The Long Road to Perdition

The journey of a prime minister from promise to irrelevance

On 29 February 2000, India’s then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposed a bold step in the Union Budget as part of his financial reforms: the dilution of equity in public sector banks to below 51 per cent. Sinha told Parliament that the Government had decided to accept the Narasimham Committee’s recommendations on banking reforms and reduce minimum government shareholding in nationalised banks to 33 per cent. Instantly, all hell broke loose. Sundry BJP members and various offshoots of the Sangh Parivar howled in protest. There were also the familiar cries of ‘sell-out’ from the CPM’s ideological bunker in the capital’s Gole Market. But Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was determined to back his Finance Minister. He summoned NK Singh, then secretary in the PMO. “Meet your former boss and enlist his support,” he told Singh. “My former boss?” Singh was not sure if the Prime Minister was referring to P Chidambaram or Manmohan Singh. His last stint was with Chidambaram. “No, I mean Manmohan Singh,” Vajpayee clarified. The career bureaucrat was in for a surprise when he met Dr Manmohan Singh to convey Vajpayee’s message. “Congress should support the move,” he told the Sardar. His head down, Manmohan Singh pleaded in a low voice, “Please spare me.” After a long pause, he added apologetically, “You know my position on this. But the Congress party will never support the proposal, inside Parliament or outside. Our leaders are nostalgic about Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of banks …” he trailed off, with bent shoulders.

Dr Singh’s pusillanimity would work to the detriment of his own integrity later. As Prime Minister, too, he showed a studied detachment, keeping his head down when India needed leadership. He remained as bland as the décor of his office. Singh’s choice of principal secretary was TKA Nair, a bureaucrat not known for any streak of brilliance in his career as a civil servant.

NK Singh remembers another meeting with Manmohan Singh after he settled down as Prime Minister in 2004. As the conversation progressed, NK Singh asked the Prime Minister who would be in charge of monitoring the implementation of projects, a key function of the PMO. The Prime Minister responded, “Won’t Montek do that?” Appalled by this reference to the Planning Commission’s deputy chairman, NK Singh said, “But Sir, he is in the Planning Commission,” before indicating that the PMO’s principal functions could not be assigned peremptorily to Yojana Bhavan. The Prime Minister fell silent. But for almost 10 years through the stint of UPA-I and II, it was the Planning Commission that functioned as the primary office for monitoring the implementation of key projects. It was only in the dying days of the UPA regime that the PMO was forced—under intense criticism for policy paralysis—to reclaim the assignment, which essentially required the Prime Minister to read out the riot act to non-performing members of his Cabinet, and to ensure that key decisions were taken in a transparent manner.

The decline of the PMO on Dr Singh’s watch allowed an A Raja, the DMK’s telecom minister in his Cabinet, to indulge in chicanery on 2G spectrum allocations, ignoring the meek advice of the Prime Minister. It also allowed his successor Kapil Sibal, who has hubris as his calling card, to blithely claim that Raja’s decision resulted in ‘zero loss’ to the Central exchequer. As head of the coal ministry, too, the Prime Minister’s inclination was to willy-nilly let colleagues and underlings in the ministry twist policy decisions to their own benefit. “For a man who is credited with boldly opening the doors to market reforms in the country, his guiding motto as Prime Minister, strangely enough, was to never light a candle against the wind, never to take a calculated risk in policy and planning. But the trademark of a good leader is not to ride on a concocted consensus, but to shape that consensus. As Prime Minister, his errors of omission were bigger than his errors of commission,” says a bureaucrat in the know. “The only issue on which he chose to come through as decisive during his entire stint as Prime Minister of UPA-I was the Indo-US Nuclear Bill,” he says.

In 2013, one Manmohan watcher observed an interesting contrast in leadership styles between Singh and the then captain of the IPL team Rajasthan Royals. Three Royals players were arrested for alleged spot fixing. Rahul ‘The Wall’ Dravid, as understated a personality as Singh, stepped forth to assert that the captain would not countenance such behaviour. “I have to focus on ensuring that the team fulfills its enormous potential and continues to play the Rajasthan Royals way,” Dravid said at a press conference.

That same evening, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh convened a meeting to fill a vacancy in the National Human Rights Commission. Opposition leaders Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, on the panel of selectors, vetoed the Government’s nominee, Cyriac Joseph, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, on the grounds of a mediocre career record. The Government overruled the objections and circulated minutes of the meeting among participants.

Swaraj, before putting in her dissent note, noticed that the minutes did not mention Cyriac Joseph. “Prime Minister, you have signed on blank paper,” she told Dr Manmohan Singh, according to a person privy to the details. Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde quickly grabbed the paper back from Swaraj, put Joseph’s name on it and then passed it on to the Prime Minister. That was Dr Manmohan Singh’s classic rubber stamp moment.

If Dravid’s public appearance sent out a clear signal that he decided to take responsibility for the Royals and its players and assume control publicly despite the ignominy of spot fixing, Singh’s handling of the NHRC issue revealed the mindset of a man who was born to be led, not to lead. At his best, the Prime Minister was ‘a man who led from behind’. Throughout his Prime Ministership, he did his best to avert every possibility of the buck reaching anywhere near his desk.

His first term in office may have ended with a flash of leadership after the passage of the Indo-US Nuclear Bill, but it took no time for darkness to descend in the early part of his second term. The CAG revelations on 2G Spectrum and the subsequent incarceration of former Telecom Minister Raja dealt a near fatal blow to a sector that was one of India’s biggest success stories, telecom. Another CAG report found similar lack of transparency in coalfield allocations. The Government’s woes were compounded after the CBI, which was investigating cases of corruption in the allocations, admitted that the Government tried to ‘change the status report on the probe’. That forced the Union Law Minister Ashwani Kumar, Singh’s own nominee, out of the Cabinet. Things turned from bad to worse after the CBI chief told the Supreme Court that the PMO too had vetted the status report. The impression that not all of Singh’s Cabinet colleagues played by the book was reinforced when the CBI unravelled the Railway Ministry’s cash-for-jobs scandal. Although the Prime Minister reluctantly showed Rail Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal the door, the CBI is conducting a probe on whether the minister himself was involved. Bansal is now the Congress candidate for Chandigarh’s Lok Sabha seat.

Singh’s track record on foreign policy in his second term was no less dismal. The beheading of Indian soldiers on India-Pakistan borders was just another moment in the life of Manmohan’s India taken for granted by Pakistan. “In the 10 years that Singh has been Prime Minister, China’s policy toward India has gone from being quietly negative to being openly adversarial,” says geopolitical strategy analyst Brahma Chellaney, “It was in this period that China shortened the length of [its] border with India to dispute Indian sovereignty over the western and eastern sectors.”

Afflicted by this Manmohan malady, the Congress party was in a flap, with the ‘perfect’ timing for the elevation of a reluctant Rahul Gandhi to the Prime Minister’s post eluding its high command. Meanwhile, scepticism grew within the party over the so-called division of power between the head of government and the head of the party. The party even had to issue a clarification that Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh were on the same page over issues such as the sacking of Bansal and Kumar.

By the time he began his last year in office, Dr Singh had already squandered much of the goodwill he commanded when he began his second term. As India stood on the threshold of another General Election, the ghost of 2G spectrum allocations would return to haunt him. Raja, the prime accused in the scam and DMK candidate from Nilgiris, alleged that the Prime Minister had sent him a note of demands forwarded by top telecom companies that he’d earlier rejected for violating the Centre’s telecom policy.

Dr Singh formed the perfect image of a ruler in denial even as the world around him—his government, the party— was cracking up. In his third press conference in ten years, his defence was as feeble as ever: “As far as the charges of corruption are concerned, most of these charges relate to the period of UPA-1 (his government’s first stint in power between 2004 and 2009). Coal block allocations as well as 2G spectrum allocations were both in the era of UPA-1. We went to the electorate (in 2009) on the basis of our performance in that period, and the people of India gave us the mandate to govern for another five years.”

He went on as a man who had retired from reality: “So, whether these issues, which have been raised from time to time by the media, sometimes by the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General), sometimes by the court, one must never forget that they belong to a period which was not the period of UPA-2, but the period relating to the previous five years, and the people of India entrusted us with new responsibilities. So the people of India do not seem to have paid heed to all these charges of corruption levelled against me or my party.”

The underlying cynicism of his statement left most people stunned. Here was the head of a government that had been ushered into power, and which boasted, at least on paper, some of the finest public administrators of our times. Not only did UPA not deliver, it also let the economy slip. The UPA inherited an economy that was growing at 7 per cent in 2004-05; it will bequeath to the next government a growth rate that is likely to drop below 5 per cent.

Decades ago, Manmohan Singh’s entry to the country’s ruling establishment was made possible by the then trade minister LN Mishra who, in April 1972, enlisted the bright economist from the United Nations as an advisor. Mishra stopped over at New York on his way to an UNCTAD meeting in Chile and was looking for someone to polish his speech on trade issues at the conference. LK Jha, India’s ambassador in the US at the time, suggested Manmohan Singh’s name. As luck would have it, Mishra was told on his return home that his economic advisor Kalyan Govind Vaidlya had been selected for an international assignment. Impressed with Manmohan Singh’s work, Mishra decided on the replacement instantly. He made a call to the then Principal Secretary to the PM, PN Haksar, and suggested Singh’s appointment. A few months later, Chief Economic Advisor VK Ramaswamy died of a cardiac arrest and the post fell vacant. Dr Singh applied and got selected. That was the beginning of a stellar career as a technocrat: Governor of the RBI, chairman of the UGC, advisor to the Prime Minister during the shortlived Chandra Shekhar Government in the early 90s. A senior ministerial colleague of the then PM says one of the last files that Chandra Shekhar signed before quitting office was to reinstate Dr Singh as UGC chairman.

The technocrat’s big moment came in 1991 when PV Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister. HM Patel declined the offer to assume charge as Finance Minister. Rao then chose Manmohan, who would live up to his master’s expectations. He would go on to become the author of the country’s epic liberalisation saga. As a policy wonk, there was not one important government post that Dr Singh missed 2014out on. Yet, Dr Singh, a child of opportunities, proved to be the very man who presided over a decade of national opportunities squandered.

True, India today is better off than it was at the turn of the millennium: poverty dropped to a historic low of 22 per cent. But an entitlement regime was on the rise, and it happened at a time when a demographic revolution was underway: 65 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion citizens are under the age of 35. The best way to meet aspirations and guarantee growth would have been to provide skill development to the unemployed. The UPA failed on this. Its efforts to overhaul education through legislation got trapped in a parliamentary gridlock. The much acclaimed Right to Education may have achieved enrolment, but failed to deliver on quality.

But for a rebound over the last two years, the UPA would have gone out with perhaps the worst record of any government in job creation. In the two years ended 2011-12, the Indian economy, according to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), added on 14 million jobs. According to the earlier, 66th round survey of the NSSO, the economy added a mere 1 million jobs in the five years ended 2009-10. The jobless- growth charge has stuck. Effectively, in eight of the 10 years in power for which data is available, the UPA has created 15 million jobs. The previous regime headed by the BJP had ushered in 58 million jobs between 1999-2000 and 2004-05. The country adds 12 million people to the labour force every year. Leave alone absorbing new job claimants, the economy is growing nowhere close to clearing the backlog of unemployed.

Countries such as the US routinely use quarter-by-quarter labour and employment numbers as criteria for gauging their economic health. But like the Prime Minister’s defensive response at his press conference, the UPA has spent a large chunk of its time and energy denying the abysmal employment numbers, instead of evolving a structural fix for the problem.

In his autumnal isolation, Dr Manmohan Singh himself has become the problem the party could not fix. The country can, still.

About The Author

PR Ramesh