‘Book confirms Singh a weak PM’
NEW DELHI: A memoir by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s former media advisor Sanjaya Baru continued to create ripples in the corridors of powers on Sunday, with the BJP saying it only confirmed the party’s claim that Singh was a “weak Prime Minister”.
BJP veteran LK Advani led the BJP charge as he referred to his 2009 campaign in which he had harped about Singh being the “weakest” ever PM. “The world already knows what he (Baru) has said but the book is an official confirmation. When I said for the first time that among all our PMs, he (Singh) is the weakest, then my own colleagues said he is a nice man and why criticise him so much. I said
AMONGST VARIOUS INSTITUTIONS, WHICH HAVE BEEN DWARFED IN THE UPA REGIME, THE PRINCIPAL ONE WAS THE OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER ITSELF. DR BARU’S BOOK CONFIRMS THIS FACT.
ARUN JAITLEY, BJP leader
I feel sad and had sympathy for him,” Advani told reporters in Ahmedabad.
BJP leader Arun Jaitley shared similar sentiments in his blog. “Amongst various institutions which have been dwarfed in the UPA regime, the principal one was the office of the Prime Minister itself. Dr Baru’s book confirms this,” he wrote. On the eve of relinquishing the office, Jaitley said, Manmohan Singh must seriously introspect as to how his tenure impacted on the institution of Prime Minister.
He took a dig at Singh saying prime ministership was not an employment but a public service and an exercise by which leadership is provided to the people. “Did he (PM) have the last word on all subjects? Or is it the system of the original communist states that was operating, where the party general secretary was always more important than the head of the government,” Jaitley wrote on his blog.
T he BJP also ridiculed Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s comments that he believed in empowering people and fighting graft, saying his claims sound hollow as he and his mother Sonia Gandhi had even “snatched” away the powers of the Prime Minister.
“The same Rahul Gandhi who along with his mother made the PM powerless says he will now give strength to the people of India,” BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said.