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NEW DELHI — In political life, perhaps there is no public reaction more denigrating than ridicule. Criticism is part of the terrain, but ridicule entails a deeper kind of humiliation, where the right to even be heard seriously has been taken away.

Ridicule was what greeted Manmohan Singh when, on Friday, he conducted his third – and widely assumed farewell – press conference in nearly a decade as India’s prime minister. The number is indicting in itself, for when the leader of a large, sprawling, vibrant country refrains from speaking to the citizenry in whose name he governs, it indicates either a contempt for public opinion, or a deep-rooted, almost self-defeating, ambivalence toward the demands of high political office.

Mr. Singh received a stiff grilling from the press. Why did he not speak more? Why despite him, a noted economist at the helm, did the economy slide so spectacularly? Why was inflation so high? The press, which may have once looked at him with respect and admiration, was hostile, even scornful, at times.

Things were not always like this for Mr. Singh. In 2009, when he was re-elected as prime minister, Mr. Singh enjoyed the status of a middle-class hero and was regarded by a large section of the electorate as an honest, intelligent and upright man. In the early 1990s, as finance minister, he had been the architect of the economic reforms that awoke India from its slumber. In his maiden speech as finance minister, where he signaled his intent to unshackle the Indian economy from state controls, Mr. Singh had paraphrased the writer Victor Hugo, saying, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

This was the gentle, erudite, but decisive, man that India had re-elected as prime minister in 2009. His Congress Party had won more than 200 seats, the first time in nearly two decades a single party had won that many. A stifling alliance with the Communists in his first term, which nearly brought down the government, had been shaken off and Mr. Singh had been given a clear mandate to govern.

In the summer of 2010, when he held his previous press conference, his government was suffering early hiccups. Some detected a lack of purpose. But Mr. Singh still enjoyed wide goodwill and a faith that he would be able to turn the situation around.

But things began to go very wrong very soon. In the fall of 2010, bungling and corruption around the hosting of the Commonwealth Games proved an international embarrassment. This was followed by revelations of a series of corruption scandals, chiefly in spectrum and coal allocations. The political narrative had been ceded, and Mr. Singh struggled to regain control. These were setbacks from which Mr. Singh and his government would never recover.

Great leaders, even moderately good ones, are willed to action in times of crisis. But, as fires around him raged, Mr. Singh retreated into a perplexing and imperturbable silence.

In 2011, an anticorruption movement led by the activist Anna Hazare paralyzed the government. A grand political gesture of good faith in response to Mr. Hazare’s concerns would have been sufficient to defuse the situation. Instead, Mr. Singh exited center stage and allowed the police to arrest Mr. Hazare. Predictably, the arrest of Mr. Hazare, an incalculably foolish step, snowballed into a major crisis, further eroding Mr. Singh’s credibility.

In 2012, after the brutal gang rape of a young woman in Delhi shook the country, protests erupted in cities across India. Mr. Singh took 10 days to comment on the subject. When he finally broke his silence, to a country seething with rage and helplessness, Mr. Singh spoke for barely a minute.

Increasingly, Mr. Singh assumed the tone of a facile spectator, not someone in charge. His understated style of leadership, once admired, began to be seen as excessively diffident and indecisive.

As the demands of Indian democracy grew more vocal, Mr. Singh seemed a stranger to the great clamor.

Years of crisis became years of decline. Economic growth rates fell. India’s global rise seemed to be stuttering. In a country largely young, aspirational and impatient, Mr. Singh began to represent a stifling complacency. But Mr. Singh could not be roused. He continued to act as if the final buck, for the inability to rein corrupt ministers or stem a growing policy logjam, stopped elsewhere. It was an abdication of responsibility unprecedented for India’s prime minister.

His press conference on Friday was a continuance of the same theme. Mr. Singh blamed the “external environment” for the slowing down of the economy, deflected the charges of corruption and accused the media of blowing issues out of proportion.

It is somewhat tragic that Mr. Singh now appears anachronistic in an India he helped shape. Many influential elements of the new India, like an expanding middle class and an activist media, would have been unthinkable before the reforms initiated by Mr. Singh. Yet these sections, formerly his most strident supporters, now eagerly await his exit from office.

Recurrently, with his Congress Party just decimated in local elections in four major Indian states and facing a similar rout in the national elections of 2014, Mr. Singh took refuge in history. “History will judge me more kindly than the contemporary media,” he said.

Seen in that context, last week’s press conference was a decidedly revisionist act. Mr. Singh read out an opening statement, listing the accomplishments of his decade-long tenure. A propagandistic booklet about his government’s achievements was distributed among the press. It was as if Mr. Singh was seeking to remind his countrymen how things were once good.

Vaibhav Vats is a writer based in New Delhi.