Former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh who has of late been very active and vocal about India’s political matters has once again tried to take a dig at PM Modi. A couple of days ago, Manmohan Singh went on to say, “People say I was a silent Prime Minister. I think these volumes (his book ‘Changing India’) speak for themselves. I wasn’t the PM who was afraid of talking to the press. I met press regularly and on every foreign trip that I undertook. I had a press conference on return in the plane.” It is being largely seen as a jibe at PM Modi. It seems that Manmohan Singh is trying to hit back for the ‘silent PM’ criticism. Manmohan Singh tried to claim that he was not a silent PM on the basis of the press conferences that he had held during his tenure as India’s Prime Minister.
However, the way the entire Congress ecosystem is trying to portray Singh as a courageous leader who was not afraid of speaking to the media doesn’t tell the whole story. In reality, there was nothing significant about the press conferences of which Manmohan Singh was a part of. He had not to muster much courage for attending these press conferences given that most of the mainstream media outlets are pro-Congress in character. What Manmohan Singh attended were more of friendly media briefings/ interactions rather than grilling press conferences.
Even a cursory look at the press conferences held by Manmohan Singh when he was the PM of India makes it clear that all he had to face were softball questions. Even when the UPA government was rocked by a flurry of scams, the friends of the Congress in the media used to ask trivial or irrelevant questions to the then PM Manmohan Singh. One can realize the easiness of questions that he faced given that one of the questions at such a time was about former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. The mainstream media outlets were not only soft towards Manmohan Singh but also took care to ensure that he does not face embarrassment or uneasiness of any sort during any of the ‘press conferences’.
MMS Press Conference,
all Corruption charges are from UPA1 and it has nothing to do with UPA2 because stupid People elected us for the second time in spite of those charges. pic.twitter.com/nm2XuSvVzC— Vishwatma 🇮🇳 ( மோடியின் குடும்பம் ) (@HLKodo) December 19, 2018
Manmohan Singh is a part of the elitist Lutyens’ circle and the elitist sections which dominate the mainstream media was obviously affectionate towards him even though they could not avoid speaking about the scams at that time in general, they made it a point not to put any tough questions during the press conferences attended by the then prime minister.
This also explains why those who criticise PM Modi for not attending press conferences are unjustified in their approach. In fact, the Darbari media loves to hate PM Modi. They have always been aggressive in personal interviews with the current prime minister. In fact, the mainstream media had played a major role in liberal brigade’s desperate attempts to make a bogeyman out of PM Modi. The Lutyens’ media has always tried to portray PM Modi as a radical Hindu leader. Notwithstanding this unreasonable criticism and vendetta, Narendra Modi stormed to power in 2014 and therefore those wanted to sabotage his political career hate him even more now. The same mainstream media which made it a point to display necessary courtesy towards former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been hell-bent on cornering PM Modi. In fact, even though PM Modi has already been cleared of all the allegations against him, the mainstream media never really stopped being extremely hostile towards him. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Modi has been acting as an answerable statesman. He is answerable to the citizenry and not to a few news traders. Prime Minister Modi has been regularly interacting with the citizens of the country.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh knew that he was facing his own men whenever he attended press conferences. On the other hand, Prime Minister Modi knows that most of the news traders that he has to face are actually cronies of the opposition who are out to corner him on every issue under the sun. This explains why attending press conferences were a delightful experience for the former PM and why Prime Minister Modi is doing the right thing by not interacting with those who can go to any extent in order to malign him.
