Craven and senile UPA Government

It was a bad week for Manmohan Singh. Brutalised at home and abroad, the Prime Minister of India is a shadow of his former self, under criticism and constant mockery, self-doubting and without confidence. The elderly Sikh’s glamour, self esteem and pride lost, his ethics questioned. It should not have come to this.
Manmohan Singh was a brilliant student through and through. Standing first class first in his Bachelors and Masters, he completed his Economics Tripos from Cambridge, and went on to earn a Doctorate in Economics from Oxford. He went on to work with merit in the UN Development, taught International trade at the prestigious Delhi School of Economics, and then went on to serve the Planning Commission and as a Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. What went so horribly wrong that such an erudite man lost all his credibility and integrity, and is now seemingly a powerless puppet at the hands of the ruling center-left Congress party and the Gandhi family?
In 1991 when India was facing severe economic crisis, due to three decades of socialist state-controlled policies, of which Singh was an architect, he became the finance minister and had to open up the gates of liberalization to stall the utter doom that was awaiting otherwise.
Still to this day, it is debatable how much Singh wanted to liberalize and how much he was forced to due to strict monetary loan guideline policies of the IMF which in reality bailed a socialist India out from bankruptcy.
Then he went on to become the first Prime Minister of India since Jawaharlal Nehru to return in power after completing the full first term. His legacy is mixed with nuclear deals and alliance with US being on the positive sides, and bills like food security bills and land acquisition bills on the negative, almost seemingly taking India back to the dark days of the eighties. The spineless and tactless reactions to the Islamist terrorism from Pakistan, the regular Chinese incursions across India’s northern borders, and the Maoist insurgency solidifies the notion of a feckless Prime Minister who’s not actually in charge, negligent at best and incompetent at worst.
In recent days, he was in the middle of a political storm when an ordinance, passed by his cabinet was questioned and sent back by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee. The same ordinance was ridiculed by Rahul Gandhi, a Gandhi family heir apparent, Vice President of the PM’s own party, a political contender for the next PM post, and an amateur when it comes to economics and realpolitik.
His speech in the United Nations showed no grand vision for a rising power like India. It didn’t touch upon Indian foreign policy and grand strategy, India’s growing economic interests abroad and how to effectively protect them, Indian military role in its immediate neighbourhood, or even the Indians killed in terrorists attacks abroad. He went back to the tried and tested Kashmir dialogues, which is more targeted at his domestic electorate who are frustrated with his wimp government.
His dialogues with Obama about terrorism and Pakistan are allegedly ridiculed by the Prime Minister of Pakistan as a moaning of a “dehati aurat” (village woman). Even when one questions the right or credibility of the Prime Minister of Pakistan of all people, of saying anything anywhere about any matters of the globe, it cannot be denied that this one was a low blow. And understandably cause of the perception of a weak Indian PM, not effectively in charge of his own party, much less the whole country.
There’s an easy way out; to call it quits and call for an early election. Live with dignity and self-respect; for a man who has rightly or wrongly served the country for so many decades and given his best, for what he thought would be the best for the country. Unfortunately for someone with so much education, Manmohan Singh never learned when to stop with respect.