Dear Subhash Ghuge and Jasan Mathews,

I appreciate your willingness to take the initiative. We need many people with initiative.

However, I'm sure you'll agree that the issue is not that simple. If all that was required was for someone to come forward, it would have happened long back.

Credibility of the leaders has to be established over a long, long time. Anna, Arvind Kejriwal, Dr. Kiran Bedi and such people had built some credibility over many years, and we all have faith in them, and yet you can see that the Team Anna members are being questioned, even if frivolously (many believe, not so frivolously) and it may not be easy to convince the people nationwide about the defence of even these good people.

Unless we are able to convince persons like Dr. Abdul Kalam to take the lead, it may be yet another of the futile exercises of well-meaning independents.

Did you consider another possibility? Congress has a vote bank, and in the normal circumstances, we may at least have ruling parties being voted out, putting a semblance of fear in the minds of parties that any wrong doing will throw them out of power. If even concerted opposition by such a party formed were to get a lot of votes (impractical though it may be) it may end up dividing the opposion votes, thus giving a third term to UPA, ruling out any possibility of rooting out corruption for a long time. Alternating Governments is a better alternative.

We have a tough situation at hand. But we don't want to jump from a frying pan into fire, do we? I hear you asking, "Should we keep quiet?" I believe, until we have a reasonable chance of success, we'll be wasting our time, at the minimum, and shooting ourselves in our feet, at the maximum. More likely, we won't even take off.

Let's think and come up with workable alternatives.

Ganesan. :~(