by Tavleen Singh
Ever since his second term in office began, there have been
many, many moments when the Prime Minister looked pathetic. He looked
pathetic every time one of his ministers defied his orders publicly. He looked
pathetic when his own economic ideas were abandoned because of pressure from
the jholawallahs in Sonia Gandhi’s kitchen cabinet. He looked pathetic in the way
in which he handled Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev. And, he has looked especially
pathetic because of the way he has watched silently from the sidelines as the
economic gains brought about by his reforms have been frittered away by
ministers steeped in licence raj ideology.
Despite
this sad record, it is hard for me to remember a moment when he looked more
pathetic than he did last week. His government’s response to an article in a
foreign newspaper that 99.9 per cent of Indians would not have heard of, leave
alone read, set a new record in being pathetic. When Ambika Soni went on
national television to rant and rave against The Washington Post, there were
those who said she must have acted on her own initiative and not on the Prime
Minister’s behalf. If she did, she should have lost her job. And, it would have
provided a good opportunity to abolish the Ministry of Information &
Broadcasting but the Prime Minister’s own office soon made it clear that she
spoke for Dr Manmohan Singh himself and that he was deeply upset.
The
article that so offended the leader of the world’s largest democracy described
him as a ‘failure’ and a ‘dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat.’ It is hard to
believe that this description shocked Dr Manmohan Singh. Had he been reading
just one newspaper a day, in any Indian language, he would have discovered long
ago that this is the general opinion of him in the Indian press. And, if he
were able to wander incognito in the streets of our fair and wondrous land, he
might discover that the average Indian has an even poorer opinion of him.
Allow me
to offer you a sample of a conversation I overheard on my morning jog from
India Gate to Vijay Chowk. As the houses of Parliament came into view, I
happened to jog past a group of college students who were on a sightseeing
tour. I was close enough to hear one of them say to the others, in tones that
seemed only half joking, ‘My aim is to become prime minister one day because
that way I am sure I could make at least Rs 20 lakh crores.’
It is the
sort of remark I hear regularly on my wanderings. I should say here that I have
not heard anyone charge the Prime Minister personally with looting the country
but there is a growing consensus that he has presided over the most corrupt
government in Indian democratic history. So why should an article, that said
nothing new, in an American newspaper invoke so much rancour as to almost cause
a diplomatic crisis?
Could it
be because the Prime Minister is more worried about his international image
than about how he is perceived in his own country? I think it is. It is an old
Indian tradition that must have something to do with being ruled by white
colonialists for centuries. My career as a journalist began when Indira Gandhi
was prime minister and I remember being constantly puzzled about why she gave
most of her interviews to western journalists. She cared so much for western
opinion that when she ended the Emergency, there were those who said she did it
to restore her image in the western world.
For the
opinion of us domestic hacks, she had such contempt that she almost never gave
an interview to an Indian newspaper and almost never bothered to hold press conferences.
Dr Manmohan Singh has copied her in his dealings with the Indian media and it
is becoming increasingly evident that he is paying a price for this. He had the
sympathy of almost no newspaper or news channel last week.
The Washington Post brouhaha comes as an uncomfortable
reminder that Indian
leaders
can learn much from China when it comes to these things. Totalitarian Chinese
leaders go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their own people think well
of them and rarely react to bad publicity in the western media. The reams of
bad publicity in the international press over the Bo Xilai incident appears to
have bothered them not even slightly. How ironic that our own democratically
elected leaders should pay so much more attention to the opinion of foreigners
than they do to the opinion of their own countrymen.
Dr
Manmohan Singh recently reminded us that his silences were worth a thousand
answers. If only he had shown more faith in silence this time.
The views expressed and Information provided
by the author are her own and left to public to judge and rationalise for
themselves.
It is by the courtesy of the Indian Express
No comments:
Post a Comment