New Delhi: When Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister in 1991, then-Cabinet secretary Naresh Chandra told him he should bring a technocrat to head the finance ministry to pull the economy out of the deep mess it was in. Manmohan Singh was picked for the task.
Manmohan Singh agreed, but with a caveat: he would take several politically unpopular decisions. “Leave the politics to me. If you succeed, we will share the credit. If you fail, you take the blame,” Narasimha Rao then told Singh, sealing the matter.
Planning Commission ex-deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia shared this anecdote Thursday in a lecture he delivered on ‘The Life and Legacy of Dr Manmohan Singh’. The lecture was part of the Prime Minister’s Lecture Series, organised by the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML).
Manmohan Singh, albeit not a good orator, was uniquely suited to persuade people to accept policy change when it mattered, Ahluwalia said. This trait came in handy both during the 1991 economic reforms he ushered in as finance minister and the Indo-US nuclear deal he pulled through as PM.
Singh, as Prime Minister, was fully cognisant of innumerable constraints, including a “division” between him and Sonia Gandhi, Ahluwalia said. However, that was only “natural”, considering the former was not the head of the party, he added.
Action was not easy, since Manmohan Singh was heading a government in which the Congress had only 145 seats, with the other 73 seats held by its allies, Ahluwalia said.
Commenting that the government at the time was existentially dependent on Left support, which added more constraints on the PM, he called it a “khichdi” type arrangement.
Ahluwalia also pointed out that PM Manmohan Singh showed he was capable of political manipulation when it mattered. When the Left threatened a no-confidence motion against his government over the nuclear deal, Singh turned it into a confidence motion, favouring his government. He spoke to everyone—from then-President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to Mulayam Singh—and got the Samajwadi Party on board. “He knew how to move politics when it mattered,” Ahluwalia said.
Sharing another anecdote illustrating Manmohan Singh’s ability to “soften the Opposition”, Ahluwalia said that when he was the finance minister, the government was facing backlash for trying to computerise the national banks. He then invited representatives of eight to nine trade and political party unions and discussed the matter with them personally.
The meeting did not change anybody’s mind. But Manmohan Singh escorted all the representatives till the gate, shaking hands with all of them. The gesture prompted the “most aggressive” among the representatives to say, “Mr Finance Minister, I completely disagree with you about the issue. But I don’t mind admitting to you that my son agrees with you completely.”
Manmohan Singh was also a “terrific interlocutor” when it came to technical policy decisions, said Ahluwalia.
It was, moreover, Singh’s “excessive personal austerity” that made him best suited to initiate economic reforms in the 1990s. Nobody would have doubted that he had vested interests in liberalisation, Ahluwalia opined.
Manmohan Singh was, however, no “free market fundamentalist”, Ahluwalia said. The PM’s life experiences would have taught him that the State needed to provide a fair shot to the economically weak, he emphasised during his lecture.
That his thinking differed from the traditional economic thinking of the times, however, had always been known, Ahluwalia said. After all, Manmohan Singh’s PhD argued Indian exports were held back—not by the West’s discriminatory trade policies—but India’s own domestic industrial policies.
In 1972, P.N. Haksar was seeking economic policy recommendations. The then-principal secretary Manmohan Singh wrote a paper arguing for liberalisation reforms, Ahluwalia revealed. However, no one knows where the paper is now.
For the first nine years of his life, Manmohan Singh lived in an “earthen house” in pre-Partition Pakistan, with his grandparents, Ahluwalia said. After the Partition had traumatised Singh’s family deeply, the late PM continued to believe that India-Pakistan relations could be normalised, he stressed.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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