“King’s Speech” is the talk of the town. The movie has won four Oscar awards. “Based on the true story of King George VI, ‘The King’s Speech’ follows the Royal Monarch’s quest to find his voice,” says its official website. It provides as good an occasion as any for a few words on the power of words in public sphere. We have, in particular, our prime minister in mind.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh has many qualities but great oratory is not one of them. Whatever legacy he hopes to leave behind, he does not intend to be remembered for great speeches. A quintessential policy wonk at heart, his speeches seem like drafted by babus and still bear his signature because he is more of an academic-turned-bureaucrat-turned-accidental-politician than a career politician.

A regular politician knows addressing election rallies and being able to hold people’s attention is part of the skill set he (or she) should have – even if many of them can’t keep even a paid audience glued. A politician who aims to become a mass leader appreciates what a turn of phrase, a carefully delivered insinuation, a gesture or a pregnant pose can deliver.

Manmohan Singh, trained at Cambridge and Oxford, honed his oratorical skills in a different arena: lecture rooms and conference halls. The result: he is perfectly at home at think tanks and business bodies or book launch events but at election rallies or in parliament, he seems to be addressing an imaginary gathering of economists or bureaucrats. Here is a sampler, from his address to the nation on Independence Day 2010:

“Our Government wants a food safety net in which no citizen of ours would go hungry. This requires enhanced agricultural production which is possible only by increasing productivity. Our country has not witnessed any big technological breakthrough in agriculture after the Green Revolution. We need technology which would address the needs of dry land agriculture. In addition, our agriculture should also be able to deal with new challenges like climate change, falling levels of ground water and deteriorating quality of soil.”

And why single out the incumbent prime minister when formal speeches by most of his predecessors and other leaders (written or cut-pasted by the hacks of North Block and secretariats) have all been like this?

There is little point in making comparisons with Nehru’s “Tryst With Destiny” (watch it here:  or read it here). When the beauty of prose is coupled with moral convictions, you get lines like Martin Luther King’s: “How long? Not long! Because the arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," which Obama has referred to more than one speech:

"It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."

In these post-Radia days, nobody expects our political leaders to be talking about resetting the moral compass and all that. The least one can say is this: while dramatic delivery of flowery prose does not make an average politician a better leader, he should be expected to communicate with people more efficiently if his job is to represent people.
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