India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Pic: http://pmindia.nic.in/)
Prime ministerial or presidential news conferences are notoriously non-newsworthy. More often than not they are an exercise in journalists asking the obvious and leaders stating the obvious.
So it was not surprising that the news conference by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, only his second such in the six years that he has been at the helm, turned out to be singularly uneventful. That in Dr. Singh India has a prime minister famously reticent and shorn of verbal flourish did not help the matters at all.
Although Dr. Singh’s news conference did have some important substance in terms of India’s relations with Pakistan as well as something that he has described the the single biggest internal security threat, namely the spread of anti-state and violent Maoists guerilla groups, it generally remained bereft of any peaks.
The lowest point of the news conference, a sort of WTF moment, was a question from an unidentified foreign journalist. It had to do with media credentials for foreign journalists who are stationed in New Delhi. All journalists, who report on the government, require credentials issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) which are issued after some level of background check. I had one until the time I left India. I am sure the foreign journalist’s grievance was legitimate but for him or her to feel compelled to ask the prime minister of the nation of a billion plus people, not to mention the world’s largest democracy, a purely logistical question is embarrassing. I have quoted below the exchange.
For the entire transcript of the news conference go here.