The writing is on the wall. Opinion polls only partially reflect the depth of popular disgust and anger against a government which has wilfully squandered its mandate in perpetrating one scam after the other without nary a thought for the rising misery of the aam aadmi. A somnolent Prime Minister who remains cocooned in the RCR complex, unless, of course, he is seeking a break from domestic misery through an unproductive summitry with foreign heads of state, a gaggle of ministers, unmindful of their own remit, making tall claims without anything to show on the ground, a leader obsessed with ensuring the continuity of the dynasty, well, with such unwholesome ingredients in the ruling party mix, it will necessarily go nowhere but down. Recent opinion polls merely signpost the electoral disaster that awaits the ruling combine.

Things could not have been bleaker for a government, which had lost its way early on in its second term — though, mind you, some of the bigger scams had occurred in its first term. The economy, you would have imagined, would be the strong suit of the UPA government headed as it is by an economist Prime Minister. Alas, the economy is bleeding the most due to cavalier neglect and wrong-headed policy prescriptions, a fact duly substantiated by the recent prognosis of the IMF, which has put growth at a paltry 3.8% in the current financial year.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who is good at, if anything, nixing all things which project him in poor light, has now taken to staging false encounters with the IMF statistics, insisting in the face of a plethora of evidence to the contrary that it would still attain the 5.6% growth that he had said it would grow at in his earlier public pronouncements.

Whatever the ultimate growth rate, there can be no denying that the aam aadmi is groaning under the weight of ever-rising prices. With wholesale inflation still untamed, and the consumer inflation raging in double digits, there is little ground for Congressmen to believe that they would be able to ward off the rude jolt that awaits them at the polling booth in the coming weeks and months. The battle for the Assembly elections later this year is only a dress rehearsal for the big fight in May 2014, when the voters will hold the ruling coalition to account for all its acts of omission and commission.

And time too it was made accountable for all the misery it has piled on the aam aadmi, what with the lowly onions selling at Rs 80 a kilo and most vegetables having priced themselves out of the reach of the ordinary people. Any ruling politician, who despite these trying times for the common man, dreams of a return to power needs to go in for a serious reality check. Voters are no longer so gullible that appeals to caste, creed and religion will lull them into re-electing the non-performers yet again.

{ If the truth be told, secularism is no more than a convenient ploy to lure the minority community into keeping the Congress Party into power indefinitely.

Unfortunately for them, even the self-serving card of secularism that the ruling politicians had hoped to play to hoodwink the minority community into voting for them seems to have been exposed as a ruse by a respected Deoband leader. Whatever his credentials for speaking on behalf of the Muslim masses, Maulana Mahmood Madani, the general secretary of the Jamait-e-Ulema-Hind, cannot be faulted for speaking some home truths about the attempt to frighten the Muslim voters by painting Narendra Modi as an ogre who eats Muslims for breakfast. If the secularist class has no case to seek the Muslim vote on its performance in power, or on the steps taken to lift the community from the socio-economic ghettos, it clearly has no ground to seek its vote by crying wolf about the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. Frankly, aside from the most unfortunate riots following the burning of a rail carriage full of Ram Bhaktas at the Godhra station, the six-year Atal Behari Vajpayee rule was free from any communal strife.

If Modi is the devil incarnate on account of that single lapse of administrative rectitude, there is no Congress Prime Minister, beginning with, we dare say, the first, who merits to wear the badge of secularism. If the truth be told, secularism is no more than a convenient ploy to lure the minority community into keeping the Congress Party into power indefinitely. How far it is fair to keep on harping on one riot while pushing all others before and after the 2002 Gujarat violence under the carpet is a question that cannot have escaped the attention of the more discerning members of the Muslim community.

That the secularist class fears its carefully devised strategy of keeping the Muslims perennially tethered to its poll symbol being exposed as a charade can be realised from the intensity of abuse heaped on Madani. Following his unexceptionable remarks that the Muslim voter should consider what the secularists have done for his welfare rather than get frightened into voting for them, he has been called a Modi supporter, a traitor to the Muslim cause, and worse.

Yet, neither the Congress megaphones nor the so-called Muslim intellectuals who have on cue castigated Madani have cared to defend the record of the Congress Party vis-à-vis the socio-economic progress of Muslims these past six decades. The lot of the Muslims, if the truth be told, is worse than even that of Dalits. But then Dalits have found their own place under the sun after severing links with the Congress Party. Maybe it is time Muslims too would squash the emotional but useless shibboleths of secularism and communalism and try and claim their own rightful place in the nation's public life.

Unless they are able to keep all their electoral options open, the so-called secularist crowd would continue to use it as cannon fodder at election time. Madani's, therefore, is a voice of reason and needs must be paid careful attention.