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| Saturday, 28 August 2004 |
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India's mild-mannered PM finally loses patience with opposition NEW DELHI, Friday (AFP) India's mild-mannered prime minister finally lost his patience with the Hindu nationalist-led opposition which brought parliament to a halt during his first 90 days in office, reports said. Newspapers quoted former defence minister George Fernandes as saying Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "threw" down on a table budget proposals which opposition leaders presented to him in his office on Wednesday. The premier refused to listen to them, Fernandes said. The Congress prime minister asked why the opposition leaders were visiting him to give their views on the budget after they had refused to take part in a parliamentary debate on the subject, the newspapers said. "You make noise in the House and now are asking me to accept it? If you have to say anything, speak on that in the House," the Pioneer daily said Singh told former deputy premier Lal Krishna Advani and Fernandes. The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said Singh, 71, had been "contemptuous, impolite and discourteous." The office of the technocrat-turned-premier denied this. "Manmohan Singh cannot be discourteous to a fly. To say he was rude or that he flung down the note is difficult to accept," a spokesman for the prime minister told reporters. He said the premier later Wednesday called BJP leaders to say he had meant no disrespect, only that he wanted the opposition to take part in parliamentary debates. Fernandes said, "The prime minister threw the note on the table ... His behaviour indicated he wanted us to leave the room." "In my 50 years in public office I have dealt with many PMs but no one has behaved like this. We were out of his room in two-and-a-half minutes," the Hindustan Times quoted Fernandes as saying. Earlier this week, the Oxford-educated Singh lamented the BJP-led turmoil in parliament over the inclusion of three politicians facing criminal cases in his Congress party-led government. Singh was sworn in as prime minister on May 22 after Italian-born Congress president Sonia Gandhi refused the post amid concern that her foreign origins could spark political problems. |
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