Helpless or Hopeless Prime Minister ??

17 Febryary 2011

Is Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh the proverbial proto-type of Plato’s Philosopher king? Is he really so helpless as a Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy as he admitted on camera in his televised interaction with selected journalists from the electronic media on February 16,2011.? Or is it that he has turned out to be a hopeless Prime Minister in UPA II regime which has been more known for a series of scams and a spiraling hike in the price of essential commodities that is making the life a common citizen miserable ?

I have been one of the biggest fans of Dr Singh as he was not only the most educated and learned Prime Minister in the world (going by his CV) but also one of the politicians with impeccable personal integrity. But after seeing his two televised interactions with media including one during the last year, one was convinced that either he was really “ school student” bring guided and goaded continuously by too many Masters and Headmaster or he was just not able to handle the office he had been entrusted with by the people of India in UPA II.

Not only he has failed miserably in communicating with people of India on what went wrong where during his tenure and why he was still shying away from explaining as to how he intended to arrest and reverse the rot set in and the continuing decline in the credibility and image of India as a result of the stories of these scams surfacing with alarming regularity almost every month. .
A comparison between the two televised media interaction of the Prime Minister makes a disturbing impression. Last year, in his interaction with the media he gave the impression of being a fighter who would tackle things and make sure that the institutions of governance worked and that accountability was fixed. But in last week’s media interaction, he looked so frail, distraught and actually admitted that he was helpless . !!

Helpless Mr Prime Minister ??? It was simply bizarre to hear this word as perhaps no Prime minister of Independent India ever expressed his helplessness in full public about the challenges faced by his government and took refuge in compulsions in dealing with crucial national issues in the name of “Coalition”.

Even as it was a desperate attempt to correct and polish his image as Mr Clean., the Prime Minister did not live up to his reputation as “ Singh is King “as the tune was being continually played all over during UPA I regime on the basis of success of 123 Nuke deal. It was not the same Prime Minister Mamnohan Singh who had once boasted that “his cabinet was more cohesive than that of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi” even as it had started earning the sobriquet of” collective connivance and complicity” on a series of issues facing the nation.

What was all the more shocking was that instead of accepting his accountability, ineptitude and incompetence of the Government, the poor supervision which seems to prevail in many Ministries and offices, including the Prime Minister's Office, and the insensitivity of many senior members of his Cabinet to public concerns over these alleged scams, the Prime Minister indirectly blamed his own party for all the mess created so far.. Perhaps he forgot that he would never have been the Prime Minister if there was no coalition government at the centre he would had been relaxing in his Chandigarh University’s Professor’s quarter what he had initially planned. If Singh became King in UPA II, it was mainly because Sonia Gandhi passed on that coveted post to him exactly under the same set of compulsions of Coalition.

There is no doubt that UPA II is perhaps the worst scam ridden government in the history of independent India and the Prime Minister too has to take a major share of blame for what a retired senior bureaucrat said” is new is the ineptitude, the incompetence and the lack of supervision which seem to prevail since you came to power--- the like of which one had not seen under any other Prime Minister”.

How ironical that party which came to power on the plank of “ Aam Aadmi “for the second time in 2009 has its Prime Minister so “Majboor(helpless) in serving them and rising up to their expectations in terms of curbing the rampant corruption, checking prices of essential commodities and containing the ever growing clout and influence of a few corporate giants in the corridors of power right up to the PMO to the extent that they decide as to utility of which Minister in a particular ministry remains till what time and when he needs to be shifted next.

How bizarre that the Prime Minister has the officers of his choice ensconced on sensitive seats for over 7 years in a row even after retirement and they have been given extension for another three to four years to carry the PMO’s responsibilities even at the cost of aspirations of those officials who too wanted to serve as Cabinet Secretary and Principal Secretary and serve as the eyes and ears of the PM. And yet he feels helpless because either he has no control over them in running the bureaucracy as he wants or he is just an indirect approver. But in the same vein he also declares that he has no plans to quit his post.. !! Incredible !!

In any case coalition politics has not been new to India and Dr Singh is not the only Prime Minister to have run into this morass. Before him, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, VP Singh, Chandrashekhar,, Deve Gowda, Inder Gujral and Atal Behari Vajpayee headed coalitions too and all of them ruled a government which worked as a team and which did not pull in different directions. But to the best of public knowledge ,there was no

instance under any previous coalitions where a Minister repeatedly circumvented the instructions of the Prime Minister, without fearing the consequences of his action as Telecom Minister A Raja did. The Minister kept making a hash of 2G spectrum allocation and the Prime Minister kept watching like a hapless bystander. !!

Even more shocking was the case of S band spectrum scam where the entire cabinet and the PMO was ware of the terms of contract given to Devas multimedia before signing the contract way back in January 2005 and it woke up to annul the same only after a TV news channel broke the story in February 2011. This was a clear case of the entire Cabinet becoming a party to this decision and yet the Prime Minister blamed coalition politics as the bane. !!


None of the previous Prime Ministers blamed their difficulties and embarrassments to collation politics as not only they told their political associates in clear terms about the “ Rubicon” as well as the bottom line and they never allowed their politics allies to dictate terms in matters of national importance. Least of all, none of these Prime Ministers made a public show of their “helplessness’ ,however weak and short-lived their term would have remained.

That Dr Manmohan Singh is not a great communicator is well known. But then he had three Media Advisors in the PMO coming from print, electronic media as well as information service. They would have been entrusted with the responsibility to inform and educate the people about the government’s messages and corrective and remedial measures on many issues of national importance. Instead of that, the PM’s media Advisor behaved more like a policemen by reminding them that: the PM was for interaction and not for interrogation” and in the process, lost a bit of goodwill of even those journalists who had gone with an open mind.

As the budget session of the Parliament had started, the opposition parties are going to launch more scathing and stringent attack on the government and the Prime Minister himself in particular and it would be quite difficult for Dr Singh to maintain his” sheen as Mr. Clean”

The one department which is going to breath down the neck of the Executive now is the Judiciary in the coming days and the government would have tough time explaining its conduct in a series of scams which have already broken. The UPA II government would find it all the more difficult to deal with the trio of CJI Mr Kapadia, IB Chief Nehchal Sandhu and CBI Director AP Singh as compared to the previous batch of CJI like K G Balakarishna, Sabharwal, former CBI directors Vijay Shankar Tiwari and Ashwini Kumar as well as former IB chief Rajiv Mathur.

The government would be put on the bigger scanner for its various acts of omissions and commission in a series of scams of huge proportions by the judiciary and investigative agencies and the growing public anger and angst against the UPA II government would make the life miserable for Dr Singh. The general public is already feeling terribly let down by this government and one hopes that the Prime Minister would someday listen to the call of his conscience and make an honorable exit from the top post than keep getting pilloried by the public and even his own colleagues in a daily basis.