It has been just 10 years since Manmohan Singh stepped down as India’s 13th Prime Minister and handed over the reins to Narendra Modi, but his tenure already seems like a bygone era. So much water has flowed down India’s rivers since then that his two terms as Prime Minister, from 2004 to 2014, almost seem like an old, sepia-tinted movie, seen through a soft-focus lens that makes everything seem mellow.
Since Manmohan Singh spoke so little – far less than his successor, in fact – the surest way to understand him is to assess the man by what he did, rather than by what he said about himself. Remarkably, for someone who grew up in a village in undivided Punjab and reached the pinnacle of public life, he was such a private man that he never used his humble beginnings to gain political mileage. This self-effacing trait stands in stark contrast to Modi’s, whose narrative about selling tea at a railway station has become part of the myth of the man himself. However, Manmohan’s modesty, a valuable and endearing quality in private, often came in the way of his political rise. Such was his diffidence that when he contested the Lok Sabha polls from the South Delhi seat in 1999, which was supposed to be a sure-shot Congress win, he lost the election. His proverbial reticence came in the way of his engaging with local partymen as well as the election machinery that ran the campaign.
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What Manmohan lacked when thrown into the hurly-burly of election campaigning, he more than made up for with his sound understanding of India’s economic needs at that epochal time in 1991, when the country’s foreign exchange reserves had dropped to such precarious levels that it could only sustain imports for a few weeks. The same Manmohan, who had been a gatekeeper of India’s protectionist economy for years as the RBI Governor and as the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, turned into a free market advocate when he was roped in by then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao as his Finance Minister. What Manmohan said on that fateful day is a reminder of his awareness of history being scripted. Quoting Victor Hugo’s words that “no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come”, Manmohan went on to say: “Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome”. Along with Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech on the night India achieved independence, this would rank as one of the greatest speeches by an Indian politician.
However, Manmohan’s quiet approach to politics hid a steely resolve that came to the fore when the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 was on the path to getting nuked by the Left, which threatened to withdraw support if the deal went through. Manmohan took the personal initiative to bridge the distrust that the Congress harboured towards the Samajwadi Party and ensured that the deal was inked without a hitch, which redefined the relationship between India and the US, the benefits of which every successive government has reaped since then.
An illustrious career such as his, which would have counted only next to Nehru and Indira’s among Congress Prime Ministers in terms of strategic importance, was marred to a great extent by the 2G spectrum scam in the twilight of his Prime Ministership. While no one has accused Manmohan of collusion in the ring of corruption, the general assessment is that as the PM, he could have intervened to stem the damage had he taken a firm stand when the matter became generally known, at least within government circles. The fact that he didn’t – and not that he couldn’t – is ample proof of his political naivete, which allowed him to believe that the storm would blow over. When it didn’t, and his government was on the way to falling, Manmohan held a press conference – one of the last by an Indian Prime Minister since then – where he refuted the claim that he was a weak PM.
“I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter, the Opposition in Parliament,” he had said. From the glowing tributes at his passing, including from those who were in the Opposition then, it is fair to say that Manmohan’s estimation of his own legacy was astute and correct. He may have been a reluctant politician, but was a capable one nonetheless.
