Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani Monday attacked the Prime Minister’s Office for what he called attempts to “crush” a foreign correspondent for criticising Manmohan Singh in an article.
The BJP leader’s main target was the prime minister’s communications adviser Pankaj Pachauri, formerly a journalist with a leading Indian television channel.
In a blog post Monday, Advani wrote that “stupidity” was a great crime in public life. He held that the episode involving the PMO and Washington Post correspondent Simon Denyer was “a high point of disservice”, coming from a man hired to serve the prime minister.
Joining ranks with other commentators who saw the PMO’s attempts to respond to the scathing criticism in the article a storm in a tea cup, Advani held that if the Washington Post instance was indeed an attempt to send “a stern signal” to Indian reporters, it had backfired. (IANS)
