‘Washington Post’ called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a ‘tragic figure’
New Delhi: Days after the Time magazine featured Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ‘underachiever’ a US daily Wahington Post called him a ‘tragic figure’.
India’s Bureu chief of the newspaper writer Simon Denyer said, “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.”
Referring to the slew of corruption scandals that have surfaced during his tenure as PM, the daily opines that Manmohan Singh’s image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat has slowly given way to a completely different one: a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government.
The daily said that for the past two weeks, the Indian Parliament has been adjourned every day as the opposition demands Singh’s resignation over allegations of waste and corruption in the allocation of coal mining concessions.
“The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation has 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 paper said.
