Ordinary civilians, both men and women, were waiting in lines to pay their tribute to the former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who had died on the rainy day of Dec. 26, and said their final goodbyes to him on the way to Nigambodh Ghat. For the visionary leader, the common people mattered a lot despite his holding many important positions in the country.
Singh, who presided over the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as the 15th Governor, had innings as the finance minister of the country, ushering in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991, and was the country’s prime minister for a decade, endearing himself to the people with his great sense of humility.
Ours was the generation that saw him in his prime leadership roles during school and college.
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It was in the nineties when he came down to Trivandrum for a lecture at Victoria Jubilee Town Hall when we as college students had a glance of him. With conviction, Dr. Singh emphasized on the importance of economic reforms. We should not miss this last train, he exhorted the audience.
With old friends like the USSR (Soviet Union) collapsing and different countries in east Asia doing far better than India, he was making a case for giving up the relics of the past.
Following his speech was the intervention of Kerala’s Finance Minister Oommen Chandy, citing Indian economist M. L. Dantwala who once remarked that “cheap food is instant socialism.” He argued that we should try to have reforms with a human face, reaching out to the poor.
In response, Dr. Singh asserted such sort of subsidies would only lead us to our demise, the USSR way. He vehemently took a Hayekian libertarian turn and argued against what Rajagopalachari had characterized as the License or Permit Raj.
Later, as a student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, I had an opportunity to hear the other side of the reforms story, in particular, the little book called “The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalization” by Bhaduri and Nayyar. No less important were the interventions of Prabhat Patnaik among others who made a passionate case against capital account liberalization.
With the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, the series of security scams of Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh, as well as the East Asian crisis of 1999, the reforms were no longer viewed as an unmixed blessing.
Upon his entry as the prime minister in 2004, Singh with the support of allies of different political backgrounds and hues, shifted from arguing against the retreat of the state to advocating for its return.
The Indian National Congress lost most of its support groups in this process as well. The widening distributive disparities were too glaring to be ignored. It had to provide a brand new story to get lost constituencies back to the Congress caravan.
During UPA (United Progressive Alliance) I, Singh presided over a coalition government which brought the largest government employment programs in the world like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREG) Act and consolidated it with a string of programs like National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Right To Information (RTI) Act in 2005. Most importantly, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act was brought in 2009. All of these were flagship programs of the government which played a pivotal role in transforming rural livelihoods in the country.
Through the two tenures as the prime minister, Singh was no more the ruthless liberalizer of Singh’s predecessor P.V. Narasimha Rao’s days, but a great institutional innovator.
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Singh’s silence was the most talked about in political circles. However with his death, his words are back in social media.
In his final year as prime minister, Singh remarked that history would judge him far more favorably than the journalists of his time. His much-discussed reply, laced with an Urdu couplet, expressed his perspective poignantly: “Hazaron jawaabon se achhi hai meri khamoshi,” which meant “my silence is far better than a thousand answers.”
Even in opposition Singh had a great sense of statesmanship. When the Congress or UPA legislators were continually bombarding Dr. Urjit Patel, former governor of RBI, with a volley of questions as part of the deliberations of the Parliamentary Committee on demonetization, Dr. Singh intervened, fully understanding the dilemma of the RBI governor.
In the past, there was a young researcher in JNU working on a project about the Congress and its advocacy of deprived castes. He was trying to seek interviews with a number of Congress leaders including Dr. Singh. The researcher phoned him, this was far after Singh’s tenure as the finance minister and while he was the leader of the opposition party in the Rajya Sabha in 2003. Singh responded back to the researcher in a week’s time via the telephone.
The young researcher was invited to Singh’s house and upon his arrival, Singh in all his glory and humility, received him warmly at the entrance. He spent more than an hour with the researcher and even treated him to a cup of tea. That is how Dr. Manmohan Singh will be remembered.
People will miss these fast waning qualities in public life.