Dr Manmohan Singh richly deserves the accolades being showered on him by people from all corners of India and the world.
As India’s Finance Minister under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1992, he presided over possibly the smoothest shift from a centrally planned to a Market Economy that any country has achieved. He did this in the teeth of India’s biggest foreign exchange crisis, skyrocketing oil prices caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, opposition from almost every political party in the country, including the BJP’s Swadeshi Jagran Manch, and from sections of the Congress itself.
Dismissing a virtual avalanche of unsolicited advice from economists all over the world to adopt a “Shock Therapy” mode of economic liberalisation and remove all economic controls at one go, he adopted a gradual shift that was completed only a decade later during Vajpayee’s prime ministership. But this approach paid immediate dividends.
From 1992-93 itself, the economy began to grow at more than 7 percent a year and, after a short slowdown from 1998-2002, continued to do so all the way till 2011-12. To say that his achievement was memorable, would therefore be an understatement.
During the Vajpayee years, Dr Manmohan Singh emerged as the principal adviser to Sonia Gandhi, who had been forced to take over the presidency of the Congress party in 1999 to prevent it from disintegrating after its second electoral defeat within a year. His advice may have been sought initially on economic issues, but he rapidly emerged as a sound and constructive adviser on political matters as well.
Perhaps his most important contribution in this field was the role he played in getting the Congress to ally itself with Mufti Sayeed and his then new party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), instead of the largely discredited National Conference, in forming the government in Jammu and Kashmir after its 2002 Vidhan Sabha election.
In the next three years, the central and Kashmir governments, working and thinking in tandem, not only broke the back of the Pakistan-backed Hizbul Mujahideen in Kashmir, but opened the border for trade and re-started the Srinagar to Muzaffarabad bus service that had been stopped in 1947.
Singh tilted the focus of development back towards development and employment generation in the rural areas. His government’s signal contributions towards these goals were Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), and the Right to Food Act.
Within India, during his first period as Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh tilted the focus of development back towards development and employment generation in the rural areas. His government’s signal contributions towards these goals were Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), and the Right to Food Act.
MNREGA provided employment for 100 days a year in every village at a minimum wage rate that has been frequently raised since then to keep pace with inflation. This caused an immediate improvement in rural standards of living that was reflected in an accelerated fall in the share of the population below the Poverty Line.
MNREGA’s greatest contribution came during the COVID lockdown of 2020 when it enabled millions of suddenly unemployed migrant workers who moved back to their villages to continue earning a subsistence wage and feed their families.
The Right to Food Act, which came into force in September 2013, became the legal base of his government’s belated announcement of 5 kilos of free rice per family late in 2020, to save families already severely impoverished by COVID from starvation. Needless to say, he did not make even a token mention of this fact when announcing it.
One of Dr. Singh’s most farsighted measures was his acceptance of the Telecom Regulatory Authority’s advice to stop auctioning bandwidths in the mobile telephone spectrum with each new increase in its speed, and to adopt a licensing plus revenue sharing model, for bandwidth allocation in the 2G spectrum, in 2008.
Thanks to an absurdly exaggerated estimate of revenue loss by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office, this reform became the tentpole of a huge and ultimately successful campaign by the BJP to portray the Congress party as being irredeemably corrupt. There seemed to be good reason to criticise the government at that time, but it was this decision that enabled India to have the cheapest telecom service in the world. The main beneficiaries were not the rich but the 150 million migrant workers who lived and worked for half the year or more, far from their families.
Dr Manmohan Singh’s achievements in foreign policy were equally striking. The most important was his breakthrough with China during his meeting with Prime minister Wen-Jiabao at the APEC conference at Huahin, in Thailand in 2009.
Tension had been building up since 2006 when the Chinese had accused India of intensifying patrolling in the no man’s land along the Line of Actual Control in the Himalayas in order to claim de facto sovereignty over its disputed portions This had reached a peak when India allowed the Dalai Lama to go to Tawang to open a hospital.
At Hua Hin the interaction between Dr Singh and Premier Wen Jiabao was so successful that not only was the Dalai Lama able to visit Tawang, but that meeting started a process of reconciliation that ended abruptly only when Premier Modi threw India into the arms of the USA, and refused to sign onto China’s Belt-Road -Initiative (BRI) in 2020.
As the years go by, I hope India will remember him not only for what he did during his tenure as prime minister, but what he did not do.
He did not denigrate, let alone attack his political opponents. Within his cabinet, he sought consensus relentlessly on every measure he was contemplating. That consensus was often denied, but he did not try to force the measures through. Till the end, he believed that the democratic process was as important as the goal sought to be achieved. Till he got the consensus, he was prepared to wait.
Many among us journalists thought then that this was a sign of weakness. It was the very opposite. As a result, the policies his government initiated have survived. It is thanks largely to this emphasis on consensus-building that these have withstood the onslaught of Hindutva.
The nation owes more to Manmohan Singh than words alone can describe.
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