TIME magazine had run a cover story on our beloved Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh calling him an underachiever. The Congress Party has come to the defence of the beleaguered Prime Minister who is facing mounting criticism from all quarters for the large scale governance deficit, trust deficit, economy in shambles, and the declining popular support for his UPA-II dispensation. The Prime Minister still has admirers in the urban elitist middle class who put the blame for all ills at the doors of 10 Janpath where UPA Chair person resides. BJP has claimed that the discovery of TIMES magazine is not new as they have been alleging a state of policy paralysis for some time now. The Industry captains who were sanguine about the PM and his government seem to have lost confidence. Congress Party claims that TIMES wrote in 2002 about the attitudinal shortfalls of Atal Behari Vajpayee who remains a mascot of right wing ideology even now.

I believe that TIMES has been charitable in their assessment of Dr.Singh calling him an underachiever. Well Dr.Singh did not achieve anything worthwhile all these years. To call him an underachiever will be betrayal of facts. What he did was to get rid of Socialist baggage with his adamant support for Indo US nuclear deal as the Left Parties who were supporting UPA-I bid good bye. It became easier for him and his friends from IMF like Montek to stall any meaningful social support scheme in the name of reforms. Left to himself, Dr.Singh would have disbanded MGNREGS  long back ,instead he chose to support another grand program JNNURM spending crores of rupees for rapid infra structural development of urban centers  with bankrupt State RTCs plying low floor buses and Air-conditioned luxury buses heavily subsidized through budget. However his budget does not have enough money to support National Food Security bill for which he depends too much on another much touted scheme Aadhar to prune subsidies.

Dr.Singh believes that his personal image is more important than that of his government. Whenever he is attacked he pleads innocence and ignorance of what is happening around him necessitated by coalition politics.

His Government supports initiatives of world climate forum to reduce carbon footprints and yet he bemoans the delays in granting of ecological clearances for his pet projects of multinational corporations. He chides his own Minister and also managed to get him shunted out of the MoEF. He keeps silence when one of his senior colleagues is indulging in large scale corruption by espousal of a housing project in Pune diverting water meant for irrigation to the project site. Yet he chides his coalition partners for alleged wrong doing in spectrum allocation absolving himself of any responsibility whatsoever claiming that the 2003 cabinet decision vests the authority of spectrum pricing to Telecom and Finance Ministers. He had formed numerous Group of Ministers and Empowered Group of Ministers to decide on policy issues and he concentrates only on building peace with Pakistan, taking lessons on economics to world leaders in WEF and other fora.

He sends his senior most Ministers to receive a yoga guru turned messiah to devise means to curb black money and corruption and keeps silence when a team of crusaders indulge in character assassination of almost every one of his colleague until he becomes the target of their attack

Dr.MMS is perhaps the only man on this earth who lived only through reputations. Yashwant sinha claimed that MMS’s Guru Dr.IG Patel called MMS as an over rated economist and under rated politician. That is the icing on the cake.