It’s been four days since Manmohan Singh underwent coronary bypass surgery. The prime minister is said to be making “rapid progress” and is well on his way to recovery.

Back in 1990, Singh had bypass surgery in Britain and later underwent angioplasty at a private hospital.

But this time, he chose to be admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi rather than go abroad or enter a private facility.

Is it a vote of confidence in India’s public health infrastructure and the stature the country’s doctors have acquired over the past two decades?

“I chose the All India Institute of Medical Sciences because I have confidence in your ability and to encourage the general public to come here for treatment,” the Hindu newspaper quoted Singh as telling his medical team after the surgery.

“I hope every patient receives the same care as you have given me.”

Prior to the surgery, health minister Anbumani Ramadoss was quoted as saying: “Our doctors are competent and we don’t need experts from outside.”

Over a period of time, India has become a destination for medical tourism but as far as public health infrastructure goes, conditions can be quite patchy.

In India, a country with the world’s third highest HIV caseload, patients may spend days queuing up for tests and drugs at New Delhi hospitals as there simply are not enough doctors and nurses to attend to them all.

In fact, newspaper reports said Ramakanta Panda, who led the team of doctors for Singh’s surgery, brought some 20 boxes of special equipment with him from Mumbai.

And a ten-member medical team as well.

Unfortunately, doctors and nurses in India are usually poached either by private medical centres that cater to India’s expanding middle class or by hospitals abroad.

The general public hardly needs encouragement to go to a government hospital. Often it’s the only kind of social security available to the urban poor. In the absence of affordable medical care, they have no choice but to throng these hospitals.

During peak hours, hospitals like the AIIMS can be as crowded as a railway platform.

“Widening disparities are prevalent in health outcomes between income groups and between social and caste groups,” the UNICEF said in its ‘State of World Children - 2009′ report.

Is the common man likely to share the prime minister’s confidence in our health facilities?

It has been a tense game of poker between India and Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks. On the face of it, India had the much stronger hand — not least because it captured one of the attackers alive and got him to confess to being trained in Pakistan.

But has it played its cards well?

Some analysts say India overplayed its hand in the initial days after the attack by saying the military option remained open.

That allowed Pakistan to cloud the issue and raise the spectre of an Indian military strike — neatly uniting the country behind the army and against India.

One former foreign secretary told me India had made a mistake on those initial days, by making a threat it was not prepared to carry out and allowing Pakistan the chance to play the victim.

Since then, New Delhi has been much more restrained and cautious in what it has said, admirably so according to diplomats and analysts I have spoken to. On Monday it presented its carefully complied dossier of evidence to Pakistan and other countries.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the stakes again this week by suggesting that the Pakistani “agencies” must have known about and supported the plan to attack Mumbai.

Pakistan has once again pounced on this claim, accusing Singh of engaging in a propaganda war.

Last year India had the backing of the U.S. in its allegation that the ISI was involved in the attack on its embassy in Kabul.

But this time around, diplomatic sources say New Delhi has yet to prove to them that the ISI was involved.

“In their oral presentation, Indian officials told the envoys of their belief that the ISI was indeed involved in the incident,” Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in the Hindu newspaper.

“Thought his claim was not contested, at least one nation, the United States, has told India it is still not in a position to share this perception.”

I wonder now if Singh might have overplayed his hand again. Should he have stuck to what can be proved in a court of law, so that he retains the moral high ground and gives Pakistan no room to wriggle out?

Or is he simply saying what everybody knows — that the ISI has links to extreme Islamist groups and must have at least known this attack was being planned?

On June 29 of this year, hundreds of gays, lesbians and transsexuals danced and sang on the streets of three Indian cities, hoisting the rainbow flag on the country’s first nationally coordinated gay pride day.

Though they waved slogans such as “gay and loving it”, many still wore masks – afraid to openly campaign against the dreaded Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which has banned “unnatural” sex since colonial times.

So where do the protesters find themselves nearly four months later, as gay activists battle a (divided) government to scrap the law, taking the case to the Delhi High Court?

The charges leveled by the government against homosexuals appear to be stacking up. Local media has quoted additional solicitor general P P Malhotra as saying homosexuality is a “social vice”, borne of a “perverse mind”.

It has been called the worst form of indecency, while an MP from an independent party called it an “evil” that has been imported into India from the western world and would change the face of India.

Worse, the government says homosexuality is “a disease” – the spreader of killer HIV/AIDS even as it infects the morality of its victims. Malhotra on Monday painted a gloomy picture indeed of what would happen if Indian homosexuals had their way: “AIDS is already spreading in the country and if gay sex is legalized then people on the street would start indulging in such practices saying that the High Court has given approval for it.”

It would, in the words of Home Minister Shivraj Patil, “open the floodgates for delinquent behaviour” for those same people who danced on the streets of Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore four months ago.

No longer fearing prison, they would flaunt their vice openly on the streets, as police and decent families stand by, powerless to stop them. If, by the government’s own estimate, just 0.3% of Indians are homosexual, that still leaves around three million people to go on the rampage.

So far, though, the High Court has not been impressed. It has dismissed the government’s evidence when it drew on religious texts, including the bible, to attack homosexuality. On Monday the High Court challenged the Centre to prove how homosexuality was a disease, and earlier cheekily asked whether straight sex should also be banned, given it also spreads AIDS.

The cabinet itself is divided: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh found himself asking two members of his cabinet to make up their very public tiff on the issue. Health Minister Ramadoss has been a strong spokesman for the gay campaign, arguing that pushing homosexuality underground has made it harder, not easier, to stop the spread of AIDS.

The question is, if the law is repealed, will homosexuals feel truly free in India, and how much of a backlash will there be against them? Given the social stigma, those who flaunted their pride secretly in June, might still find it hard to out themselves to friends and family, even if the law says they can.

As a financial journalist, covering politics and parliamentary debate is sometimes part of my job. What I witnessed on Tuesday in parliament — wads of cash being flashed around inside the lowerhouse– is something I had never bargained for.

The civil-nuclear deal with the United States will go through, and some reforms may be pushed by the government with the help of
its new allies. But politics will never be the same again, tainted by allegations of bribery and a vulgur display of money power.

Shortly after his government won a convincing victory in parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the victory sent a message to the world that “India’s head and heart was sound and India is prepared to take its rightful place in the comity of nations.”

India has attracted global attention due to its strong economic growth and aspires to be a global power. But now more than ever, it needs to fix its politics and governance so that these two key elements do not derail its ambitions.

All political parties will need to seriously think about the events of the past few days and work out mechanisms to prevent it from happening again.

Global best practices need to be imbibed to help politics and governance catch up with the demands of a globalising economy. If it does not happen soon, then ordinary Indians’ cynicism and disillusionment with their politicians will become irrecoverable.

Too much is at stake.

Much as he tries astrologer Rajan Chopra can’t keep the pride out of his voice as he speaks to me for the second time in 24 hours.

It’s victory march at 7 Race Course Road after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wins a closely-fought vote of confidence 275 to 256 in parliament and the temptation for Chopra to say “I told you so” is overwhelming. But Chopra, a political and corporate astrologer who predicted yesterday that the government would win the trust vote, says “it’s a victory for astrologers as well”.

If popular predictions are anything to go by then stargazers say the strong Saturn in Congress President Gandhi’s astrological chart is to be thanked for the government’s victory and the Congress party will be wise to look heaven wards for further guidance before general elections next year.

“As I have said before, Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh will play a very crucial role now, along with party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav,” Chopra says. “I am basing my prediction on three things - the chart of the Congress party, that of opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of Sonia Gandhi.”

Don’t the stars of Manmohan Singh count for anything? His answer confirms something that non-stargazers suspected all along. “Gandhi is the main force behind him.”

Kanpur-based astrologer Ramesh Chintak who strongly believes there is no branch of astrology that can help predict the future of a political party or outfit, says Saturn is strong in Gandhi’s stars which may have led to Tuesday’s turn of events.

However, he cautions that astrological predictions of any single individual cannot be trusted to foretell the fortunes of the party as a whole. He prefers rather to strengthen his prediction with safer bets.

“I heard the speeches made by (leader of opposition) L K Advani in parliament and I think he indicated even then that the opposition may not in the end win the motion. You also have to take into account the general word on the streets that the government is likely to win the vote,” he says.

When I tell Chopra that India’s Science and Rationalists Association dismisses astrology as superstition, he assures me that he is “a scientific astrologer and a paramedic man on top of that”.

Chennai-based astrologer K.B. Gopalakrishnan was quoted on websites with astrological charts to bolster his claim that Manmohan Singh was safe on the trust vote. Although astrologer M N Kedar, a member of the Indian Council of Astrological Sciences, strongly predicted that the planetary position was not in favour of the government.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the civilian nuclear deal with the United States is all about whether India holds early elections or not.

Every newspaper is speculating if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has staked his personal reputation on the deal, will resign to disassociate himself from an administration that failed to save a pact keenly watched by the world.

But are these the arguments India should be debating in the short-term or should we be discussing the real benefits and drawbacks of the deal?

The communists oppose the deal, in large part because they see it as a front for Washington’s strategic bulwark against a rising China and increasingly unstable Pakistan.

Besides, they say there are many holes in the deal that Washington will use to manipulate India’s foreign and strategic programmes, and that nuclear energy is not a solution to the shortage of electricity in the country or rising oil prices.

Why? Because nuclear energy can not meet India’s huge oil consumption in the transport sector, is expensive to produce and will expose India to manipulations by a small international cartel of uranium suppliers.

But most Indians feel, if straw polls by newspaper and television channels are to be believed the nuclear deal is good for India: The agreement is meant to provide India with the means to produce clean energy — a key constraint to economic growth. And the rise in crude prices underlines need for diversified sources of energy (even if nuclear will take ages to fill the gap).

Internationally, the accord represents a long overdue acceptance of India as a responsible nuclear power.

From the pro-deal camp here are a few points to ponder:

* Even if relations sour with the United States, India can turn to France, Russia, Australia or other uranium producers for supplies, courtesy the waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group which is independent of the deal with Washington?

* Why should India not use the deal to get a waiver from NSG and the opportunity to clear its name as a nuclear pariah state?

If the deal falls through, it is unlikely Washington — or any other nuclear nation — will broach the idea of selling nuclear fuel to India anytime soon.

But will that outcome make India more dependent on outside sources for energy, and weaken its own economic prospects against the growing clout of China?

This is the kind of debate that India would benefit from. Focusing on elections may only reap short term political benefits.

Only last year Indian policymakers were showing off the strong fundamentals of the economy to the world and pressing for a seat at the high table of global fora. Everything was going well — high growth, a surging stockmarket and a lot of attention from global investors attention.

But high oil prices and rising inflation threaten to bring the India growth story to its knees. Finance Minister PalaniappanChidambaram’s speech at a meeting of oil producing and consuming nations in Jeddah on Sunday showed the cracks in India’s confidence levels.

No doubt oil prices have spiralled, threatening the economic gains made by developing countries, as Chidambaram said in his speech.

But in the case of India was it misplaced optimism about growth or lethargy in getting the right policies on the ground that made things worse?

It pained me to read Chidambaram speech, in which he expresses “a heavy heart and foreboding” and says meeting India’s Millennium Development Goals had been imperilled by soaring crude oil prices.

But it is both a frank admission of the dangers facing developing countries, including India, and a fervent call for cracking down on speculators who, according to the minister, are playing havoc with the fortunes of nations. For the complete speech please click on
www.pib.nic.in.

The Congress party-led government contains three key reformers — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia — and it had four years to get things moving. But they appear to have succumbed to their communist allies on policies
and reforms that investors see as vital for India’s growth.

The oil surge and rising prices pose huge challenges for Indian policymakers. Strong measures will be needed. But will India’s leaders bite the bullet?

Murmurs of discontent have risen in some ranks of the ruling Congress about the influence of the Gandhi dynasty in the party.

Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh criticised last week how decision-making within Congress was made in a “narrow context” — meaning the Gandhis. He quickly backtracked by swearing loyalty to the family, but only after being publicly snubbed by Sonia Gandhi.

This came amid a controversy over Rahul Gandhi’s very public trips around India — leading to him being called “Crown Prince”. Some said he was overshadowing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Clearly there is controversy over what should be the role of these two Gandhi’s – the heirs to the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty that has run India on and off since Independence – in an election year.

Around the same time I had been in Karnataka, spending a hot afternoon at a rally by Sonia while covering this key state election. Sonia spoke in Hindi to thousands of people who only understood Kannada, one of the languages of Karnataka. As a journalist, I found it difficult to find one exciting quote I could use for my story — something unusual for most politicians who understand like no one the value of the sound bite.

Sonia obviously struggles to be great public speaker, but I wondered why no effort has been made either to get a translator for the crowd, or for her speechwriters to present a more media-friendly speech for the Karnataka election.

As Sonia spoke, I turned around behind me to look at the faces of the crowd. Many were falling asleep in the heat, others chatted among themselves. Many people seemed eager to go home.

The next day Hindu nationalist BHP party aides told me they were rubbing the hands in glee at the lack of a strong message in Sonia’s speech.

The same aides were also happy that Congress had not put forward a candidate for the chief minister’s job, common practice in a party where the top brass plays a game and divide and rule with state-level officials.

While Congress may openly criticise Singh for betraying the family name, the more important question for Congress may be asking if the Gandhi name still inspires the kind of voters who attended this rally. They may need to worry about the loyalty of voters.

Few have a bad word for Sonia. But when I asked people why they had come, most said it was to glimpse her as one would turn out to see a Bollywood celebrity. Some said it was to see her “fair skin.” But it was not about politics.

Driving back from the rally, a journalist with 20 years experience in India told me that one could easily forget that Congress leaders in decades past could be awe-inspring public speakers that would draw tens of thousands of eager voters — He mentioned Indira Gandhi as one and he contrasted Sonia with the reception that BJP Narendra Modi had received in rallies.

The string of state election defeats show both Rahul and Sonia are clearly struggling to resonate with voters. One wonders if the time will come when more members of Congress start to ask if the Gandhi dynasty needs to make way for newer faces — a “Modi” equivalent for Congress.