Date: 04/06/2014
IN INDIA “JAANWER = DRIVER” (“Monkey at Wheel”)
Visitors going to India are advised NOT to hire cars for self driving. They are advised to hire a texi or scooter rickshaw since the locals know well how to negotiate their way through the traffic chaos in a lawless world. The reason?
Foreigners do not know the rules of driving in Bharat because there are NO rules. Just watch how the local driver avoids collisions and crashes but sometimes causes fatalities, too.
Drivers ignore street lights, cut corners, drive with defective brakes and even with half the bulbs fused, and overtake recklessly, risking fatal collisions.
The original sinner was Jawaharlal Nehru who watched the traffic chaos and did not show any wish to make it civilised. His mind was firmly set on loot and corruption, and self preservation. His daughter Maimoona Begum (born Nehru) was sent abroad for schooling and so were her own two sons to England where surely they saw the cars driving in an orderly manner without even sounding the horn. But as soon as they returned home they watched the chaos and did nothing to improve matters. To them lives of natives were dirt cheap.
It is this state of affairs that took the life of a promising senior cabinet minister of the new cabinet. We were saddened to read, “Indian minister Gopinath Munde killed in car crash in Delhi”.
Rural development minister charged with reviving economy dies on his way to victory rally after collision with another car.
Was this death an isolated case? NO.
More than 230,000 people were killed on Indian roads in 2010, or a rate of almost 19 deaths per 100,000 people. As many as 15 people died in road accidents every hour in India in 2012 with 53 more injured, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
India's roads are among the most dangerous in the world and Delhi, the headquarters of ITALIAN MAFIA in Bharat, one of the cities that account for the greatest number of fatalities.
India's minister for rural development has been killed in a road accident, depriving Narendra Modi of a key ally just eight days after coming to office as prime minister with a mandate to revitalise a stalled economy.
Gopinath Munde, 64, was on his way to the airport for a victory rally in his home state of Maharashtra on India's west coast when his car collided with another vehicle. He died later in hospital.
"My tributes to a dynamic leader whose premature demise leaves a void hard to fill," Modi said in a tweet, amid a flurry of tributes from allies and political opponents. "Condolences to Munde's family. We stand by them in this hour of grief."
Modi had entrusted to Munde the crucial task of spearheading his government's battle against poverty in the countryside, home to more than half of India's population of 1.2 billion, but which contributes just 14% of gross domestic product in Asia's third-largest economy.
The minister was sitting in the back of his Maruti SX4 when it was hit on the side by a Tata Indica, whose driver police said was in custody. Munde's driver and a personal assistant survived.
Doctors tried to revive Munde for 50 minutes after he was taken to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in the capital, a hospital spokesman said. "There was no spontaneous breathing, no pulse, no cardiac activity," he added.
Television pictures of Munde's car at a police station showed frontal damage and dents and scrapes down its left side.
Munde becomes at least the third senior Indian politician to die in a car crash in recent times. The Congress party's Rajesh Pilot, a former transport minister, was killed in 2000, and Sahib Singh Verma, a former labour minister belonging to Modi's Bharatiya Janata party, died in 2007. (Not to forget Giani Zail Singh, former PRESIDENT of India who also died in car crash in India.
“Taming” the vehicle drivers in Bharat must be the top priority of the new nationalist government if we wish even the VVIP’s to survive a road journey in the Land of Sri Krishna and Sri Rama.
=========
000000000