The Prime Minister came across after today’s TV-only press conference as the Great Stoic.
Clearly aimed at damage control and expectation management, his answers were sincere and candid, especially about the compromises that have to be made to keep a coalition together. His most startling analogy was to ask rhetorically if food, fertilizer and kerosene subsidies for the poor could be construed as revenue losses. “What is your starting point?” he asked in the context of the 2G spectrum being allocated at sub-market rates. One TV editor asked him if he was implying that 2G, too, was a subsidy. He side-stepped this one.
He should have been asked: “Are you comparing subsidies that help India’s poor with subsidised wireless spectrum that made the rich richer?”
Other answers: “This is coalition dharma…things are not entirely the way I would like them to be”; [on corruption] “I have to tolerate a lot … otherwise every six months we would have new elections.” “We shall overcome, we shall prevail, we will provide our country with a functioning government”; “As of that moment [May 2009] I had no reason to believe that anything seriously wrong had been done”; this despite the fact that “complaints were coming in [against Raja], complaints were from all sides”; “These irregularities shouldn’t have happened .. I am not very happy about these developments.”
There has been an amazing amount of public talk by government leaders ahead of the Budget session. Clearly, the prime minister sees, as he told the BBC, that a poor international image “saps our self-confidence”. He referred to self-confidence several times during the news conference, from his opening remarks onward. But on the lack of any reforms by UPA-II, and other signs of dithering, he had villains galore – state governments, the BJP, the coalition system. He did talk about “harsh punishment” for the corrupt and said “wrongdoers won’t escape this time”. And he made clear he would not throw in the towel – all this was a learning experience and he “relished” it, and likened himself to a CEO – if seven of ten decisions were good, “shareholders will say ‘job well done’”.
The prime minister also made a few key allusions to points that this Budget may address – the dire need to create a viable corporate-debt market, the need to mobilize funds from overseas in a Infrastructure Development Fund, and a push for the PPP (public-private partnership) model in infrastructure development. There are also clear signs that Pranab Mukherjee will start the process of curbing or axing ministers’ discretionary powers, widely seen as a font of corruption.
Overall, Manmohan Singh came across as sincere, serious, and a bit helpless. “I have a job to do. We have a lot of unfinished business. I will stay the course,” he said, stoically.
[This post also appeared on the Business Today website at http://bit.ly/primeminister]
Manmohan 'timid' Singh's case is one which would be covered by the maxim Res Ipsa Locquitur, that is, the thing speaks for itself. With the massive outbreak of one scam after the other under his regime, it is difficult to believe that he is sincere. He is guilty of abdication of prime ministerial responsibility and allow his cabinet colleagues to go on corruption rampage. He can afford to be stoic about the fortunes of the people of this country! By his own admission, he did not even monitor the work of his cabinet colleagues, much less control or influence them. A helpless person has no business to remain a PM. His thunderings about punishing the corrupt is amongst the sorriest jokes.
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