India's 'silent' prime minister becomes a tragic figure

Ray

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Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks
"We're not in the Boy Scouts," Richard Helms was fond of saying when he ran the Central Intelligence Agency. He was correct, of course. Boy Scouts do not ordinarily bribe foreign politicians, invade other countries with secret armies, spread lies, conduct medical experiments, build stocks of poison, pass machine guns to people who plan to turn them on their leaders, or plot to kill men such as Lumumba or Castro or others who displeased Washington. The CIA did these things, and more, over a long span of years. On whose orders? This is a question a Pulitzer prizewinning writer addresses in an adaptation from his forthcoming book about Helms and the Agency, The Man Who Kept the Secrets.
RICHARD Helms, as lean as a long-distance runner and looking just about as restless, dressed in a suit and tie, greeted a visitor at nine o'clock on a sunny morning on his front doorstep. He would not have been dressed any differently if he'd been on his way to present an annual report to the board of directors, but in the spring of 1977 he was not going anywhere. The reason was not that he was looking forward to a chance at last to read the collected novels of Balzac, or that he wanted to stay home to work on his stamp collection, or that he welcomed the freedom to watch a whole season of baseball on television. The reason was that his whole life was hanging fire while he waited to learn if a special grand jury in the District of Columbia would vote to indict him for certain acts committed shortly after he ceased to be director of central intelligence (DCI) of the CIA.

Indicted for what? Helms would ask in his own defense. Helms is a man with an oddly appealing grin. His lower jaw juts out a trace, giving his otherwise ordinarily handsome face a singularity. His grin, lower jaw out, eyes wide, hands up, has about it an ironic, incredulous air; he can be amused, bewildered, and angry at the same time. For what?

He knew perfectly well for what, but intended to convey his contention that he had never done anything he was not asked, ordered, expected, or required to do by the nature of his job. In particular, the director of central intelligence had a responsibility not to answer every idle question put to him. He was charged under the National Security Act of 1947 with protection of the CIA's sources and methods. No one has ever spelled out what powers are thereby granted to the DCI. Helms had to protect the CIA's secrets by himself. It was his job and he did it. Indicted for what?

The narrow answer was for perjury before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 7, 1973, when Helms answered a question put by Senator Stuart Symington—"Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government in Chile?"—with an unequivocal "No, sir."

"Did you have any money passed to the opponents of Allende?"

"No, sir."

"So the stories you were involved in that war are wrong?"

"Yes, sir."

Helms's problems added up to a general mess of a sort unthinkable in previous years. But the dimensions and possible consequences of the mess had not yet halted the investigation, despite quiet appeals to the Justice Department by distinguished Washington figures who thought Helms was getting a raw deal. Taken together, these facts explained why Helms, who ought to have encountered little difficulty in finding a job, was not free to write his memoirs or accept employment or do much of anything except play tennis, dine with friends, and wait for his lawyer to straighten things out.

Helms was an isolated man. It was not that he lacked friends and allies in Washington, where he had spent nearly thirty years in the practice of intelligence. He was both liked and respected there, on his chosen ground; he was taken to be an honest man, a dedicated public servant who deserved honorable retirement after a long career working his way up through the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. Not many people knew what Helms had been doing in the CIA, but those who did formed a circle of unusual power and influence—former Presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other high officials, congressmen, and leading journalists. But this phalanx of support, personally gratifying as it must have been, only emphasized his isolation. Outside Washington, the word "intelligence" had acquired a new and sinister shade of meaning. Four years of official investigations had cast the CIA in a dark light, and the name of Richard Helms had turned up on a great many embarrassing documents about Watergate intrigue, assassination plots, the testing of drugs on unwitting victims, attempts to foment coups in democratic countries. The Washington circle that excused these things, explaining them away as the prosaic facts of international life, was a decidedly small one, and Helms was trapped at its very heart.

Helms did not understand how this had happened. He certainly knew the details of recent history better than most. He had watched the awful progress of events from Watergate to a major investigation of the CIA by a Senate select committee, and he had resisted the process of exposure at every step of the way. Helms had feared two consequences from the hemorrhage of Agency secrets which was still continuing: the demoralization of the CIA, unaccustomed to public scrutiny and a field day for hostile intelligence services rummaging through the Senate committee's voluminous reports. In Helms's view both had occurred, just as predicted. He was not a believer in catharsis. He was neither embarrassed nor repentant. Men of the world knew that the business of intelligence was more than a simple matter of spy and counterspy. What Helms did not understand was the relentless harping—especially on the part of certain Senate liberals and the pressmen—on the "crimes" of the CIA. Of course Helms read the papers; he knew there was a large public that did not like the Agency and what it was taken to represent—the secret expedients of power, and the failures of American Presidents who had tried to bull their way in the world. The wreckage of Vietnam was proof enough that something had gone terribly wrong. But in Helms's view, the hostility focused on the Agency, and indirectly on him, was the result of a refusal to accept the reality of an anarchic international system, in which vigilance, power, and strength of will were a nation's best, indeed only, defense. Destruction of the CIA through exposure and recrimination was like spiking the guns.

In the spring of 1977, out of a job for the first time in nearly forty years, Helms had plenty of time on his hands; his lawyer had told him to keep out of the public eye. But it went against the grain. Temperament and years of habit had accustomed him to days of busy executive routine: office by 8:30, meetings throughout the day, the review of endless pieces of paper, departure regularly at 6:30. CIA people like to tell stories about the Agency's great days and the adventurous men who ran its operations before everything fell apart, but they do not tell anecdotes about Helms: there aren't any. He is remembered as an administrator, impatient with delay, excuses, self-seeking, and the sour air of office politics. Asked for an example of Helms's characteristic utterance, three of his old friends came up with the same dry phrase: "Let's get on with it." He had hired out to do a job, he did today what had to be done today, he left his desk clean at night.

Of course every desk at the CIA was clean at night. The security people roamed the building after the close of work and handed out demerits for unlocked safes, full trash baskets, classified documents left in desk drawer. Even the desk of a man such as Richard Bissell, Helms's predecessor as head of the CIA's Deputy Directorate for Plans (DDP), had been clean at night before he left the Agency in disgrace after the collapse of his plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It would be hard to imagine two men more unlike than Richard Helms and Richard Bissell. Helms had been pretty unhappy when Bissell got the job Helms wanted back in 1958, but it wasn't solely personal disappointment that distressed him. Bissell was loquacious, inventive, the most open-minded of men; there was literally nothing one might propose to him that he would not turn this way and that in his logical mind, judging it strictly on its practical merits. A plan to invade Cuba, a poisoned handkerchief for an Arab general—he was ready to entertain them all. But Bissell's logical clarity was illusory. He sometimes fatally misjudged men. He worked out schemes for management and then broke his own rules. His desk was chaos. One look at it (and Helms did not get many; Bissell did not invite Helms's advice) and one might despair for the country. But even Richard Bissell's desk, straightened up by his secretary, was clean at the end of the day.

No branch of the American government was in better order at night than the CIA, in its huge headquarters in the middle of a woods in Langley, Virginia. It was the biggest thing of its kind in the world, much larger and more modern than the headquarters of the Committee for State Security—the KGB—in Moscow. The nation's secrets were each in their appointed place and one might have thought, if one had made the rounds with the security officers checking for violations, that the country must be in good order, that everyone knew his job, and accepted the ground rules, and agreed on the importance and purpose of the business at hand. An illusion, as Richard Bissell abruptly discovered in April 1961.

Helms had not been much surprised by Bissell's failure at the time. But he cannot have imagined, as he picked up the pieces in Bissell's wake, that his own gifts as an administrator, his long experience in managing secret operations, his devotion to their secrecy, his caution and cool judgment, would all fail too. Indeed, before his government was through with him, Helms would have reason to envy Bissell's quiet departure. The problem was not the way Helms or Bissell or anyone else in the CIA had been going about his job, but the job itself. The problem was what they did. The meticulous routine and order of the Agency, the tables of organization, the well-established and accepted dealings with the other branches of government, the procedures for internal and external control, the apparent consensus of official Washington on the importance of the CIA's work, were all illusory. The structure was jerry-built. The agreement was mostly confined to a small circle in Washington.

The arrangement had worked so well for so long that it was hard to see how fragile it was. The foreign policy establishment in Washington trusted the CIA, and still trusts it, for that matter; but beyond governing circles the political foundation of the CIA rested on nothing more substantial than a popular fascination with espionage and a conviction that we are the good guys. The American public, in short, had been taught a kind of child's history of the world, sanitized of the rougher facts of international life. A Victorian political morality obtained. Presidents, congressional leaders, the Pentagon, and the State Department all found it convenient to let the public assume that only the Other Side did things like that. We did not bribe foreign politicians. We did not undermine other governments. We did not invade other countries with secret armies. We did not spread lies, conduct medical experiments, put prisoners in padded rooms for years on end, build stocks of poison, sabotage factories, contaminate foodstuffs, pass machine guns to men who planned to turn them on their national leaders. Above all, we did not plot to kill men for nothing more than displeasing Washington. To discover ourselves the victims of so many illusions, all at once, was disorienting. The result has been a profound shift in public attitudes and deep confusion in Washington, where simultaneous efforts are under way to make sure the Victorian morality really obtains this time; to deny that it was ever seriously breached; and to get the CIA back on the job.

Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks - Thomas Powers - The Atlantic
If you have the time connect what was written in the US media during the times of these happenings.

You will see a remarkable coincidence in views.
 
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Ray

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Therefore, the US media is as pliable as the Indian media.

To use a Bushism - Don't misunderstimate the US media being a tool of the US Govt!

India's paid journalists are a dime to a dozen, in the US, they are more sophisticated and not so crass!
 

Patriot

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The timing of the article suggests end of days for MMS, now it's time for Rahul baba's crowning ceremony.
 

Oracle

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Apologize? Because Mr. Simon Denyer put up hard facts on his paper? Totally ridiculous. Congress should introspect on why, just not this (TIME issue as well), have been a recurring phenomena. PM might be honest and his credentials impeccable, but those does not run the country. (I have used the word might in bold, as there is a limit to which the citizens patience can be tested and the political class' incompetency tolerated).

UPA - II has failed miserably and have been giving importance to trivial and divisive issues (SC/ST promotion, increasing the age for consensual sex etc) to take the heat away from the various scams that now lay exposed. While trying to create momentum in the economy, they should have consulted with all parties - in a democracy no party is indispensable. But, Congress, not only did not consult with the principal opposition party BJP, they did not consult even with their allies such as TMC. Even a person with half a brain would know how difficult they have made it for themselves without taking in confidence, atleast their allies.

After being stuck down by the Supreme Court, Congress made Constitutional amendments and proceeded with the Retrospective tax laws. This is behavior of an authoritarian regime. Pranab Mukherjee should have been chided, while he came up with the Retrospective tax laws. What happened 10 years back is to be analyzed and judged with the laws of that time. Instead of forming sound policies, they are on a backstabbing spree killing investment sentiment across the globe and scaring away investors who invested billions of dollars in this country. You, bloody maggots, you cannot shift your goalposts every time to suits your parochial needs. FDI in retail can be passed through an executive act, but they still are dithering to do so. And there are so many more which I can list out in here.

It's good that Mr. Simon did not apologize. The PM is not beyond criticism. And just coz' the article was published in a foreign journal it riled you all up? Have you people ever thought what the country thinks about you? Can you shut up 1+ billions of us? Instead of crying like a spoilt baby, do what you're supposed to do and stop acting like idiots. Or this country will never forgive you.
 

Daredevil

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PMO lodges protest with Washington Post over story against Manmohan Singh

Agencies Posted online: Thu Sep 06 2012, 14:04 hrs

New Delhi : The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has lodged a formal protest with Washington Post newspaper for an article critical of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, terming it as "unethical and unprofessional" conduct of the journalist.:shocked:

The PMO, in its reaction posted on the US-based newspaper's website, has said the story was "totally one-sided" as the journalist "never" got in touch with the PMO for its version.

"We do not complain about criticism of the government which is a journalist's right. But I am writing this letter for pointing out unethical and unprofessional conduct at your part," said a letter by Pankaj Pachauri, Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister's Office.

In the letter, Pachauri has complained that the journalist "despite all lines of conversations open", never "got in touch with us for our side of the story though you regularly talk to me about information from the PMO. This story thus becomes totally one sided."

Pachauri refers to the journalist Simon Denyer's mention that his request for an interview was declined and says that his mail had clearly stated that interview was declined 'till the Monsoon Session' of Parliament which gets over tomorrow.

With regard to quotes attributed to former Media Adviser to the PM Sanjaya Baru, Pachauri has stated that he has complained that Denyer 'rehashed and used' an eight-month-old quote from an Indian magazine.

"We expected better from the correspondent of the Washington Post for fair and unbiased reporting," the letter states.
 

Ray

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PMO is only demeaning his office and the reputation of the country.

Does the US care what China has to say about the US?
 

hit&run

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Congress-I is not habitual of facing upfront journalism not running on their scripts. They have been playing media media with India media and be fooling us together with occasional subacute criticism.

Today I noticed on my TV when Kapil Sibal was just ready to give his statement to media NDTV ran a headline on their website that Watch, Kapil Sibal hit at BJP. I mean let him first hit at BJP and at least let him complete his statements or answer before NDTV or people of this country can decide whether he has able to hit at BJP with convincing answers or not.

Now NDTV is running headlines mentioning the name of a businessman and Rajya Sabha MP known for his proximity to BJP president Nitin Gadkari. What an effort they have made to break this story draging BJP into it but they failed to investigate this scam in the first place.
 
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SADAKHUSH

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I don't think that MMS would be a mole within the Congress just to wreck it up from within.

If that is what I have understood from some of the posts.

He is too much of a good man for such underhand doings.

Call him what you want, but I wonder if he will do such a thing.
I did not say that he is a mole but his hands are tied and he is just trying to clean up the mess to which the past administrations have paid only lip service. What is the other alternative left for him either take the action or regret it later on? He is not outspoken but quiet and smart enough to clean up the mes from top down. Can you point out single administration before him where one after another corruption scandals are being exposed and investigated? This does not include the raids conducted in the residences of bureaucrats right up to a peon in Madhya Pradeh who had accumulated net worth of INR 3 crore. I know of hundreds if not thousands of retired Armed Forces personal commissioned and non commissioned who have retired with out any property in their name.
If and when he writes tell all only than we will know whether he is doing what I have suspected for the last one year and this very point was raised by me in our local talk show but was dismissed by a journalist from Chandigarh.

In our Punjabi language there is a word we use to often "Mesna" which means a quiet person doing the things quietly without raising any suspicion that is what my take is about our PM's part of personality. As we all know that he has been a life long public servant that is where he was exposed to the dirty side of our GOI departments and during those years he must have decided to do the right thing if he gets the opportunity which is the case now. I stand by my assertion and time will prove whether I am wrong or right.
 

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A perfect storm of stupidity

An officious media advisor to Dr Manmohan Singh thought that he would crush a journalist from Post and send a stern signal to Indian reporters in the process.

hich is the greater crime in public life, corruption or stupidity? Take your time over the answer. If corruption were a political death sentence, quite a portion of the UPA Cabinet would not have been elected in 2009. Perhaps corruption is measured by extent; only when lubrication turns into loot does the voter decide that enough is enough. Conversely, even passing silliness creates disproportionate damage, possibly because the punishment is ridicule. Laughter can be more dangerous for reputation than a court sentence.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has had a difficult Parliament session. The Opposition attack on the allotment of coal blocks will hurt the Congress more than him, because at worst the PM can be accused of being a facilitator rather than a beneficiary. The beneficiaries were those who kicked back some of their expected loot to political parties, principally the Congress, but hardly the only party to use this route to welfare. The list of coal-cronies includes not just politicians' friends and relatives, but crosses over into media. This is the way in which some media owners demand and get their rewards for being subservient to authority. These are the revelations that separate wheat from chaff, or independent media from quislings.

Politicians in power live, if not always amicably, with media all the time. It is therefore a trifle strange that they never seem to understand the dynamics of independent journalism. News, as someone who knew the business said, is something someone wants to hide. The paradox is quite logical: often the easiest way to kill a story is to hold a press conference. If you have nothing to hide, no one is interested.

The worst person that government can hire to "manage" media is a journalist. He becomes holier than thou. And so, when told to fix a story he attempts to fix the journalist.

The other part of media is opinion and analysis. A politician in power has every right to dispute analysis, but must be as meticulous as a silken lawyer in finding incontrovertible answers that dissect each point and prove it to be either hollow or distorted. Lawyer-politicians are obviously useful for such an exercise, but when they cut corners to push an unsustainable point they damage their own case. Witness the argument that there was zero-loss to the government in both the 2G stink and the Coalgate stain. The UPA has suffered badly from hyperventilation masquerading as argument.

Opinion, however, is a separate privilege. To accuse an opinion of being biased is to miss the point, since it is what it says it is, a viewpoint. Politicians get coy when praised, which is only human. But they should set aside that equally human weakness, wrath, when confronted with criticism. Another paradox: the best way to deal with an opinion you do not like is to ignore it. The sensible minister, or indeed Prime Minister, does not respond to the writer, he responds to the reader — and chooses his moment to do so.

Since this is becoming a litany of oxymoron, why not one which should be turned into an operating law of governance? The worst person that government can hire to "manage" media is a journalist. There is something in the culture transfer from a flowing newsroom to the granite blocks of a government building that transforms a journalist into the worst form of new convert. It is an old saying that the new convert prays seven times a day. He becomes holier than thou.

And so, when told to fix a story he attempts to fix the journalist. Aggression swells the ego and wells up hidden dyspepsia in proportions that become toxic — not for the target but for the government. A perfect storm was brewed out of a non-event when an officious media advisor to Dr Manmohan Singh thought that he would crush a journalist from the Washington Post, Simon Denyer, and send a stern signal to Indian reporters in the process, with a withering salvo of accusations. This pesky foreign correspondent had dared to commit the unpardonable impropriety of criticising the Prime Minister of India. If this was intended to cow down Denyer, it had the opposite effect. And if it was meant to frighten Indian media, then the consequences were worse, for a story which would have been ignored or reduced to the margins rose to the top of attention. The official's pomposity was an invitation to laughter, and who could resist such an offer? This must be a high point of disservice to Dr Manmohan Singh by a man hired to serve.

Reportage merges a narrative of events with context. When a government has lost the plot, media will become a mirror of disarray and failure. Governments love journalists when the going is good; they all become potential censors when the ebb tide turns up. The freedom of India's press is not a gift from government. It is an inalienable Constitutional right. Officials will come, and sometime go faster than they come; the Constitution lives on as long as democracy survives.
 

Daredevil

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Behind the attack

Frenemies in the West have now seized upon Manmohan Singh, analyzes N.V.Subramanian.

10 September 2012: The Manmohan Singh PMO's fracas with The Washington Post and its India correspondent, Simon Denyer, is a case of friendly enmity or frenmity if you like. But if A.B.Vajpayee is introduced into the shindig on account of the criticism of his prime-ministerial style by Time magazine, then it becomes a story of clashing world views that is nearly civilizational in character.

The more remarkable Indian prime ministers have also been complex, and Vajpayee has never been an easy man to understand, an outsider in BJP, an island unto himself in politics, keeping his own personal laws, someone with poetic sensibilities, and a nationalist at heart. When he became prime minister, there was expectation and excitement that his political maturation in right-wing, conservative ideology would impel India into natural alliance with the United States.

That's what at any rate Vajpayee articulated in his New York Asia Society address in September 2000. But it had been preceded two years previously with the Pokhran II tests that had angered the Clinton administration into sanctioning India. Not only was the United States the sole superpower, it hadn't begun to show the decline of later years, and it had a strong and charismatic president in Bill Clinton. Vajpayee, the politician and strategist, knew he had to get India out of the Pokhran II hole, and had to sweeten relations with the US even if he had other ideas.

He had other ideas, to be sure, and they principally concerned securing India's interests in an unstable post-Cold War world. He was under pressure, for example, to sign CTBT after Pokhran II, and there is an interesting insider account of how closely he played his cards to his chest and got out of doing so in Washington. Apparently, Vajpayee and a senior cabinet minister travelled together to the US one time, and the minister convinced him (or so he thought) to okay CTBT. The minister went to another city whilst the prime minister arrived in Washington.

The minister told a US presidential aide to expect the CTBT announcement from Vajpayee. The aide had been updated differently but kept his silence. At the designated hour, Vajpayee spoke, but not about signing CTBT. He fudged the issue. The minister was stunned but the presidential aide had been warned beforehand. He had been authoritatively told Vajpayee would not sign CTBT.

There is another instance of how Vajpayee ran rings around the United States. Some years ago, Left politicians made an interesting disclosure. They said Vajpayee had told them to oppose within and outside Parliament any Indian military involvement in Iraq as a means to resist US pressure. Even Congress was primed to do so. In other words, Vajpayee was his own prime minister, and whilst he may have appeared friendly to the United States on the surface, he didn't make real concessions.

This background is necessary to understand Time magazine's criticism of Vajpayee's prime-ministership, saying he was sleeping on the job. That criticism is factually incorrect. Vajpayee may have appeared slow and not all there, but he had a first-rate mind and he was a wonderful delegator. He knew what he wanted and who would deliver it. He was not a file pusher. He was a big ideas man. In six years, he proved himself one of India's outstanding prime ministers. Because he didn't serve US interests conditioned by his nationalist upbringing and conservative ideology, the US did not like him very much, which partly explains Time magazine's criticism.

The case with Manmohan Singh is completely different, perhaps even the opposite. Unlike Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh had a Western higher education, in Cambridge and Oxford. He never got over his fascination with the West, becoming in due course its slave. Whilst receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University in July 2005, he had the gall to say "...it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences...." He told the (former) US president, George W.Bush, that Indians "loved" him. Only because of the precedent set by Vajpayee, Indian troops could not deploy in Iraq under Manmohan Singh.

Subsequently, Manmohan Singh was prevented by coalition compulsions and opposition pressure from tying India too closely to the United States. He pushed his defence minister, Pranab Mukherjee, to sign the Indo-US defence framework agreement, but the Left allies of Manmohan Singh's UPA-1 government ensured that it did not benefit the United States with "interoperability", joint operations, provision of India bases for American foreign interventions, and so forth.

The Indo-US nuclear deal was obtained by Manmohan Singh after blackmailing the Congress leadership with a resignation threat and a corrupt confidence vote victory in Parliament. In its final form, the deal was less pro-US, thanks to the spirited battle put up by the opposition and strategic writers, including the late nuclear physicist, P.K.Iyengar. And against Manmohan Singh's wishes, Parliament passed a tough nuclear liability law, which has upset US reactor manufacturers.

Finally, there has been economic paralysis under a star economist PM. Manmohan Singh was made finance minister in 1991 partly to win over IMF. When he became PM, the West expected India to open its markets. The expectation turned to desperation after the November 2008 bankruptcies in the United States. Left to him, Manmohan Singh would have obliged the West. But by then, coalition compulsions were enormous, he had lost control of government, and inflation had begun to rear its head to kill the growth story before long. Manmohan Singh was helpless. As a prime minister, he was powerless to assist the West. His own ambitions, however, dissuaded him from leaving.

It is these factors that have prompted Western media and ratings' agency attacks on Manmohan Singh and his government. The attacks do not lack substance. Every word written in The Washington Post story is true, and the rating agencies' downbeat analysis of the Indian political economy is entirely accurate, but their intentions may not be always honourable. Without questioning the journalistic credentials of Simon Denyer who wrote the Post story, it can be said that the West's hopes from Manmohan Singh have been dashed, and that largely explains the venom unleashed against him.

But that doesn't put Manmohan Singh and A.B.Vajpayee in the same bracket. Vajpayee had conceived and put clear limits to a friendship/ partnership with the United States and the rest of the West, with an alliance never being considered despite his statement to that effect. On the other hand, Manmohan Singh was prevented by Indian polity and public opinion from embracing the West to India's certain disadvantage. So frenemies have now seized upon him, trashing him with words, and seeking a better and more efficient deliverer. Through all this, one prime minister emerges a nationalist, whilst another is, despite his exertions and protestations, condemned as an apostate.
 

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