As we head closer to the assembly elections in five states and to the general elections next year, the figure who stands alone and abandoned is clearly the Prime Minister. The man who was feted abroad and who has been Prime Minister for nine years of the world’s largest democracy is fast fading into the shadows. And yet he seems neither bitter nor angry. Like his one-time boss, Narasimha Rao, the ninth Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh will also probably retire into solitude with his books and his family, in a government appointed bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi.