US daily terms Manmohan 'ineffective' bureaucrat

A livid govt demands apology from The Washington Post

The ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government has threatened to seek an apology from “The Washington Post” after the US daily in an article in its Wednesday edition termed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt” regime.

Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said that she would take it up with the Ministry of External Affairs and demand an apology from the “Post.” “The article on the prime minister by a paper like ‘Washington Post’ is unacceptable. The claims made there are completely baseless and we reject it,” she told journalists, reacting to the newspaper’s article “India’s ‘silent’ prime minister becomes a tragic figure”.

Though “The Washington Post” recognised Singh as the “architect of India’s economic reforms” and “a respected figure on the world stage”, it also quoted “critics” saying that he ran the risk of being remembered as a failure. “India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh helped set his country on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but critics say the shy, soft-spoken 79-year-old is in danger of going down in history as a failure.”

The article has irked the government as it came at a time when the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had been disrupting the proceedings of Parliament, demanding Singh’s resignation over “Coalgate”.

Soni however termed the report by the US daily a piece of ‘yellow journalism’ and ‘baseless’.

Singh was often criticised for being pro-America in his economic and foreign policies during his government’s first tenure from 2004 to 2009.

But “The Washington Post” was the second major US publication to slam him for his performance as the head of the second UPA Government. The “Time” magazine had on a cover story in its July 16 issue described Singh as an “Underachiever” and noted that he appeared to be “unwilling to stick his neck out” on reforms that would put the country back on growth path.

“The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation played out in parallel with his country’s decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and as its reputation for rampant corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the country was on an inexorable road to becoming a global power has increasingly come into question,” the Post’s New Delhi correspondent Simon Denyer wrote in the article. Denyer later tweeted that the neither had the government asked for an apology from him, nor had he offered one.

In his article, Denyer recognised the prime minister as “the major force behind his country’s rapproachement with the US” and noted that US President Barack Obama’s aides used to boast of his tremendous rapport and friendship with Singh.