<b>T N Ninan:</b> PM as politician

The prime minister said nothing new during Friday's press conference, except the obvious (that he was not looking for a third term); he also made some deliberately aggressive remarks about Narendra Modi. However, there was a flaw as well as a curious inconsistency in the logic that he adopted. When asked about the scams that took place on his watch, he offered the argument that both the spectrum and coal mine scandals belonged to the first government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA); the people had voted after that, and rewarded the UPA with a fresh mandate. But Manmohan Singh failed to apply the same logic to Narendra Modi. In asserting that someone who had presided over the massacre of innocents could not or should not be prime minister, he seemed to forget that Mr Modi had thrice won the mandate of the people of Gujarat after that pogrom. Indeed, Mr Modi did better than the Congress by winning thumping majorities. If sins of commission and omission were washed away by such electoral mandates, then surely the washing had been done by Gujarat's voters far more than the national electorate had done for the UPA.

That brings up the flaw in the prime minister's logic, in confusing between political realities, judicial verdicts and fact-finding reports. If judicial verdicts could get overturned by an election, India's constitutional scheme would fall apart. Since that is not the case, the prime minister remains answerable for what happened in both the spectrum scam and the coal mine scandal. He is perfectly free to mount a defence on facts and logic - and he has done so more than once, and did so again during his press conference. But in maintaining that what he wanted to be done in both instances did not eventually get done, he is scoring an own goal, and re-fuelling the charge that he has been a weak prime minister. Dr Singh also forgets that the relevant reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General came after the 2009 elections.

There was a further inconsistency in that he sought to distinguish between the records of UPA-I and UPA-II when it came to scandals, but did not do so when it came to his economic record. If he had chosen to focus only on the second term, he would have had to admit rather more candidly that it has been a period when economic growth has been reduced to the slowest in a decade, inflation has been higher than in any other five-year period since 1991 if not earlier, that India's external account was dangerously in deficit for a while and the country therefore in danger of a rating downgrade, and finally that the fiscal situation is basically not under control. He got around those embarrassing facts by focusing on the decade and not the quinquennium. Further, he mentioned the difficult international environment that had caused the decline in growth and the rise in inflation, but did not mention that it was the international environment that also facilitated the rapid growth of the earlier phase.

A prime minister is entitled to put a gloss on the numbers for his period in office, and to present the record in as positive light as possible. Indeed, no one will deny that the record has many bright patches. But when Dr Singh plays with the period that he wants to review and does not apply the same logic to others that he does to himself, Dr Singh is really telling us that he has learnt to be convenient with the facts, and selective with the logic he applies.