Almost everybody seems to have an opinion, and not a good one at that, at prime minister Manmohan Singh‘s recent performance at his press conference in New Delhi, forgetting that governance is not about performance. And forgetting that not everything need be to the byte-sized expectations of television anchors.

The Telegraph, Calcutta, has a story on Singh’s precedessors who had a face for radio. Id est, they were just not media-savvy. Leading the list, Morarji Desai. But the father of the defamation bill, Rajiv Gandhi, who announced his foreign secretary’s replacement in a media powwow, and the mother of emergency, Indira Gandhi, were no better.

One of Indira Gandhi’s big boo-boos, according to H.D. Deve Gowda‘s media advisor H.K. Dua, involves Kengal Hanumanthaiah, the political architect of  the Vidhana Soudha.

“Unlike her son, Indira would never announce anything substantive at her media interactions, Dua said.

“He described how then railway minister K. Hanumanthaiah had sacked the railway board chairman, a certain Ganguly. The chairman refused to accept the sack order and set out for Delhi’s Sarai Rohilla station for his pre-scheduled trip to Jaipur.

“The minister had the sack order pasted on the coach Ganguly was to travel in. Ganguly did not budge and even held media conferences in the coach.

“At her news conference a few days later, Indira was asked about the situation. “She chose not to bite the bait but Hanumanthaiah was out in the next ministerial shuffle,” Dua said.

Read the full story: Manmohan waltzes where many slipped

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