Euthanised Singh
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It is odd that in our dynamic and cacophonic democracy, derisively called ungovernable because of the people’s unbridled freedom to speak their mind, a prime minister choosing to address a press conference becomes news. No doubt Dr Manmohan Singh speaking to the media has rarity value, because it is only the third time since 2004 he has deigned to, barring brief interactions with select mediawallahs (mostly fawning owners) during flights on his dozen or so overseas visits. But after his hour-and-a-quarter session, with Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari as master of ceremony ensuring he faced no supplementary question to the bland (and tutored?) answers in a one-question-per-person format, it did appear the PM said nothing anyone hadn’t heard before and it was clear there would be more talking later by others about what he ducked than said.
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Dr Singh saying he won’t be a candidate for prime ministership if a Congress-led coalition won the general election in five months, was in itself no news, as he has hinted at that before. It was only him saying so formally. In any case, he never was a contender, but a willing recipient of high office when Sonia Gandhi heard the inner voice in 2009 amid strident protests against her becoming PM because of her Italian ethnicity and with which he continued into a second term. But what was newsworthy was his rather disingenuous denial of responsibility for the scams several of his cabinet colleagues unleashed on the nation, by saying he never permitted those and stressing he did his best under unfavourable domestic and external conditions to see India had the best nine years it ever had economically.
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If denying responsibility for the financial corruption the UPA government has been mocked for raises questions about his leadership and his abnegation of authority to the coterie under Congress President Sonia Gandhi and to coalition compulsions, what makes it unbecoming of his stature as an honest economist-politician, is his saying that all the scams happened during UPA’s first term (2004-09) and the government sought and obtained the electoral mandate to govern for a second five year term notwithstanding. By implication, the people knew what they were asking for and that is mitigation for him. The fact is, all of the scandals came into public glare in the second term and prompted whatever reluctant action we see after session after session of parliament was stalled by opposition parties.
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Dr Manmohan Singh was never a communicator and people, out of respect for the work he did in steering India’s economic liberalisation, have learned to forgive him for slips such as the latest today when he endorsed Rahul Gandhi as a future prime minister by saying he has “outstanding presidential qualities”. But a man who kept repeating that historians will judge him more kindly than contemporary media and the opposition do, has done himself little credit by saying the people in their wisdom did not make as much of all the corruption allegations as the media and opposition parties do, in re-electing the UPA in 2009 and suggesting they may do so again. Dismissing Narendra Modi and BJP or an Aam Admi movement may be a politician’s bravado. But making the kind of excuses he did, after asserting in his opening statement that the UPA government was dead against corruption and will punish the guilty, was no way to consign himself to the mercy of history. It was political euthanasia he signalled in choosing to break his long silence.
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