Feet in the clouds

The prime minister’s plane, derivatively called Air India One, is certainly luxurious — but, as with Air India itself, it is impossible to forget that it is state-run. The cabins might feel more spacious but the carpets look drearily familiar; the Republic of India struggles with many things, above all with soft furnishings.

Manmohan Singh has now been prime minister for almost 10 years, and it is difficult not to associate the trappings of the office with his personality. On board AI-1, the media sit behind a false wall that has a brass plate affixed to it with the engraved words ‘prime minister’. Beyond that wall is emptiness and silence. From the activities on the ground, from the black-clad men and women all about, it is possible to deduce that the plane, like India, does in fact have a PM on board. But he is a presence more imagined than sensed.

The PM’s officials are more in evidence, wandering around and talking to journalists with a frankness not often observed in New Delhi. Perhaps the ribbon of round windows, more easily visible to those milling about the aisles than in regular aircraft, help develop a sense of perspective. Certainly, discussions about Afghanistan after the US' planned troop draw-down take on a certain piquancy when conducted against the backdrop of the country itself, far below. It is possible to look down on the hostile peaks, the scattered skeins of green and the grey-brown furrows and ask: Just how does anyone think they could win a war in a place that looks like that?

Perspective, perhaps, is what Manmohan Singh also craves. Certainly, one fact long known is that this Indian PM feels most comfortable when outside India. Singh told Parliament as much last month, when he pointed out that, unlike in the Lok Sabha, at the G-20 people listened when he spoke. Thus, foreign trips tend to embolden him.The big news of the day was his announcement that he would in fact meet the new Pakistani PM, Nawaz Sharif, in New York. This seemed to have been a closely guarded secret to start off with; the schedules that were printed had mysterious blanks, but no confirmation of a possible meeting was forthcoming. Naturally, many voices in the electronic media, and some even within Singh's own Congress party, would decry it as further appeasement of a Pakistan  doing little to stop cross-border terror.

It escaped nobody's notice that the news of the PMs’ planned meeting came the moment the prime minister got on the plane. It seems the instant his feet are off Indian soil, Manmohan Singh can take decisions.