Delivering innumerable speeches does not make PM communicative: Jaitley

Commenting on the statement released by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which maintained that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has so far delivered around 1200 speeches and has been very communicative, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the party's Lok Sabha candidate for Amritsar, Arun Jaitley, said on Saturday that delivering innumerable speeches does not make a prime minister communicative.

"I read a statement of PMO that PM spoke 1200 times in 10 years and that's what makes him a communicative PM. I don't think he became a communicative PM by just reading out speeches and templates," said Jaitley.

"What you say must carry weight and should be inspirational, and people should at least listen to it, but I doubt that those speeches would be remembered, as great speeches or anything of significance except for the routine sentences. It's almost like the PM, having walked on snow, has not left any footprints behind," he said.

Yesterday, the PMO cited economic data to claim "unprecedented development" in the past decade and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's current media adviser Pankaj Pachauri said this would not have been possible if the PM was weak, as mentioned in former media advisor of the PM, Sanjay Baru's book 'The Accidental Prime Minister.'

He also refuted Baru's claim that Singh had been a silent Prime Minister. He said that even though the PM had delivered 1,198 speeches and his office had issued many press releases, they were never highlighted sufficiently in the media, as they were more interested in other fields rather than in issues like the economy, development, agriculture, science and education.