Friends,
The controversial article has been extracted from internet and placed below. It may also be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/indias-silent-prime-minister-becomes-a-tragic-figure/2012/09/04/a88662c4-f396-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_story_1.html .
One may not entirely agree with it. Prime Minister's Office and Indian press has sharply reacted. However, the perspective of Washington Post cannot be ignored: it is a widely read paper and shapes public opinion about India in USA.
Dhirendra Krishna
India's `silent' prime minister becomes a tragic figure
Correction: An earlier version of this article failed to credit the Caravan, an Indian magazine, for two statements that it originally published in 2011. The assertion by Sanjaya Baru, a former media adviser, that Singh had become an object of ridicule and endured the worst period in his life first appeared in the Caravan, as did an assertion by Ramachandra Guha, a political historian, that Singh was handicapped by his "timidity, complacency and intellectual dishonesty." While both men told The Post that the assertions could accurately be attributed to them, the article should have credited the Caravan when it used or paraphrased the remarks. The article has been updated.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's second term in office has been damaged by corruption scandals and policy paralysis.
"It has been my general practice not to respond to motivated criticism directed personally at me," he said. "My general attitude has been, `My silence is better than a thousand answers; it keeps intact the honor of innumerable questions.' "
Singh probably will survive calls for his resignation, but the scandal represents a new low in a reputation that has been sinking for more than a year.
Ethnic violence between India's Hindu Bodo tribespeople and its Muslim minority has prompted many to flee from major cities.
`I have to do my duty'
Singh was born in 1932 into a small-time trader's family in a village in what is now Pakistan, walking miles to school every day and studying by the light of a kerosene lamp. The family moved to India shortly before partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Singh pleaded with his father to be allowed to continue with his studies rather than join the dry-fruit trade.
A series of scholarships allowed Singh to continue those studies first at Cambridge and then at Oxford, where he completed a PhD. Marriage was arranged with Gursharan Kaur in 1958; they have three daughters.
A successful career in the bureaucracy followed, but it was in 1991 that Singh was thrust into the spotlight as finance minister amid a financial crisis.
With little choice, Singh introduced a series of policies that freed the Indian economy from suffocating state control and unleashed the dynamism of its private sector.
More than a decade later, in 2004, Singh again found himself on center stage, becoming in his own words an "accidental prime minister."
The Congress party led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had surprised many people by winning national elections that year, but she sprang an even bigger surprise by renouncing the top job and handing it to Singh.
In him she saw not only the perfect figurehead for her government but also a man of unquestioning loyalty, party insiders say, someone she could both trust and control.
"I'm a small person put in this big chair," Singh told broadcaster Charlie Rose in 2006. "I have to do my duty, whatever task is allotted of me."
From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-
independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status within the Congress party. Sonia's word was destined to remain law.
But Singh made his mark during his first term in office, standing up to opposition from his coalition partners and from within his own party to push through a civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States in 2008, a landmark agreement that ended India's nuclear isolation after its weapons tests in 1974 and 1998.
It was a moment that almost brought his government down, an issue over which he offered to resign. While no electricity has yet flowed from that pact, it marked a major step forward in India's relations with the United States.
The Congress-led coalition went on to win a second term in 2009, in what many people saw as a mandate for Singh.
The 2009 election "was a victory for him, but he did not step up to claim it — maybe because he is too academic, maybe because he is too old," said Tushar Poddar, managing director at Goldman Sachs in Mumbai. "That lack of leadership, that lack of boldness, lack of will — that really shocked us. That really shocked foreign investors."
`He suffers from doubts'
In a series of largely off-the-
record conversations, friends and colleagues painted a picture of a man who felt undermined by his own party and who sank into depression and self-pity.
His one attempt in 1999 to run for a parliamentary seat from a supposedly safe district in the capital, New Delhi, had ended in ignominious defeat. His failure to contest a parliamentary seat in 2009, making him the only Indian prime minister not to have done so, further undermined both his confidence, his friends and colleagues say, and his standing in the eyes of the party.
Congress, insiders say, never accepted that the 2009 election was a mandate for Singh and jealously resented the idea that he could be seen to be anywhere near as important as a Gandhi. Rahul, Sonia's son, was being groomed to take over from Singh, and the prime minister needed to be cut down to size.
He soon was openly criticized by his own party over attempts to continue a peace process with Pakistan despite the 2008 attack on Mumbai by Pakistani militants.
Singh became even more quiet at his own cabinet meetings, to the point of not speaking up for the sort of economic changes many thought he ought to be championing.
"His gut instincts are very good, but sometimes he suffers from doubts about the political feasibility, about getting things done," said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a Columbia University professor who has been friends with Singh since their Cambridge days.
Singh will go down in history as India's first Sikh prime minister and the country's third-longest-serving premier, but also as someone who did not know when to retire, Guha said.
"He is obviously tired, listless, without energy," he said. "At his time of life, it is not as though he is going to get a new burst of energy. Things are horribly out of control and can only get worse for him, for his party and for his government."
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