Pavan K. Varma | Manmohan peaked by 2009, elegantly faded into history

By now, the obituaries have been written. Every word of praise for Dr Manmohan Singh is true. A self-made man, from a lower middle-class family, coming as a refugee after Partition, he went on to became one of the world’s leading economic academics, with a degree from Cambridge, and a DPhil from Oxford. Appointed finance minister in 1991 by PM Narasimha Rao, he was the architect of India’s single biggest economic reforms, boldly dismantling the licence raj era, saving India from imminent sovereign debt default, and setting it on a path of economic recovery whose impact is undiluted even today.

However, in retrospect when I think about it, one of the reasons why I said no to joining him in 2009 — and again when the offer was repeated a year later — was because I realised the difficulties in working for a PM who was hardly his own man in a dispensation where the real power lay, just a short distance away from the PM’s residence, at 10 Janpath, where Congress president Sonia Gandhi lived. Possibly, my assessment today has the unfair benefit of hindsight. It was not as though Dr Manmohan Singh’s first term had been unsuccessful. He had, against formidable odds, succeeded in signing the landmark nuclear deal with the USA; the UPA had just won a second term; a new term of five years lay ahead of him; the cover story of a leading magazine had the tagline “Singh is King”.

But Singh had peaked by then, and there were troubling straws in the wind. He had his way on the Indo-US nuclear deal, but his persistence did not have the unstinted support of Sonia, who was worried about the survivability of the government, given the unbending opposition of the Left parties, the government’s principal allies. In Singh’s success, which was partially responsible for the UPA’s return to power in 2009, lay the seeds of the problems ahead. Two swords cannot fit into a single sheath; and the sheath did not belong to him.

From 2009 to 2014, the “political paralysis” that gripped the UPA-2 government was largely due to the fact that Manmohan Singh as PM bore the brunt of decisions being made beyond his control. That he could do nothing about it, was part of the compact that made him PM. When in 2004, the UPA unexpectedly came to power, Sonia wisely did not want to become PM herself; Rahul wanted power without responsibility; Manmohan was the acceptable compromise, and for good reasons. Politically, he was not a threat to the Gandhi family. He had no political base of any significance himself, having lost in 1999 the only Lok Sabha election he fought from Delhi. He was competent, quietly efficient, unambitious, and could be expected to not assert himself, or become part of any hostile political grouping. The person with perhaps a much higher claim to the job was Pranab Mukherjee, but there was an undeniable trust deficit between him and the Gandhi family. Singh was thus the ideal, most non-controversial, choice from the point of view of the interests of those selecting somebody for the top job. He thus became the beneficiary of unexpected largesse. But it was a conditional gift. He could be PM without the powers to act like one. It was an unsustainable situation.

Under the onslaught of an aggressive BJP led by an ascendant Narendra Modi, the UPA government in its second term lurched from one crisis to another: Unconvincing responses to allegations of scams; weakness against demands for ministerial resignations; the aftermath of the 26/11 terrorist attack and the Sharm-al-Sheikh capitulation on equating India with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism; complete confusion in handling the Anna Hazare movement; economic stasis, and growing unpopularity. By many accounts — also contested by others — the National Advisory Council set up by Sonia Gandhi, became the focus of disproportionate power, with the government forced to adopt many of its decisions, some of which, to be fair, were, good for the country and for governance.

The key point, however, was that Manmohan was not his own man, with the powers to run the government unfettered as any PM should. Ever the thorough gentleman, he was akin to the man in the boxing ring who has his hands tied, getting pummelled around, but even so never losing his personal dignity. In this shadow game of one-sided power, visible to all, possibly Dr Singh could have somewhere drawn the line. Personally, I think that when Rahul publicly tore up in 2013 the ordinance passed by the Cabinet, while Dr Singh was away in Washington on an official visit, the good Dr should have said enough is enough, and resigned. The issue was not the ordinance itself — which was possibly undesirable — but the outrageous humiliation of the PM and his government in such an in-your-face and arrogant manner. If Singh had then, indeed, resigned, he would have, in his own self-esteem, and in that of the public at large, become “king” again.

But he did not. After the BJP came to power in 2014, he gradually yet elegantly faded into the sepia pages of history, a spectacle I witnessed in the Rajya Sabha, where, greatly respected, he sat in the front row of the Opposition benches, attended Parliament regularly, but rarely spoke. Perhaps, in his press conference of June 2014, he wrote his own most accurate obituary: “History will be kinder to me than the contemporary media, or for that matter, the Opposition parties in Parliament.”

People in public life of the civility and learning of Dr Manmohan Singh are fast becoming an extinct species.