By suggesting to Indian industry to put a lid on huge pay packets to top executives and show more responsibility to the poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has offered the kind of penetrating and wide-ranging critique of capitalism that other national leaders should take to heart, writes a leading western columnist.

"Singh's speech (at the CII meet in New Delhi recently) may be the most important one given by a major national leader so far this year," Tom Plate says in his weekly column 'Pacific Perspectives' for the Los Angeles Times and other international publications. Describing Singh's address 'extraordinary', he said the prime minister's advocating a philosophy of systematically caring for those who have less "is probably the best way to make sure that all of us will continue to have more".

Singh had cautioned that "rising income and wealth inequalities, if not matched by a corresponding rise of incomes across the nation, can lead to social unrest."

Inviting the industry to be the government's partner in creating a humane and just society, he had also asked corporate India to first resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and reduce conspicuous consumption. Plate described Singh as a 'deeply serious man with a cerebral IQ probably twice that of most national leaders'.

Desisting from 'rank socialist prescriptions', the columnist noted that the prime minister had asked whether self-satisfaction about unprecedented wealth was wholly justified in the oppressive presence of diminished inequality.