The worst of times brings out the best from a true leader, someone who, with political skill and a higher sense of national interest, turns adversity into advantage. India, a nation bruised and gasping for some fresh air, should be a challenge as well as an opportunity for such a leader.

We miss him so badly, and what we have instead are seasoned ventriloquists and masters of triangulation. Their art only makes the life of the Republic, emerging from a merciless summer with bloodlust as its abiding motif, more miserable. We still don't have a clear, no nonsense, counter strategy to end the sub-rural savagery of the Maoists who have declared war on India.

We are caught between sentimentalism and tentative nationalism as the valley of Kashmir becomes the stage for a local variation of intifada. We have no forward-looking economic agenda, and, in the name of social justice, we continue to be subjected to the worst forms of political dishonesties. We have a government with a blurred vision, with a cluttered mind. It is a government suffering from conviction deficiency.

It is presided over by a man feted elsewhere at the global high tables as the wise man from the East. And Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with his cultivated professorial gravitas plays the role to perfection. In a world where some of the most powerful leaders are in their 40s, he is perhaps worthy of being indulged as an elder statesman.

We need one at home too, for Manmohan looks invariably out of place whenever he is faced with national emergencies that demand the best from the prime minister of a country whose international aspirations are not matched by its domestic performance. The reality is: he is the hapless master of an unwieldy, Babelic house.

That is why, on an issue like the Maoist attacks that would have put any other civilised nation on war alert, the home minister is a lonely warrior. It should not be the concern of just one department or the affected state; it should be an occasion for showing the necessary political will to face up to the enemy. The Manmohan regime doesn't know whether it is an ngo with a mushy humanitarian agenda or a government whose allegiance is to an India under attack.

This confusion only brings out an absence of conviction-and a singular political authority. It shows in a series of policy mishaps, ranging from the Maoists to Kashmir to Telangana, and none of which can be wished away as mere local disturbances. Most tellingly, in this season of inflation and bad economic management, the original reformer seems to have run out of ideas.

Even on the social agenda, the pet project of the prime minister's political boss, apart from providing employment opportunities to left-liberal freelancers, there is more verbiage than action. And Manmohan the global wise counsellor has not come out with a policy on our near abroad that strikes a balance between national interest and international responsibility either. He has lost the momentum.

It is, in the end, all about leadership. The UPA has the mandate and the doctor has the stature; what is not there is political conviction. The prime minister, though a fast learner in politics, cannot cope with the politicking within his own Cabinet, which at times resembles a group of incompatibles undermining each other.

The prime minister may be a sobering, reassuring presence, but why he is still not rising from being the leader of the Government to become the leader of the nation is partly explained by the power matrix within the UPA and his own back story as a dutiful, apolitical manager who is at his best when supervised.

It is his sixth year as the prime minister of the world's most volatile-and unforgiving-democracy, and Manmohan has got the political context to make a deal with history. What he needs is a text that can redeem India-and himself.