What the PM didn’t say

The headline writers had a difficult time on Monday evening. The “open” press conference of the Prime Minister of India, held after an interval of five years, was disappointing for more than one reason. Nothing new was said that had not been said before and some of it had been repeated umpteen times. Without anything new, the question naturally arose as to what indeed was the “news”.
Far more disappointing than the absence of “hard news” in Dr Manmohan Singh’s interaction with journalists in New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan on Monday — that lasted a bit more than an hour and a quarter — was the fact that the Prime Minister rather adroitly ducked each and every uncomfortable question, be it on the telecommunications scam involving minister Andimuthu Raja, his squabbling Cabinet colleagues airing their differences in public, Naxalites, Telangana, Afzal Guru, the politicisation of the Central Bureau of Investigation, caste-based Census or, for that matter, on the alleged involvement of Union ministers in the Indian Premier League controversy.
The obvious question that would then arise would be why the press conference was conducted in the first place. Was it really to mark the conclusion of the first year of the second United Progressive Alliance government, essentially an image-building exercise? Was it to refute snide suggestions to the effect that the Prime Minister was running away from addressing the media or answering tough queries about his ministers and his party’s allies? At the end of the morning, what became important was not what Dr Singh said, but what he didn’t.
There was, however, one significant acknowledgement. And it relates to inflation. For well over eight months now, various spokespersons of the government — from finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, among others — have been shouting themselves hoarse that the inflation rate was about to come down. In more recent weeks, these individuals have been claiming that one had to just wait for the real finance minister of India, “Indra-bhagvan”, the god of rainfall, to smile on the nation before food prices starting collapsing. Even when the Budget hiked taxes on petrol and diesel in February, government worthies contended that the impact of the rise in fuel prices on the overall rate of inflation (presumably, as measured by the official wholesale prices index) would be barely 0.4 per cent.
We are now a bit closer to the truth. The Prime Minister himself has said that inflation will come down to the five to six per cent level by December. He’s playing it safe. This means that till the end of the year, the aam aadmi’s real income will continue to shrink on account of higher food prices, albeit at a slightly slower pace. Food inflation was at a high of 20 per cent in December and is currently over 16 per cent. If world-renowned economist Dr Singh’s prognostication is correct, the pace at which prices are going up will decelerate or slow down. Food prices will not come down, barring a few exceptions — that too, only on account of seasonal factors. That’s it.
The other noteworthy aspect of the Prime Minister’s take on inflation is that just about everybody and everything is responsible for high inflation in the country but not the government or its policies. The list of factors that have contributed to inflation is long: drought, floods, international economic recession, besides, of course, high world crude oil prices. No mention need be made about our minister for agriculture, food and consumer affairs, Sharad Pawar. After all, Dr Singh has categorically said the buck stops with him. He and he alone is accountable to Parliament and the people of the world’s largest democracy. As for his colleagues in the council of ministers, the first among equals merely urged them to argue against one another while they were inside Cabinet meetings, not outside them.
The Prime Minister stood by the actions of his controversial minister for communications and information technology, but his arguments were disingenuous, to say the least. Dr Singh agreed that there was a “huge gap” in the prices of 2G spectrum and 3G spectrum but that the “whole problem” needed to be viewed in a “proper perspective”. To elaborate on this “perspective”, the Prime Minister recounted Mr Raja’s justification for his actions: namely, that he was implementing policies that had been put in place in 2003 when the UPA was not in power, that he had gone by the recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Telecom Commission and that he did not wish to “discriminate” against new entrants by applying different yardsticks.
Since supplementary questions were disallowed during the press conference, no follow-up queries were made on whether Mr Raja cherry-picked the Trai’s suggestions, on why he failed to abide by even the Prime Minister’s own suggestion not to follow a first-come-first-served system of allotting spectrum and on why he suddenly and arbitrarily brought forward the cut-off date for receipt of applications for licences and spectrum. Dr Singh was clearly prepared for this question. He gave one of his longest answers to this particular query — quite unlike his brief one-line answers to many of the other questions he fielded. Still, the Prime Minister kept his options open: the CBI was looking into the alleged scam, he pointed out, adding that his government was clear that corruption is a problem, and that action would be taken against any person “at any level” if found guilty.
To a question as to whether he was really as pro-American as the Left makes him out to be, the Prime Minister said he is “working on an agenda that serves India to the best of my ability” and that it was for the people of the country to judge him. (In September 2008, as he sat beside George W. Bush at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C., Dr Singh had said: “The people of India deeply love you”.) A few minutes later during the press conference, one wonders if the Prime Minister’s made a proverbial Freudian slip of the tongue when he said that “we are a country of a billion dollars”, before quickly correcting himself to replace his last word with “people”.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator