Leader Loses His Luster as India Chafes

NEW DELHI â€" Nine years ago, when news broke that Manmohan Singh would be the next prime minister of India, a man stood on the roof of a vehicle pointing a pistol to his own head and threatened to shoot himself. He demanded that the president of the Indian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi, who had just led the party to a surprise victory in the general elections, become prime minister.

Mrs. Gandhi had chosen Mr. Singh for the job for a host of reasons including the fact that her vanquished political foes had sworn to turn her Italian origins into a perpetual hell for her. And, as a Gandhi, she did not need the inconvenience of coronation to control the government. Also, Mr. Singh was innately incapable of being a threat to the Gandhi family.

The urban middle class, which was largely disappointed by the victory of the Congress party, was consoled by the news of Mr. Singh’s elevation. Here was a scholar, an economist, the finance minister who liberalized the Indian economy in 1991, a man who was perceived to be incorruptible, and generally such a nice person that he could not win an election the only time he tried. But today, the perception of the third-longest-serving Indian prime minister has changed. The middle-class reaction to him now, if visually expressed, would be of a distraught man pointing a gun to his own head.

Mr. Singh’s two terms, especially the second, have been rocked by controversies. Among them have been the accusation that the minister of communications and information technology, who was eventually jailed, favored certain companies in allocating mobile telephone spectrum licenses and that the prime minister’s office was fully aware of this; and that when Mr. Singh was in charge of the Coal Ministry, the government allocated mining licenses in an inefficient and arbitrary manner at great cost to the government’s revenues. On Monday, the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation revealed that after his agency prepared a report on the coal scandal for the Supreme Court, the law minister and officials of the prime minister’s office and Coal Ministry altered portions of it.

But, the director said, the changes were not substantial.

The prime minister’s famed personal integrity long insulated him from the scams, but in the past two years, particularly in the past week, that aura has diminished.

Mr. Singh speaks rarely, more rarely still to the nation. When he does speak, he is banal and wise, though once he did tell the U.S. president at the time, George W. Bush, that “the people of India deeply love you,” which was news to the people of India. In fact, of late the defining quality of the prime minister has been his unnatural silence, which was once interpreted as elegance but now is seen as evasion. His silence in the face of pandemonium in Parliament is similar to that of his political mentor, former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, who was often caricatured by the cartoonist Keshav as a man with a zipped mouth.

When he does speak, Mr. Singh has defended himself by saying that there have been no lapses, or that the accusations against him are exaggerations by politicians and the news media, or that he was unaware of some nefarious things going on in his government.

He does not have back channels of communication with journalists. No media leaks originate from his desk drawers. His rivals within the Congress party, on the other hand, have a well-oiled system of shadow briefings and leaks. Delhi’s seasoned journalists believe that some of the scandals that have embarrassed the prime minister have been leaked from within the Congress party.

The decline of Mr. Singh’s reputation is the subject of the latest cover stories of three national newsmagazines, whose cover lines were: “Descent of man,” “Dr. Dolittle” and “The good doctor’s dubious practice.” There are the inevitable television debates, too, and middle-class dinner conversations. In these stories and debates, Mr. Singh is accused not only of being the passive head of a corrupt system, but of not pushing through the next phase of economic and administrative changes and ineffectually presiding over an economic slump.

Mr. Singh is probably the only Indian prime minister to profess a love for capitalism and for the ability of private enterprise to eradicate poverty. Yet, the compulsions of politics have cast him today in the role of a financially profligate, crowd-pleasing socialist. A major bill that his government is trying to push through to win the impending general elections, the National Food Security Bill, would provide grain at huge discounts to nearly 67 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population and free meals to children and pregnant women. It is expected to cost about two trillion rupees, or $37 billion, a year, though this figure includes existing food subsidies. The grain would be delivered by the same distribution systems that have been proved to breed middlemen and corruption. This is exactly the kind of expenditure that the middle class and the business community hate.

There is an important statistic in this seemingly ridiculous bill. One in three Indians is no longer deemed poor enough to receive subsidized food. And for that Mr. Singh is responsible in no small measure.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.