It is an index of the poverty of politics that the BJP should ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to resign prompted by an article in the Asian edition of Time magazine that has called Dr Singh an “underachiever”.
Union home minister P. Chidambaram’s pained description of the demand as “distasteful” doesn’t quite capture its absurdity. It is the prerogative of a journal to project any viewpoint. The effort would be deemed credible by its readers if the argument is persuasively presented. But for a major political party to try and own the same criticisms reflects sheer laziness, a lack of confidence in itself, and an absence of originality. Surely, the country’s main Opposition party can do better than that.
The American newsmagazine thinks the Prime Minister appears “unwilling to stick his neck out” to push growth-oriented reforms. This is a criticism from afar that seems not to capture India’s present political complexities. The BJP, however, was expected to grasp the picture better. While the government could have pushed harder on the economic front, all said and done India is still recording the fourth highest growth rate in the world at a difficult time for the world economy.
It is possible the BJP is piggybacking on the Time article in order to deflect attention from its own current difficulties that are searing it. But the party might do well to remember that the same magazine had once said that then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was “asleep at
the wheel”.