Why Manmohan-the-mouse should have roared sooner

If parliamentary debates were the stuff of WWF cage fights, Manmohan “Bonecrusher” Singh may be said to have gotten the better of LK “Iron Man” Advani on Wednesday with his uncharacteristic exhibition of restrained aggression. Like a smiling assassin, Singh mocked Advani, pointing out that in 2009, the BJP had fielded the “Iron Man” against the “lamb” that was Manmohan. And we all know how that turned out, Singh said, with disarming self-deprecation. Advani wasn’t around in Parliament to defend himself, and so the job of defending the BJP was left to Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh, who are no mean orators themselves. Yet, the perception lingers, going by this morning’s media headlines, that Manmohan Singh effectively kayo-ed the BJP on Wednesday. “Lamb PM mauls lotus lions in big game,” gushes the headline in _ Telegraph. “_PM gets aggressive, takes on BJP and Narendra Modi,”  says The Times of India.  Other headlines too echo much the same sentiment. Just the fact that the man whom Narendra Modi derided the other day as a “nightwatchman” has been around in office for nearly nine years, under whose Prime Ministership the UPA won the 2009 elections against considerable odds sure counts for something in a parliamentary democracy where the winner takes it all. That gave Manmohan Singh gloating rights, and he rubbed it in by claiming that the UPA would win a third term in office, come 2014. [caption id=“attachment_629655” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  It will take more than a roar in Parliament to change the assessment of Manmohan Singh as lacking in authority. PTI[/caption] In that sense, yesterday’s round in the parliamentary cage-fight arguably went to Manmohan Singh. The Mouse That Roared had won the day. Yet, even in his thunderous speech, the areas that Manmohan Singh focussed on - and the areas that he studiously avoided - show up his failings rather more starkly than he may have liked. Singh showcased the UPA government’s record of economic management since 2004 and compared it favourably with that of the NDA during its term in office from 1999 to 2004. That record is, in any case, open to challenge on many counts: at one level, the UPA 1 government benefited from the reforms undertaken by the NDA government, but failed to advance them. Besides, if Manmohan Singh really wants an insider account of the UPA’s colossal mismanagement of the economy, particularly since 2008, he only needs to read Raghuram Rajan’s recent Economic Survey or P Chidambaram’s latest Budget speech, both of which trace the faltering of the economy to the regressive policies of recent years. But the areas on which Singh maintained his customary silence in his speech in Parliament on Wednesday are just as telling. Manmohan Singh failed to address, even tangentially, the monumental corruption scandals that have wracked his government, which have bestirred public minds for much of the past three years. In virtually every such scandal - from the 2G spectrum case to the coal block allocation scam - it’s by now well established that Manmohan Singh knew in real time that much mischief was afoot, yet he looked the other way. He was, to invoke the metaphor that has so rankled him and compelled him to break his Sphinx-like silence, the nightwatchman who knew that the country was being looted, but didn’t blow the whistle. If only Manmohan-the-mouse had roared sooner - and his aggression had been directed at the perpetrators of the corruption scandals - perhaps his thunderous speech in Parliament on Wednesday would have carried greater conviction. In that sense, Manmohan Singh’s record as an Artful Survivor in office - he is the third-longest serving Prime Minister - counts for nothing given that at the end of the day, his two biggest advantages when he assumed office in 2004 - his record of having implemented the first generation of economic reforms and his reputation for personal probity - both stand besmirched by everything that happened under his watch. As political analyst Yogendra Yadav noted in a CNN-IBN talk show on Wednesday, in politics, it is not what you say but you are received and heard that counts. “The same Prime Minister saying the same things five years ago would have meant something. Today, he merely sounds hollow.” And even the same growth statistics that Singh parlayed would have acquired a different connotation - if ordinary people had a sense of well-being, Yadav added. “For all his likeability, when Manmohan Singh demits office, as he will by next year, he carries none of the probity, none of the sense of national well-being that was once associated with him.” Silence, of the sort that Manmohan Singh is often associated with, can represent great inner strength. But in his case, his record in office - of looking the other way when scamsters were plundering national assets and of failing to intervene when ruinous economic policies were being implemented - only signals a complete lack of political and moral authority. It will take more than an almighty roar in Parliament for a day to change that assessment of Manmohan Singh.