The Indian prime minister is going to places he shouldn’t. And not going to places he should.
It’s becoming a pattern. First, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attends a summit of an international grouping that has little relevance to India’s foreign policy priorities. Then, at the “sidelines”, he meets the Pakistani leader who happens to be there [...]
Chetan Bhagat uses sophisms to advance an argument for surrender
So how many cliched sophisms can you squeeze into one 900-word op-ed piece? Chetan Bhagat manages to do five. More than a defence of the prime minister as it announces itself to be, his op-ed in Hindustan Times (linkthanks Rohit Pradhan) is merely a series of [...]
Statesmanship and not
Much of the public debate over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bad wager at Sharm-el-Sheikh as been framed wrongly. It is not about the need for India to diplomatically engage Pakistan (although presenting a binary choice between war and talks, and advocating talks suits the UPA government just fine).
It is about how. Shekhar Gupta’s [...]
The strategic consequences of Manmohan Singh’s vulnerability
So he stood his ground, and didn’t make use of the lifelines that were created for him by the foreign ministry.
Whether he intended it or not, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made himself personally vulnerable. Whether he intended it or not, his Sharm-el-Sheikh lollipop is a gamble: if [...]
But still won’t
This blog would be remiss if it missed pointing out an excellent post by Raju Narisetti, the editor of Mint, on his blog. Dr Manmohan Singh, he writes, should be an op-ed writer.
Usually, it is the opinion page editors of newspapers who are in the habit of telling the government and the people [...]
Caught in a storm without an umbrella
Mint makes a very important point in today’s editorial:
We have often said in these columns that the UPA government made a cardinal mistake during its term: buoyant tax revenues should have been used to fix the fiscal problem. The money that flowed into the kitty was frittered away, even [...]
V Anantha Nageswaran
TN Ninan’s weekend rumination on Manmohan Singh’s purported successes on the external front is disappointing for two reasons: it does not make any useful point and it is misleading. The ongoing global financial and economic crisis is neither about global financial regulation nor its architecture.
In all fairness—whether or not Dr Singh was [...]
India needs a can-do leader
If you wanted some irony supplements today, consider this. When his cabinet colleagues demanded that the Government of India take action against a glorified thug, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh helplessly said “what can I do?”
Oh, but that didn’t stop him from setting in motion a communal socialist policy that will [...]
Nothing ideological about it
First he said that his government had no ideological view on anti-terrorism laws. Now Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—he who is the much celebrated ‘father of the economic reforms’—says he has no ideological commitment to markets either.
Asked if the current global financial disorder was an occasion to revise the faith in the markets, [...]
They destroyed the paddle. Schitt creek* is coming up
Growth in industrial production fell to 3%, the lowest in six years, indicating that bad times might be ahead. There’s worse. As Niranjan Rajadhyaksha demonstrates, the UPA government has frittered away the opportunity to put the economy on the footing to handle the coming problems. In the [...]
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