The Hindu Business Line : <I>Insular PM? </I>

It is a paradox that, when transport and communications were nowhere near what they are today, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi were more visible to the people of all parts of the country and more often in their midst than the Prime Ministers of recent years. Jawaharlal Nehru, of course, was a communicator par excellence and tireless in going to all nooks and corners of this vast nation, talking directly to people assembled in lakhs to see and hear him and explaining government's policies and programmes. Lal Bahadur and Indira Gandhi too felt at one with the people at large, and took every opportunity to mingle with them. To some extent, Rajiv Gandhi also was able to capture the people's imagination with his youth, dynamism and vision.

Unfortunately, none of the other Prime Ministers has been able to match them in developing the same kind of evocative rapport with the people. They functioned within the confines of their brick-and-mortar offices; in fact, their names would have meant little to people outside their own States.

Dr Manmohan Singh, for all his standing as an economist of repute who has launched India on the road to stardom on the world's economic stage, has turned out to be the most insular and reticent of PMs. Whether it was Medha Patkar's fast, the agitation over quotas, the miasma surrounding the nuclear deal with the US or the seemingly contradictory postures taken by Ministers and even between the Congress party and the Government over issues such as the fuel price hikes, Dr Manmohan Singh could have squelched the raging controversies by coming out into the open, in public meetings and media conferences at important locations in different States, with the Government's stand and future course of action. His habit of keeping to himself may be all right for a bureaucrat, but not for a PM. Indeed, President Abdul Kalam does a better job of relating to various sections of the people than Dr Manmohan Singh.

B. S. RAGHAVAN