Should Manmohan Singh Resign?

Ole Spata/European Pressphoto Agency Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a press conference in Berlin, Germany, on Apr. 11.

NEW DELHI â€" Manmohan Singh is the third-longest-serving prime minister in India’s history, but his control of the world’s largest democracy is increasingly being questioned.

Over the weekend, both Law Minister Ashwani Kumar and Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal resigned following allegations of corruption, bringing to six the number of cabinet ministers who have stepped down in the past four years.

The latest resignations seemed intended to placate critics and voters hoping for more accountability in India’s central government, and to signal that Mr. Singh himself is taking an active role in improving accountability.

In a carefully crafted statement accepting the ministers’ resignations on Saturday, President Pranab Mukherjee said he had done so “as advised by the prime minister.”

But the question lingers: As the head of the cabinet, is Mr. Singh the one who should be stepping down?

“Singh’s reputation has certainly been damaged over this episode,” D.H. Pai Panandiker, president of the RPG Foundation, a New Delhi-based economic research group, told Bloomberg News on Monday. “His reputation for personal integrity is well established, but there is an impression he tolerates others being corrupt,” Mr. Panandiker said.

That alleged tolerance, once noted in mild rebukes of Mr. Singh’s management style, threatens to become his defining characteristic as his second term as prime minister grinds to a close.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has been unrelenting in its demands for Mr. Singh’s resignation in recent weeks, and raised the pressure over the weekend, staging protests outside his home. An opposition political party demanding that the leader of the governing party step down isn’t, of itself, highly unusual. And despite the scandals, the Congress Party has nabbed leadership of three states from the opposition in elections in the past year and earlier this year â€" Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Karnataka.

But calls for the once-loved Mr. Singh to step down have been coming from other sectors as well, including once-sympathetic historians, columnists thought to be supportive of the Congress Party and voters themselves.

Whether Mr. Singh still enjoys support from the majority of the members of India’s Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, who actually have the power to vote him out of office, is unknown. But other branches of the government have weighed in:

India’s Supreme Court was sharply critical of the Singh-led government’s role during an investigation into the allocation of India’s coal resources. Last week it called India’s top investigation agency nothing more than a “caged parrot” for the Congress Party.

The growing criticism of Mr. Singh represents a massive shift from the way he was perceived when he was elected to the job, as Manu Joseph noted in the International Herald Tribune last week:

Here was a scholar, an economist, the finance minister who liberalized the Indian economy in 1991, a man who was perceived to be 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.

Writing in The Asian Age earlier this month, Sanjay Basak and Venkatesh Kesari said of Mr. Singh:

He seems to have lost his moral high ground as the scam-tainted UPA-2 is now being accused of trying to shield him from the Coalgate scam. Scalded by scandals and accused of being “too weak to lead,” Dr. Singh, who had refused to rule himself out for a possible third term, could now find the doors closing on him fast.

Mr. Singh is said to be such a hard-working politician that he’s never taken a vacation in his nine years on the job. Perhaps, a growing number of critics seem to be saying, it is time.

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