If there's one thing that the nation knows about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh it is that he is a man of few words. Most loquacious when flying back into India when he's returning from a foreign trip, Singh keeps his interactions with the press to a bare minimum and with the public restricted to televised speeches (and not all of those have gone smoothly either).
The numbers bear testimony to this. This press conference will be only the second during Singh's second term as Prime Minister. It will be only his third full-fledged press conference in the entire 10 years that he has been the Prime Minister.
So when coming to the end of a ten year term, possibly his last stint in national politics, Singh's announcement that he would be addressing a press conference just three days into the new year has expectedly been met with a lot of speculation.
Will he resign? No, said his office. Will Rahul Gandhi be made the Prime Minister to get a few months in the chair to motivate him for the national elections and get him some responsibility to show off? Unlikely, and it would be a really bad gamble. So what do we expect?
Singh is likely to focus on how the government, despite the claims of the opposition, met economic challenges head on and managed to achieve a modicum of success. The Prime Minister in all likelihood will deny the claims of policy paralysis and will give us numbers to show otherwise.
He could blame Europe for the nation's economic woes like he has been for the past few months and could also face some questions on the Congress showing in the recent Assembly elections. He will endorse Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and the philosophy of the Congress.
In all likelihood he will have something to say about everything BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi has been saying, and about the BJP that has blocked Parliamentary proceedings and stalled crucial legislation. It's unlikely to be complimentary but then Singh is not a man of harsh words.
There won't be anything groundbreaking and if anything may be a defence that has come too late. But it will be good to hear the Prime Minister at least take some of these inconvenient questions for a change, rather than staying away from them.
Meanwhile, On the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's press conference tomorrow, BJP today asked him some probing questions, including how he thinks history would judge his tenure, "failure" to assert himself against corruption and "subversion" of constitutional institutions. Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said he would like to ask the Prime Minister five questions.
He sought to know from Singh how in his opinion history would judge his tenure as Prime Minister and whether he feels his term as Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao government gave him greater satisfaction than his innings as the Prime Minister. "Since his government is perceived to be extremely corrupt, where does he feel he went wrong in not asserting himself when the situation so demanded," Jaitley said.
Another poser to Singh, a renowned economist, by Jaitley was where he felt he went "wrong" in management of the economy which led to the "breakdown of the investment cycle". Jaitley also asked the PM if he "bears the guilt of institutional subversion" like that of CBI, CVC, JPC and civil services- during his tenue as Prime Minister.
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