Modi’s rule has not been good for India, says Manmohan

TIL Desk/National/New Delhi/ In one of his sharpest attacks yet on Narendra Modi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh said his successor’s rule has not been good for India as he “failed” the electorate and led a government that was “mostly silent” on incidents of communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism.

Singh, while speaking at the launch of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s new book on Friday, alleged that under the present dispensation the environment in universities and national institutions like the Central Bureua of Investigation was being vitiated and dissent stifled. His remarks came amid the current crisis in the CBI, whose top two bosses were divested of their powers and sent on leave by the government.

In a scathing criticism of Modi, Singh said he was elected as the 14th prime minister of India on the back of many lofty promises, but in the past four years, he and his government “failed” their electorate and eroded the voters’ faith. He said Modi is a “paradoxical prime minister” and Tharoor has demonstrated this through his “superbly written and devastatingly accurate book”.

Tharoor’s book is titled The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. “He (Modi) has spoken of being a prime minister for all Indians but the government he presides over has been mostly silent in the face of widespread communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism.