Addressing his third press conference in over nine years in office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought to reserve his place in history by hoping it would judge him more objectively (read kindly) than the media and the Opposition parties, and startled the nation by congratulating himself for maintaining the momentum of growth (his claim) despite adverse international circumstances. Ruling out a third term for himself, he tried graciously to pave the way for the Congress vice president to hopefully lead UPA-III, saying that Rahul Gandhi, widely expected to be formally anointed as prime ministerial candidate on January 17, has “outstanding credentials” for the job. Mercifully, given the manner in which the Gandhi scion has led his party to defeat in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi, Manmohan Singh did not try to elaborate on his ‘credentials’.
While diplomatic kindness towards Rahul Gandhi was not unexpected, the venomous denunciation of a Narendra Modi prime ministership as “disastrous” took observers by surprise. Singh topped this by denying he was a weak Prime Minister; that history would decide his tenure; that being “a strong prime minister does not mean presiding over the massacre of innocents in the streets of Ahmedabad’ and that India does not need such a person as Prime Minister. The Prime Minister added that a parliamentary rather than presidential system was best suited to a nation of India’s size and complexity.
This quality of being utterly divorced from facts on the ground bedevilled the entire 75-minute press conference, with Manmohan Singh answering every question with a brief sentence or two, and the format of the press conference not permitting a more detailed extraction of views by counter-questioning. Brevity notwithstanding, however, the comments on the Gujarat Chief Minister were harsh, unwarranted and out of tune with the reality that barely a week ago (December 26, 2013) Ahmedabad Metropolitan magistrate BJ Ganatra upheld the closure report of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) which gave a clean chit to Narendra Modi and others for alleged conspiracy in the 2002 riots.
Manmohan Singh fizzled out when it came to the Sikh riots of 1984, and the inability of the UPA to provide justice to the victim families despite nearly a decade in office. Claiming that succour was given to the families even though no compensation was adequate for their loss, he said that in a debate in Parliament “I apologised publicly”. He completely evaded the issue of bringing culprits from his own party to book.
Claiming that the economy was not doing badly despite the global crisis of 2008-09, the eurozone crisis and some domestic constraints (infrastructure bottlenecks and environmental clearances for projects), he said the highest growth rate since independence, nine per cent, was achieved in the nine years of the UPA. The reality is that the rate of growth under Atal Bihari Vajpayee was 8.4 per cent, and it is the lowest ever under UPA-II. Prices and inflation are so high that the middle class and the poor are ruined. The economy is in a shambles despite claims to the contrary; the current account deficit (CAD) was $7.36 billion under the NDA in 2004, but now stands at a whopping $80 billion. At the same time, public sector investment has fallen from 9.4 per cent in 2008-09 to 7.91 per cent in 2011-12, and obviously impacts employment generation.
The Prime Minister who has been overestimated as an economist and underestimated as a politician and is now set to complete two terms in office without ever standing for election, brushed aside talk of corruption tarnishing his reign by pointing out that all scandals pertain to the tenure of UPA-I, and the coalition still won a second mandate. He did not actually say that this rendered all charges null and void, but asserted with unusual firmness that the media and the opposition tend to forget that “I wanted transparency in 2G (spectrum allocation) and coal (mines)”. History would leave him unscathed, he predicted, admitting that though there were some “irregularities”, the dimensions of the problem were overstated even by the Comptroller and Auditor General.
Though Manmohan Singh did not say why he could not get the transparency he desired in the case of spectrum allocation or coal mine allotment, he may have subtly transferred responsibility to the Congress and its president Sonia Gandhi. He certainly never explained how or why crucial files relating to coalmine allocation went missing. To a specific question about the dual centres of power in the UPA, he said that the fact that the Congress president and the Prime Minister were different persons had worked well and that it was a “remarkable achievement” to complete 10 years as Prime Minister with any “hiccups” in relations; that Sonia Gandhi had been an enormous help in dealing with complex issues and backed him on major issues. He claimed that people appreciated that a coalition guided by the Congress was needed to fulfill the social and economic revolution necessary to defeat poverty, ignorance and disease.
Sidestepping the issue of whether the price rise was a factor in the defeat of the Congress in four Assembly elections recently, the Prime Minister said that commodity prices, and the cost of energy were controlled by international factors beyond the control of the government. He maintained that the regime had protected the weaker sections of society against price rise by keeping the public distribution system stable with food grains at the same price as in 2003 (NDA rule), while MNREGA wages were indexed at the rate of inflation. The Government had also implemented some recommendations of the Sachar Committee, increasing scholarships and concentrating on districts with minority concentration.
Reforms, he mused, are a process and not an event, and would continue wherever there was scope and circumstances permitted. The Indo-US nuclear deal, he reminisced, was the high point of his nine year rule, hoping that diplomacy would straighten out the hiccups in the strategic partnership (re Devyani Khobragade maltreatment). The push towards foreign direct investment (FDI) would continue, he insisted.
On the issue of the Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister deciding the commercial interests of a firm with which he and his family members had business dealings, Manmohan Singh admitted receiving a letter from Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, but said he did not find the time to apply his mind to the issue – a rather neat way of avoiding the moral and legal ravine!
On the neighbourhood, he said the Bangladesh border fencing was stymied by terrain difficulties, and there was need to tap the full potential of the Indo-Pakistan peace process which was held up by circumstances. He did not elaborate, but expressed a desire to go to Pakistan if conditions were appropriate during his remaining tenure. Regarding Sri Lanka, he said that the Tamil population now had a local government in the north which would tackle its problems and also the conflicts with Indian fishermen.
The only area where Manmohan Singh felt that more could be done was health care for women and children, and particularly the rural health mission. His unfinished agenda included the anti-corruption bill and the women’s reservation bill. He dodged a question on the audit of electricity companies by the Aam Aadmi Party, but said time alone would tell if it can deal with the challenges posed by the economy and the polity.
All in all, it was a surreal performance. The Prime Minister did not have a note or even a tone of regret for presiding over the most corrupt government since independence; for using and misusing official investigative agencies against political rivals; failing to act to control prices and rampant inflation; failing to act against black money and the flight of capital to safe havens abroad. There was not a word on rising atrocities against women and children; the threat to jawans on the border; the lack of defence preparedness and inability to firm up contracts on any deal.
Then, for such a minority-conscious regime (of ‘Muslims have the first claim on resources’ fame), there is the abject failure to intervene in Uttar Pradesh despite over 100 communal clashes in one year of the Samajwadi Party regime. Neither the Centre nor the State Governor has spoken despite Akhilesh Yadav’s failure to restore normalcy after the Muzaffarnagar riots, and instead forcibly evicted people from relief camps after abysmal conditions there, including the deaths of several infants and children, were exposed by the media. Despite so many failures on so many fronts, the Prime Minister behaved as if the ascent of Narendra Modi on the political firmament was the greatest apocalypse awaiting the nation.
Niticentral.com, 3 January 2014