| Less Prime Minister  At the birthday celebrations at 7 Race Course Road, it was India Shining without anybody saying those cursed words. The shine, though, was there on the prime minister and his political boss, and it could not have been entirely attributed to the arc lights. The mood was, to parody the poet: Bliss was it in that evening to be alive, but to be Manmohan Singh was very heaven. Don't ask why, read the freely distributed pamphlet on the achievements of the two-year-old UPA Government. Still, there was a visible deficiency of emotional quotient. Maybe we should take a return trip in time to know why even a party at 7 RCR cannot change what is written in the birth certificate. Two years ago, a tearjerker in the Central Hall of Parliament was the prelude to the arrival of Manmohan Singh as prime minister. When the renunciation of Sonia Gandhi was enacted against an appropriate backdrop of maudlin kitsch, the would-be prime minister-no matter who it was at that moment-could not have afforded to be more prime than the Congress party's Madonna who said no. No coronation after that blockbuster renunciation could have marked the birth of a leader. Manmohan Singh was presented as the chosen prime minister not because of what he was but because of what he was not. He was not your average politician. He was hardly political for that matter. He was the gentleman technocrat who had proved his worth as a loyal, dutiful executor of prime ministerial ideas. In retrospect, there was virtue in his disqualifications-and there was individual opportunity too. He was there because India had repudiated the bad politics of a party that could not manage-or comprehend-the historical responsibility of being right in a country conditioned by left-of-the-centre certainties. The accidental prime minister-cum-apolitical politician had an opportunity there to build on his image, his most valuable asset. Brand Manmohan could have been a political statement as well, for smart politics makes a better prime minister. And India needed the kind of politics which could match its global aspirations and attitude. Manmohan, after all, is supposed to be the face of a gentler, kinder India where freedom and competition extend from the marketplace to the classroom. Today, if bad politics has made him a bit banal, you cannot entirely blame it on, say, an Arjun Singh. When India badly needs the vintage Manmohan Singh, the prime minister seems to be wondering, Manmohan Singh who? | 
