Mr. Singh's Lament
India's prime minister suggests the buck doesn't stop with him.
India's Congress-led government has been besieged by allegations of graft since the middle of 2010. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tacitly suggests it's not fair to hold him responsible when he has little control over his own coalition government. That was the message of an hour-long television interview aired on Wednesday.
Asked what he was doing when Andimuthu Raja—the former telecom minister who belongs to a southern Indian party that's part of this coalition—allegedly perpetrated a $40 billion scam selling telecom spectrum, the prime minister responded, "In a coalition government, you can suggest your preferences but you have to go by what the leader of that particular coalition party ultimately insists." Mr. Singh says the buck does not stop with him: "I did not feel I was in a position to insist [on] auctions" instead of the first-come, first-serve way in which spectrum licenses were sold.
It's no secret that Mr. Singh has been India's weakest prime minister from the moment he took office. This was evident not merely from errant coalition partners, but also ministers of his own Congress Party. For instance, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has implemented his own activist agenda despite Mr. Singh's warning that environmentalism shouldn't become a new avatar of the old license-permit raj.
Mr. Ramesh, Mr. Raja and many others understand that at the end of the day they are answerable only to the Congress President Sonia Gandhi. When the party won parliamentary polls in 2004, it was Mrs. Gandhi, a member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated Indian politics since independence, who anointed Mr. Singh to the top post.
But it's more than embarrassing when the leader of the world's most populous democracy throws his hands up at the hijinks of his own ministers. Accountability is clearly breaking down. India cannot be taken seriously on the world stage when its prime minister doesn't have the power to speak on the country's behalf. How much longer will the Gandhi family rule from behind the curtain?
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