Pm Manmohan Singh Quotes

in the Congress party known for planting stories against the PM in the media were

For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia. They did not see loyalty to the PM as a political necessity, nor did Dr Singh seek loyalty in the way in which Sonia and her aides sought it.

As long as the prime minister’s image is good,’ he said to me, ‘so, too, the image of the government and the country. When the image of the PM suffers, the government’s image, and the country’s, also suffers.

once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM,

Nair’s risk-averse personality only compounded Dr Singh’s careful approach and contributed to a further dilution of the PM’s authority.

early to rise and late to sleep’ schedule had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, his habit of tuning in to the BBC early in the morning helped the Government of India respond with alacrity to the tsunami in December 2004. Long before any disaster management, national security or intelligence agency woke up to alert government agencies, the PM was up and heard the news of the tsunami.

As PM, he would listen to all opinions, only rarely disagreeing with anyone in meetings, so as not to discourage free expression, and then doing what he felt was needed to be done.

the BJP remained in denial about its defeat and was refusing to extend to the new PM the basic courtesy of letting him speak in Parliament. Finally,

Once the economy began to falter and the government became wobbly, India and its PM lost their sheen,

After proclaiming the 123 Agreement ‘sound and honourable’, he followed up with an editorial a few days later, toeing Karat’s line and advising the government to put the deal on hold. AndYechury, who had privately agreed that the PM had done what he had promised to, publicly criticized him.

Why, I was asked, was UPA-1 more successful than UPA-2? Why had the PM’s image taken such a beating? What

will argue, in the coming chapters, that the Manmohan Singh of UPA-1 was not the ‘puppet PM’ that he came to be seen as in UPA-2.

Pranab was never so transparent either in expressing his disagreement or support. After returning from an important visit to Washington DC, Pranab chose not to brief the PM for three days. He had gone to see Sonia Gandhi but had not sought an appointment with Dr Singh. On the third day, I asked Dr Singh what had transpired at Pranab’s meetings with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. ‘I don’t know,’ was his plaintive reply.

Chidambaram, Jayalalithaa’s bete noire, to quit the Congress and join the Tamil Maanila Congress. Against this background, the 2004 alliance with the Congress could not have been negotiated by Sonia. It was left to Dr Singh to do that, and I was always surprised that political analysts paid little attention to these capabilities of the PM.

In UPA-1 public opinion did not turn against the PM for this moral ambivalence on his part, because

was standard practice in the Vajpayee PMO for some journalists to get such limousines when travelling abroad with the PM. I was told that Vajpayee’s son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had befriended many senior editors, had taken personal interest in ensuring that the PMO’s favoured journalists were well looked after. I brought to an end all such privileges and incurred the wrath of some professional peers.

The days when the Planning Commission was composed entirely of subject experts were long gone. Various political and social quotas had now to be filled. North, south, scheduled caste, woman, minority. In the era of coalitions, every constituent political party wanted to name a member. For the PM, himself a former deputy chairman, the Planning Commission had become the place where he could park a trusted aide.

ordinance. During UPA-1, it had been forced to defend the PM even when it did not agree with his actions, to ensure the

But Dr Singh’s view was that India’s economic rise and its regional and global profile would make it impossible for the world community to ignore its legitimate claim when the time would come for UNSC expansion. There was no need, he felt, for India to make a repeated claim each time the PM spoke somewhere. During the first three years of UPA-1 Dr Singh referred to the UNSC membership issue only on three occasions—when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2004 and 2005, and when he addressed the US Congress in 2005.