For a conscientious politician, honour is a greater adornment than power. He values honour more than the office he holds. However, it can be said of some politicians that they lose their honour before they lose power. Dr Manmohan Singh, an essentially honourable man (I say this on the basis of my interaction with him before he became Prime Minister), has allowed his personal integrity suffer a serious dent by, among other things, the reckless manner in which he has attacked L.K. Advani, the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP and the NDA. An objective assessment of what Advani said about Dr Singh, and how the latter hit back at the BJP leader, would reveal that the PM put his personal honour at stake and emerged a loser.

The harshest word that Advani has used in describing

Dr Singh’s performance is that he is a “weak” Prime Minister. He has only articulated what most Indians know—that the PM has allowed his high office to be “devalued” by making 7 Race Course Road subservient to 10 Janpath. There was no personal prejudice or animus in this description. It was in the nature of legitimate political criticism coming from an opposition leader. Advani is incapable of harbouring personal hostility towards anyone. On the contrary, he has on many occasions discarded constraints of political correctness to publicly shower praises on his political opponents.

Recall how he publicly eulogised P.V. Narasimha Rao, in the first year of his premiership, as India’s “best prime minister after Lal Bahadur Shastri”. Recall how both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and he supported several economic reforms initiatives of Dr Manmohan Singh when he was the finance minister in the Rao government. Recall how, when Advani represented the Vajpayee government at the funeral of E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1998, he lauded the “idealism” of the CPI(M) leader. Recall also how, during his chance encounter with Rahul Gandhi at the airport lounge in Delhi in 2007, he told the young Congress leader that he did not consider the Congress an “enemy” of the BJP but only a “political adversary”, implying that the two national parties can, and should, cooperate on major national issues.

... contd.