history-has-really-been-kinder-to-dr-manmohan-singh

History has really been kinder to former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in his death. The way he has been praised by people across the political spectrum, including those who used to criticise him, is unprecedented. So much so, the Shiromani Akali Dal, which has always been at loggerheads with the Congress, has planned a special ‘path’ (prayer) for Singh in the Darbar Sahib. 

 

Singh deserves to be praised and lauded for scripting the economic reforms in the country. Originally the idea of former Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao, economic reforms were implemented and executed by Singh with outstanding brilliance whose success is still being felt.

 

Later, when he was selectively picked by Sonia Gandhi, the then Congress president, to be the Prime Minister, he duly came up to her expectations as that of the country. Everything went off so well that Singh led the Congress to return to power in 2009 with 206 seats in the Lok Sabha, which was for the first time since 1991 that any political party had crossed the 200 mark.

 

Moreover, Singh was pitched against one of the most powerful and popular leaders of the country, LK Advani, whom the Bharatiya Janata Party had projected as its Prime Ministerial candidate in 2009. Advani was not an ordinary leader. In fact he is the real architect of the BJP. The edifice that stands today has been crafted and carefully built by Advani. But despite that he could not win as he was pitched against a popular and middle class-icon of those days, Dr Manmohan Singh.

 

During his first term not only did Dr Singh further consolidate the reforms and liberalization he had initiated 13 years back in 1991, he signed the Indo-US Civilian Nuclear Deal, which was a great diplomatic landmark in the Indo-US relations, while putting the survival of his government at stake as the Communist Party of India-Marxist withdrew support to it.

 

When everything looked great and glorious with an emphatic mandate, the second term of Singh started to fizzle out, primarily because he had abdicated his authority. His inherent political weakness started to show up as the allies got more powerful. While in 2009 he led the party to an emphatic and impressive performance with 2006, in 2014, the party had a devastatingly dramatic fall securing just 44 seats in these elections.

 

While Rahul Gandhi is blamed and held responsible for that devastating performance, it is actually Singh, who had headed the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for ten years. It was the reflection and outcome of that performance that led the Congress tally to fall down to such an abysmally low number.

 

History has indeed been kinder to Singh. All the blame was put on Rahul. Thanks to the BJP’s propaganda blitz against Rahul, all that went wrong in the Congress was attributed to him instead of Singh, while Rahul held no official position in the government. It is a separate story that Rahul did wield a lot of influence in the UPA government though.

 

Singh could have taken a principled stand on multiple occasions, which would have raised his political stature. He never made it look like he was acting on his own. He deliberately let an image build up suggesting that it was Sonia Gandhi who was in complete control. That way he saved his image and reputation against the massive corruption scandals, real or imaginary, that hit the image of the UPA government, the Congress in particular so hard that the Congress suffered the worst ever defeat in history.

 

No doubt Singh’s integrity was above board, but he did not help in any way to ensure that his government’s integrity also remained like that. The 2G Scam, although not as huge as it was projected to be with the notional and assumed figures, but the spectrum was allotted to people in a discretionary manner which did cause huge losses to the government. And certain privileged people did get benefitted. Singh, apparently due to the compulsions of coalition politics, preferred to keep quiet.

 

Then there was the coal allocation scam, which did take place under his nose. It was widely believed that the coal mines were allocated on the recommendations of the Congress party only, but Singh accepted those recommendations without any objections or reservations.

 

Worst of all was the passage of an ordinance by Singh headed government, which bypassed a Supreme Court ruling barring elected MPs and MLAs from holding the office if they were convicted of an offence with sentence of two years’ imprisonment or more. The ordinance was passed and implemented apparently to prevent Lalu Prasad Yadav from an imminent disqualification ahead of the verdict in the fodder scam, in which he was certain to be convicted.

 

It is this same ordinance that Rahul Gandhi tore down famously or infamously during a live press conference in the Press Club of India. The UPA government later withdrew the ordinance. Lalu Yadav was convicted and disqualified as an MP.

 

Singh had unfortunately surrendered his authority completely to Gandhi. As famous writer and satirist Cho Ramaswamy wrote in the Hindustan Times on February 7, 2008, in his own characteristic way as how Singh was ignorant about an imminent cabinet reshuffle. “So the cultured Doctor was sure that there was going to be a reshuffle. But who was going to barge in and who was going to be kicked out? Will the portfolios of the ministers be changed? Who will get what? The PM was anxious to know. Of course, being only the PM and not Sonia Gandhi, he had no right to expect to know anything in advance. His lot, he knew, was to wait and watch”, Ramswamy wrote, about the way Singh had surrendered his authority.

 

Singh was always described as and taken to be an “apolitical” Prime Minister. No less a person than former President Pranab Mukherjee would strongly dispute that. He was quoted having said it multiple times during private conversations that Singh was one of the shrewdest politicians of the country who enjoyed being the Prime Minister for ten long years without any accountability.

 

It is said that during the last lap of the UPA-II at one point of time it was decided to replace Singh as Prime Minister. While the first choice was always P Chidambaram, given his inability to speak Hindi, he was ruled out. The final choice reportedly fell on Pawan Kumar Bansal, a suave and soft-spoken MP from Chandigarh, who was the Minister for Railways in Singh’s cabinet that time.

 

It was during this time the CBI trapped Bansal’s nephew in a corruption case. It is rightly said that there are no coincidences in politics. The CBI works directly under the Cabinet Secretariat.

 

That was the ten-year long regime of Singh, which ended up in Congress touching its nadir with just 44 seats in the Lok Sabha.

 

And history has really been kinder to Singh.