There is a sense you get that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is losing traction with the ruling Congress party leadership, which in the main comprises of Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul.

This couldn't come at a more delicate time for India when its growth is sought to be obstructed by a recession-hit West, rise by China, and when the situation in Afghanistan is turning from bad to worse with the impending US withdrawal, with all its terrible portents for the restive Jammu and Kashmir.

So far, there has not been any statement from Sonia to indicate a loss of faith in Manmohan Singh. But the earlier rush to support him in every crisis, indeed mollycoddle him during an opposition onslaught, is significantly missing.

In the current session of Parliament, where the Manmohan Singh government generally and Manmohan Singh as economist particularly have been targeted by the Left and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, there has been resounding silence on the part of the Congress leadership. Almost alone, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has been doing the firefighting operations for the government.

That is not all. Overshadowing a gag order on Congress managers against condemning government policies, the earlier strident criticism by senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh of Home Minister P. Chidambaram's counter-Maoist policy, Mani Shankar Aiyar's embarrassing rant against the Commonwealth Games, and the dissing of Manmohan Singh's rightist economic czar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, by partymen like Anil Shastri, continue to resonate within political circles, increasing the insecurity of the prime minister.

Senior leader Arjun Singh, in his latest antic in the Rajya Sabha, obliquely targeted the pro-US policies of Manmohan Singh by urging him to push President Barack Obama to extradite the Bhopal gas tragedy fugitive, Warren Anderson.

Unabated violence

The problem for the technocratic prime ministership of Manmohan Singh is that matters have come to a head with manifestly political and political-economic issues like the price rise, Maoism and the related matters of tribal impoverishment and unrest, and the unabated violence in Kashmir, whose chief minister Omar Abdullah, has spectacularly failed his elected office. Indeed, the general failure of politics under Manmohan Singh has got acutely and violently concentrated in Kashmir, exacerbated by lack of development and employment opportunities there.

India's mounting political problems have not brought Sonia to the forefront to support Manmohan Singh but contrarily driven her into deeper isolation, almost as if she is scared to face the blowback from a bumbling, failing technocracy. Unwilling to give up the present arrangement, where she supposedly leads politics and Manmohan Singh allegedly government, the system reflexively has embraced the good cop-bad cop arrangement, where the ruling party on occasion outguns the opposition in lambasting the government. The way Aiyar is tearing into the Commonwealth Games will soon leave India's administrative leadership without clothes.

Meanwhile, given its almost miraculous growth, the West has begun turning the screws on India. Obama has vowed to curb job exports to India (and China) and the US has slapped Indian IT companies with a protectionist high H1-B visa fee that will hurt their American onsite operations.

The UK, on the other hand, has set off a "superbug" scare targeting India's burgeoning medical tourism industry. China, for its part, has moved its newest medium range ballistic missiles to the Tibet border. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban are purposefully moving north into the traditional stronghold of the Northern Alliance (NA) that once India backed with Russia and Iran before 9/11, thus conceivably cutting away or severely limiting an Indian option to establish an NA-2 to contain terrorism within Afghan borders once the US leaves. Kashmir during all this refuses to stabilise.

N.V. Subramanian is Editor, News Insight, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels.