Howls on Time’s broadside
The Asia Edition of Time
magazine has set the cat among the Indian political pigeons by piling up
unpleasant epithets in describing the performance of Dr Manmohan Singh as the
Prime Minister: An underachiever, a man in shadow, unable to control his
Ministers, unwilling to stick his neck out on reforms, and one who has fallen
from grace.
The sole, albeit condescending,
mention of “the calm confidence he radiated once” , looks more damning, embedded
as it is in all the rest of the provocative stuff.The best way to deal with
criticism is to introspect and see whether there is any justification for it. As
the ancient Tamil sage Thiruvalluvar put it 2,500 years ago, wisdom lies in
heeding sense from whichever quarter it might emanate.What, after all, is
under-achieving? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an under-achiever as
“one who fails to attain a predicted level of achievement or does not do as well
as expected”.
Well, the prevalent opinion within
the country itself and even among those who are cognizant of the constraints
faced by Dr Singh, as the Prime Minister, is that he has not measured up to
expectations.
PUBLIC PERCEPTION
Unlike all other Prime Ministers,
except perhaps his mentor, P.V. Narasimha Rao, he has been withdrawn and
uncommunicative, depending on colleagues such as Mr Pranab Mukherjee or Mr
P.Chidambaram to manage crises. In that sense, he has been a man in shadow.The
public perception deriving from the many abhorrent scams that had taken place
right under his nose is that he has no control over his Ministers.He himself has
confirmed it by listing the many areas in the Finance Ministry left unattended
by Mr Mukherjee upon whom he apparently could not prevail.
Certainly, as the article says,
there has been a backsliding in economic reforms with no determined effort by
the Prime Minister to have the Bills languishing in Parliament touching on some
of them passed, and to make a bold pitch for the rest. Which means he has been
unwilling to stick his neck out.
I don’t think the article on the
whole has been unfair. However, it raises some other interesting issues.First of
all, I don’t understand why there should be such a lot of breast-beating over
its publication. The invectives that the media of democracies such as Australia,
Britain, Canada and the US frequently use against their own leaders and public
figures are far more damaging than the comments of Time magazine on Dr
Singh.
Indeed, the ferocity of the
satirical barbs to which they are subjected by late night political jokesters is
to be watched to be believed. Not once have I known the top leaders of those
countries taking cudgels against them. (Of course, US President Richard Nixon
unleashed the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
against some of them, but then he was of a distinctly untypical genre.)
Compared with all that, I should
say that Dr Singh has been let off lightly with some gentle and civilised
admonitions.
INFERIORITY COMPLEX
Secondly, why should we, as a
people, regard such remarks as gospel? Neither the Opposition’s bandying them
about to lambast the Prime Minister and the UPA-II, nor the UPA spokespersons’
going hammer and tongs at the contents of the article, displays signs of
maturity and dignity.It would have been far more of an effective riposte if the
matter had been left to be handled by media scribes with a passing sarcastic
quip aimed at the article from some political second-ranker.
After all, media in India too
indulge in fulminations against top leaders of Britain, the US and the like.The
political establishments there hardly take any notice of them and go about their
quotidian business as if nothing happened. The problem with India is its
inferiority complex resulting from its colonial background.It makes Indians
over-sensitive to observations and criticisms originating from industrially
advanced countries.Indians have not yet learnt to judge developments on the
political, cultural, literary and other fronts on their own merits, based purely
on their relevance to India’s concerns.
For instance, only after Western
literary critics gave their seal of approval to the creations of Rabindranath
Tagore, R.K.Narayan, Satyajit Ray or Arundhati Roy did the Indians even come to
know that they existed in their midst!
Cool it, folks!
-Umesh Shanmugam
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