PM HAS NO SENSE OF DIGNITY AND HONOUR Sunday, 12 May 2013 Manmohan Singh has been shown his place by Sonia Gandhi for his untenabledefence of Pawan Kumar Bansal and Ashwani Kumar. Clearly, he is not the primusinter pares. A man of honour would have resigned by now Those of us in the media who broke ranks with our colleagues and defied popularperception of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as a man of unimpeachable integrityto describe him as a glorified babu, weak and pusillanimous, remarkably bereftof any sense of honour and utterly unscrupulous in a cynical and sly manner,were rudely rebuked for besmirching the reputation of an honest man. That wasduring the months when Manmohan Singh was pushing the India-US civil nucleardeal and displayed no qualms about misleading Parliament repeatedly to sidestepinconvenient questions from the Opposition. The Americans kept on shifting thegoalposts; our obliging Prime Minister kept on insisting that we were beingsold an apple and not a lemon as claimed by critics of the nuclear deal. Then came the infamous cash-for-vote scandal when money was used for purchasingparliamentary support for UPA1 which had clearly lost its majority after theLeft walked out of a perverse relationship. It did not bother Manmohan Singh,touted as a man for whom probity mattered more than power, that he won the votebut lost the trust of the people. We reminded those flying the flag forManmohan Singh that our description of him was not wide of the mark; sadly, fewwere persuaded that the Prime Minister’s mask had fallen off, exposing the faceof a cynical politician for whom ends justify the means. A second victory forthe Congress-led UPA in 2009 weakened the case against Manmohan Singh —theimage of a clean politician, we were told, had swayed opinion in his party’sfavour. We will never know the truth about that assertion and it would be foolish tospeak with certitude on imponderables that influence the outcome of anelection. But what can be said without fear of contradiction is that by thetime he took oath of office in 2009, Manmohan Singh was no longer an accidentalpolitician but a crafty practitioner of the politics of cynicism. Between thesummer of 2009 and that of 2013, the crafty politician has become craftier,although as during the tenure of UPA1, he has got away with impunity by usingthe popular perception of him as a man of integrity and honour as a cover. Thatwas till now. Even as I write, the Prime Minister stands disrobed of hisfictional integrity and denuded of make-believe honour; his ‘spotless’ image,cultivated assiduously by camp followers, most of them charlatans in media,lies in tatters, smudged by scams and stained by scandals, beyond repair andresurrection. If India has never before seen a Government as steeped in corruption as thepresent regime headed by Manmohan Singh, the nation has never had to contendwith a Prime Minister so fallen that Lucifer would be envious. In her time MrsIndira Gandhi spoke of corruption as a global reality and thus sought to put agloss on it. It could also be argued that she was not particularly finickyabout rules and procedures being followed, nor was she averse to undue favoursor else she would have asked Sanjay Gandhi not to accept huge tracts of landfor his non-existent Maruti car factory. We have also seen a Prime Ministerturn his office into a cash-and-carry counter when Chandra Shekhar occupied thepost for a few months. The Bofors scandal led to the downfall of Rajiv Gandhi;no Prime Minister had been called a ‘thief’ before that, unfairly as it mayhave been. But what we are witnessing now is incredibly stupendous and stunning at once: A“dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat”, to quote The Washington Post, “presiding over a deeply corrupt Government”. What we haveis a Prime Minister who claims to be perpetually in the dark about what’shappening right under his nose; scornful of accountability and disdainful ofresponsibility. When the Great 2G Spectrum Robbery came to light, he said hewas not aware of what A Raja was up to although that is not true. As we now know,at every stage Raja kept the Prime Minister informed of his decisions andactions; at no stage did Manmohan Singh remonstrate. We also know that he hasfailed to act on the findings of the Commonwealth Games inquiry committee thathe had set up. All that and more pales into insignificance compared to thegargantuan Coalgate scam — he held charge of the Coal Ministry when coal blockswere allocated to cronies of the regime for a song, defying both logic andrules. His claim, that he was not aware of the loot, comes as no surprise. The story does not end there. It continues with the Law Minister, theGovernment’s law officers and senior officials of the Prime Minister’s Officeand the Coal Ministry trying to manipulate the CBI’s investigation into the scandal.Together they changed the “heart of the report” the CBI was supposed to submitto the Supreme Court, detailing its investigation and findings. The PrimeMinister’s response? Why, he wasn’t aware of the tampering with the report, ofcourse! And even after he became aware of it, he brazenly defended Law MinisterAshwani Kumar, refusing to act against him despite severe strictures by theSupreme Court in the form of scathing observations. Just as the Prime Minister would not countenance any demand to sack his RailwayMinister Pawan Kumar Bansal whose nephew was caught red-handed collecting cashfor prize postings. Even as the evidence against the Minister piled up by theday, Manmohan Singh refused to act. Was it merely because Pawan Kumar Bansalwas loyal to him instead of the Palace? Is that also why Ashwani Kumar thoughthe could get away with his shameful though amazingly brazen attempt towhitewash the Coalgate scandal? Lutyens’s Delhi is awash with stories, eachmore scandalous than the other. For instance, lurid details of alleged tapedconversations between Pawan Kumar Bansal and his associates are doing therounds. As always, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction and that pathis best avoided. What we do know is that it required an incensed Congress president to tell thePrime Minister where he got off to get the two tainted Ministers out of theCabinet. Friday afternoon’s unscheduled visit by Sonia Gandhi to the PrimeMinister’s residence was followed by Pawan Kumar Bansal and Ashwani Kumarputting in their papers. For the record, the meeting lasted for 15 minutes; thediscussion could not have been replete with niceties. That Ahmed Patel made ita point to be present when the two Ministers came to hand over theirresignation letters has served to underscore the fact that Manmohan Singh maybe the Prime Minister but he is not the primus inter pares. A person who has so debased the Prime Minister’s office and become an object ofridicule within and outside the Government and the ruling alliance, not tomention his own party, should put in his papers too. But this would requiresummoning a sense of honour and dignity which is absent at the moment. ManmohanSingh is incapable of doing even that. (The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi) PM has no sense of dignity and honour
