This I-Day, will Manmohan be free to be Manmohan?

Over the years, I attended other Independence Days at the Red Fort and gave up going only when security became such a problem that the Prime Minister had to speak from a bullet-proof box to an audience that now consists almost entirely of VIPs and their smug spouses and progeny. The Red Fort ritual is now meaningless and the only reason why I mention it here is because it is hard to ignore Independence Day in a piece that appears on August 15 in a year when a new Prime Minister gets to hold forth from those famous ramparts.

New prime ministers have a chance to make the ritual meaningful again, but rarely take it, and nobody squandered his chances as recklessly as Atal Behari Vajpayee, who as our first genuine non-Congress prime minister could have told us truths we so need to hear. Truths about why a country so rich in resources should continue to be so poor. Truths about why our people are still deprived of their basic needs, healthcare and education.

Truths about the huge resources wasted on reviving our moribund public sector, truths about economic polices that failed us and destroyed our environment. The list of untold truths is long but either nobody showed it to Vajpayee or he had bad speechwriters because his speeches made the ritual August 15 address even more meaningless and boring than it already was. Why brood over history, though, let us look instead to the future.

Deadline constraints ensure that I write before you hear the Prime Minister’s speech, but unless Dr Manmohan Singh is more his own man than you and I suspect, he is unlikely to say anything that elevates the ritual to a genuine attempt to speak to the people.

Of his ability to do this, I have no doubt. At a CII meeting, I once heard him make one of the most startlingly honest speeches I have heard in Indian politics. At the time, he and the Congress were out of office. When he stood up, most of us continued munching at our kebabs thinking he would confine himself to the usual criticism of the Vajpayee government’s policies. Instead, he spoke reflectively about why he had personally moved away from socialism and why our socialist policies had failed to deliver us from poverty, hunger. A brave speech from a man considered the Nehru-Gandhi family’s leading loyalist.

Since he became Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh has been disturbingly silent. So silent that Delhi buzzes with whispers of depression and disaffection. He is already sick of the job, these whisperers say, and is waiting for the right moment to say thank you, Soniaji, and bye bye.

But, I digress. In one of the few moments the Prime Minister broke his silence since he took office, he made an excellent speech in which he admitted that one of the things that needed urgent attention was administrative reform. At every level, he said, the interface between officialdom and ordinary citizens was flawed.

Not extraordinary as either admission or observation, except when you keep in mind what we usually hear every time a politician opens his mouth. If the Prime Minister is brave enough to speak the truth this morning, he would have given the Red Fort ritual a new lease of life. Otherwise, he would be doing us all a huge favour if he scraps it from next year and speaks on television instead. Even DD can fake the ramparts of the Red Fort in a studio and the money saved on security arrangements could be spent on building a village school or two in honour of Independence Day.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com