May 9: The impatience has burst through the veneer.

The Prime Minister is “failing to perform on all fronts”, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said today in the first public expression of disenchantment with Manmohan Singh who has changed the rules of engagement with the Left ever since the nuclear deal hit a wall.

“I don’t want to denigrate our Prime Minister as I have great regard for him. But let me speak the truth. As Prime Minister, he is failing to perform on all fronts. He could not control inflation which has hit the poor people badly,” Bhattacharjee told a media conference ahead of the panchayat polls.

At the political level, the chief minister said the Prime Minister had failed to get his party elected in state polls. “Look at the leadership he has provided to his party. The Congress has lost the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections. I don’t know whether this party will have the same fate in the coming Karnataka polls.”

However, reacting to the chief minister’s comments, a PMO official said: “In politics, politicians make such remarks all the time but the record of the Prime Minister is there for all to see. The country has never witnessed a stronger economic performance and enjoyed a higher international standing than during the term of Manmohan Singh.”

The Congress sought to underplay the chief minister’s statement, saying political compulsions on the eve of the panchayat elections might have forced his hand.

But other sources in Delhi said the chief minister’s comments also reflected the Bengal government’s frustration at being made to wait for central clearances for several projects in the state (see chart).

“The projects are not being cleared. Nothing will be done in a hurry,” a source said.

The Prime Minister had also sidestepped an invitation from the chief minister to lay the foundation for a steel plant in Bengal and chosen to go to neighbouring Jharkhand for an industry event.

A television channel had yesterday quoted Bhattacharjee as saying that “after Manmohanji took over, the Congress faced many elections but lost”.

The chief minister today clarified that he was not making a personal attack on Manmohan Singh but stuck to the opinion that the Prime Minister was “failing to perform”.

Manmohan and Bhattacharjee used to share a warm relationship largely because of the convergence of their ideas on development and governance. Bhattacharjee’s less rigid stands on several issues had also prompted the Prime Minister to hold him up as an ideal chief executive of a state.

In March last year, the Prime Minister had referred to the chief minister as his “friend” to say: “… I sincerely believe that my friend Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is right when he says the time has come in this country to work steadfastly to rapidly industrialise the economy.”

However, after the nuclear deal was virtually frozen at the insistence of the Left, sources close to the Prime Minister had said that the Centre would no longer go out of its way to help Bengal. The state government was never snubbed outright but an unfriendly administration at the Centre can stall projects by sitting on files.

But the PMO official said: “I don’t think in the past three decades, any other Prime Minister has done as much for Bengal as Manmohan Singh.”