DR Manmohan Singh, who died aged 92 last week, will be remembered in opposite ways. As finance minister and prime minister, he condemned “left-wing extremism” as the biggest threat to India’s internal security. The sahukar-backed right agreed.
Consequently, too many left-wing intellectuals and academics are imprisoned over unfounded claims that they posed a threat to Indian democracy. When it was Singh’s turn to hand over the baton to Narendra Modi, something he disliked but refused to see as a logical outcome of his economic policies, Singh was warning that Hindutva represented the real threat to India.
In the end, it was too late to heed the corrected warning. The threat to Indian democracy was posed by either the left or the right. It could not come from both of them, unless they had united, as they selfishly did, against Indira Gandhi’s brief emergency appeal.
Dr. Singh is therefore hailed as India’s economic Prometheus, after the Greek legend who defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity.
He is praised for opening up India’s economy, which strove to unleash the nation’s complex hidden energies. In some versions of Greek myth, Prometheus is also credited with creating humanity from clay, a description the ever-modest former prime minister would likely disapprove.
Manmohan Singh’s policies propped up businessmen who came together to promote Narendra Modi as prime minister.
Many respected him for his cultural roots and not for his politics. Of his three daughters, one is an author and has also written extensively on social issues such as forest conservation in Mizoram. Another daughter is a history teacher, with seminal work on Indian history to her credit. The third daughter, Amrit Kaur, is a respected human rights lawyer in New York. We just heard her singing Faiz in a tribute to her father. She constructed ‘Gulon mein rang bharey’ with an emotionally vivid alaap that helped discern the soft notes of Raag Jhinjhoti in Mehdi Hasan’s legendary composition of the poem.
One is reminded how early in Manmohan Singh’s time as Prime Minister, his party president Sonia Gandhi went in search of Raga’n Josh, an out-of-print book on legendary musicians written by Sheila Dhar, an accomplished classical singer and storyteller. Sonia Gandhi found out that Singh’s wife, Gursharan Kaur, wanted the book. Sonia cleverly followed him and gave the prime minister’s wife a precious book; one that would have made Nehru smile approvingly. Recalling similar uplifting stories should help dispel the cultural dampness that has gripped the country since Narendra Modi began advising citizens on frying pakoras on sewer gas stoves.
The second view on Manmohan Singh’s interventions as Finance Minister (1991-96) and as Prime Minister (2004-2014) places him as the protagonist of the 19th century gothic novel about a scientist’s complicated experiment that goes terribly wrong. Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s monster in the Indian context has been fueled by the economic experiment that Dr. Singh was asked to begin in 1991. The Congress was in crisis after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May of that year.
The disappearance of the Soviet market and the oil price shock meant that India was barely able to avoid default by pledging its gold reserves. What followed saw the rise of a Frankenstein-like middle class, much of which thrives on hatred of its parents. Worse, Singh’s policies propped up businessmen who banded together to promote Narendra Modi as prime minister.
In other words, the logic of Singh’s reforms dictated the dissolution of democracy that allowed tycoons to become super-rich and left the poorest masses living in the hope that prosperity would come to their dreary homes. One shudders to see crisis-stricken Pakistan return to the discredited IMF model, which has led to the dilution of democracy in India and elsewhere.
But let’s start at the beginning, or there, to evaluate Dr. Singh’s complicated experiment. A major earthquake in Maharashtra in 1993 forced me to cover the devastation for a Western news agency. Several instructive lessons awaited us; One of them was observing Shiv Sena cadres removing rotting bodies and animal carcasses with their bare hands and with unmatched dedication.
Recall that it was the same Shiv Sena that had violently attacked Muslims in the Mumbai massacre of 1992 and 1993, after the destruction of the Babri mosque. Isn’t the same the case with right-wing groups in Pakistan, where, furthermore, the government is outnumbered by Jamaat or Jamiat cadres in rescue missions; say, in the flood-ravaged mountains? A starker lesson from Latur’s visit was unrelated to the ravages of the earthquake. The then chief minister of Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar, met me several nights after retreating from daily press conferences to his makeshift office.
Pawar was India’s defense minister when he met then Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. Pawar said Li was worried about Dr Singh’s reforms as his coalition government had not trusted the latter man.
Pawar said China had also not trusted the last man in its reforms. Li said China’s one-party system could handle any resulting turbulence with ease, while India, given its democracy, would struggle. Mikhail Gorbachev, he said, was more like India’s problems.
“Gorbachev made a mistake by introducing perestroika and glasnost simultaneously,” Li told Pawar. Perestroika, or radical restructuring, and glasnost, which emphasizes an open society, do not go together, Li said. Indeed, Rao’s government needed to bribe a group of parliamentarians to win the vote in favor of Singh’s reforms. Furthermore, Singh had to give a false address in Assam to qualify for a Rajya Sabha seat from there.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court rejected journalist Kuldip Nayar’s petition against changing the rules for the election of the Rajya Sabha, initially designed as the council of states. The court amended the constitution and allowed citizens of any state to be elected to Rajya Sabha from any other state. Singh was never elected to the Lok Sabha, so it was a useful court ruling.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Amanecer, January 7, 2025.