Why is PM desperately clinging to his chair?

He has had insults hurled at him inside and outside Parliament. There is not one newspaper, news magazine or news channel which hadn't come out with derogatory commentaries about him. He has been called the weakest Prime Minister, and one who is presiding over the most corrupt Government in India's history. He has been taunted as a mouni baba .

The more the verbal barbs targeted at him, the more waxen his face and the deeper his withdrawal into his shell without any explanation or rejoinder. Things are made worse for him by the fact that he is not a master communicator, in any case, and his barely audible monotone leaves no one any wiser about what precisely he is wanting to convey.

The Financial Times (FT) pithily summed up his perceived image thus in its editorial, “Indian tortoise slips into reverse” in its issue of May 27:

“Mr Singh, who used to be lauded as the architect of economic reforms, is now routinely derided. More than a prime minister, he is characterised as an errand boy for Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party leader. Indeed, the 79-year-old Mr Singh seems to have lost all ambition, as well as any grip over the administration he might once have had.”

It is not FT alone: Everybody feels that it is best for him as well as the Government and the country if he quit — and fast.

JUSTIFIABLE CONTENTION

Till the other day, at least, his detractors were confining themselves to attacking his ineffectualness, without questioning his personal integrity. There were, of course, those who were accusing him of harbouring Ministers in his Cabinet widely notorious for their unsavoury antecedents, on the untenable plea of his bounden obligation to uphold the coalition dharma.

Their contention — which was entirely justifiable — was that his readiness to work with shady characters robbed his own honesty of any significance or consequence, since it was tantamount to abetting all the loot and plunder of public coffers that was taking place on his watch. Nevertheless, they were prepared till now to make notional allowance for his helplessness.

With Team Anna and the Opposition on the war path over Coalgate, even his own uprightness has been called into question. He has been publicly castigated for acting as a shield for all corrupt transactions carried out by some of his colleagues. Suspicions, instead of being allayed, have been stoked further by the explanations and excuses offered by his office (PMO), the Minister of State in his office, Mr V. Narayanasamy, and the Minister in independent charge of the Union Ministry of Coal, Mr Sriprakash Jaiswal.

It is not so much about whether Dr Manmohan Singh is right or wrong. It is about the office itself, as held by him. There can be no disputing the progressive loss of its power, weight, authority and credibility since he assumed charge. The degeneration is perturbing beyond description. It is also puzzling, to boot, in view of Dr Singh's nearly four decades long association with the Government and his familiarity with all the booby traps and pitfalls in its functioning.

Seat of survival

Having been nurtured in Government Servants Conduct Rules, rather than in the anarchic antics of the political class, one expected him to be acutely sensitive to anything that will even remotely besmirch his reputation and to keep away from the wheeling, dealing, carpet-bagging and pork-barrelling that are the hall marks of the art of political survival and success.

It is precisely this seat of survival that has come to haunt him now as charges of corruption are being hurdled at him rather than him being merely accused of remaining silent at corrupt practices of others.

For, if his political survival requires wheeling, dealing, carpet-bagging etc., the fact that he has survived in politics this long means that he must have indulged in it himself. Or, so, the argument goes. In other words, Dr Singh's case has become a case of out-Heroding Herod.

Whatever that be, the choice now before him is whether he would like to quit with something of the dignity and respect still intact, or whether he would be forced to leave in an acrid cloud of acrimony, if not ignominy. The time has come for him to ask of himself: “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them.”