of the senior leadership, including Pranab Mukherjee to chalk out a defence line that was more technical than political.
Sonia is currently in UK. The lack of political direction was also evident when ministers deliberately chose not to raise the issue at a meeting of the Union Cabinet in the evening.
Senior Congress functionaries though felt the issue would dissipate in the next few days as focus would shift to the Assembly elections in four states, where it is expected to do well.
They also drew solace from the fact that the Left parties had a subtle difference in their approach vis-a-vis the BJP as they had not demanded the PM’s resignation.
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