Assessing Manmohan Singh: He was never a true reformist by instinct
Assessing Manmohan Singh: He was never a true reformist by instinct
Bibek Debroy
Rare is the person who reads Robert Browning now. He wrote a poem titled “The Patriot” and it begins, “It was roses, roses, all the way, /With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.” Somewhere down the line, the poem says, “And you see my harvest, what I reap, /This very day, now a year is run.”
It has been more than a year now, seven years if one counts from 2004. As prime minister, Manmohan Singh (let’s call him MMS) is most likely on his way out, once the Congress figures out the exit policy.
Since clamours for removal have emanated from within the Congress too, we aren’t talking about 2014. More like 2012. As PM, the MMS legacy has been the nuclear deal, aborted peace initiatives with Pakistan and part-aborted agreements with Bangladesh. But MMS is an economist. As FM, he is the one who liberalised the economy in 1991 and reminded us about an idea (reforms) whose time has come.
Rao, Not Singh To put it mildly, the economy is in a shambles now. Reforms most likely are on permanent pause. The sound and fury over FDI in retail amounted to nothing. During UPA-I, we had RTI and NREG. The rest was a legacy. During UPA-II, we have Right to Education and may have Right to Food. As a reformer, lauded by the external world and urban India, I doubt MMS will be proud of this legacy.
But should we be surprised? We have conjured up an image of MMS as the original reforming FM. There are several problems with this identification. First, MMS wasn’t PV Narasimha Rao’s original choice as FM. IG Patel was, though that is neither here nor there. Second, the credit for those reforms should largely go to Rao, though the Congress conveniently chose to ignore this later. Indeed, MMS also distanced himself from Rao, though that too is perhaps neither here nor there, except that it reveals some of MMS’ personal attributes. The point is, any FM in 1991 would have had to introduce those reforms. The agenda was known. The blueprint was known.
All of these had been firmed up by the end of 1990. All that remained was for FM to read out the speech. MMS wasn’t the engineer or the architect. At best, he was the contractor.
Third, MMS may have been an economist once. But for years and years, he was a laterally inducted bureaucrat. A requisite characteristic of a successful bureaucrat is lack of conviction, economic, political or ideological.
You need to be malleable. And MMS was successful at that. It isn’t generally known that the “garibi hatao” slogan was thought of by MMS. Therefore, we have ourselves conjured up this ‘father of reforms’ image and MMS chose to go along.
Honest, But… Part of the image also concerns honesty. Honesty is a relative expression. I have been severely reprimanded by an MP for calling MPs and politicians dishonest. I have been advised to call them differently honest and there is a grain of truth in that.
There is absolutely no question that MMS is personally honest in pecuniary matters. I have plenty of anecdotes on this and so do all those who have interacted with him. But have you heard of House No. 3989, Nandan Nagar, Ward No. 51, Sarumataria? You probably haven’t. This is in Dispur and MMS is ostensibly a tenant there.
That’s because he is a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam. As I said, honesty is a relative term and I know of people who would baulk at this deception.
There is an anecdote in Yashwant Sinha’s book about how MMS had brought alone a file to Chandra Shekhar, who was then the PM, but had already resigned. The file concerned MMS’ appointment as UGC boss.
As Chandra Shekhar had already resigned as PM, he pointed out that he couldn’t morally sign the file. MMS retorted that he had backdated the file. Since this anecdote has gone uncontested, it is presumably true.
Therefore, if non-pecuniary transactions are involved, I have never been convinced MMS places a premium on “honesty”. It is for an individual to decide whether he feels comfortable looking at himself in the mirror.
I think this “personal honesty” point is driven too hard and is again part of the myth, not the reality. As is the statement, “MMS is not a politician”, with the word “politician” being used in a pejorative sense. In this context, what does the word politician mean? I guess it means someone who will do anything to further one’s own goals, even if it means discarding one’s friends and dining with the enemy. In politics, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Low on Charisma
If that is the definition, and not election to Lok Sabha or state assemblies, I find no evidence to suggest MMS is not a politician. On the contrary, I have met people who have worked with MMS in various capacities and who recount his ability to be extremely flexible for achieving goals. This is no big deal, in fact, it isn’t any deal at all.
The problem is with the MMS’s image. It’s far too removed from reality.
This leaves MMS’s attribute of humility, and I have plenty of anecdotes on that too. This attribute is without blemishes. But MMS never had fire in him. However, as FM, and as leader of the opposition later, he was fun to work with. He was knowledgeable and made you comfortable. As PM, and increasingly so, he looks tired and jaded.
I have refrained from personal anecdotes. But there is one I cannot resist. I forget the year. It was probably around 2000 and he was leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha then. The context doesn’t matter for this story. I remarked, “Why don’t you forget all this? You will never become PM. Write a book.”
I wish he had never become PM, or had gracefully exited in 2009.
Air India and Hydrocarbon losses – “Honest” PM Manmohan Singh
“Honest” PM Moneymohan Singh in action yet again. For an economist, seems surprisingly ignorant of profit/loss economics when it comes to serving the CONgress party. But wait! Profit for the party and loss for the country!
On December 30, 2005, the United Progressive Alliance government moved uncharacteristically fast. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh concurred with a note sent by a select group of ministers on a commercial contract on the very day it reached his office. Soon after, the aviation ministry under then minister Praful Patel informed the national carrier Air India about Singh’s decision. Air India promptly acted on it – all on the same day.
This contract was a Rs 33,197-crore deal Air India , signed with Boeing and General Electric to buy 50 planes. The sequence of events on that winter day is marked in red in a recent audit report of the aviation sector by the Comptroller and Auditor General, or CAG.
As it turned out, the plane acquisition deal triggered Air India’s nosedive. At the time of the deal, the airline was still in the black, with a net profit of Rs 96.3 crore on an income of Rs 7,630 crore in 2004/05. The airline had a Rs 1,801 crore balance sheet, of which debt was Rs 1,262 crore. Five years later in 2009/10, it would report a loss of Rs 5,552 crore – about twice the size of Sikkim’s economy – on an income of Rs 13,402 crore, along with a staggering debt of Rs 38,423 crore.
The single-day clearance is one of a number of dubious government decisions highlighted by the report. Similar revelations have also been made in another CAG report on the hydrocarbons sector. Both strongly criticise the government’s functioning, pointing out failures and systemic flaws in its processes.
http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/cag-report-indicts-civil-aviation-and-hydrocarbons-sectors/1/18990.html
Arnab Goswami’s art of Sangh baiting
Arnab Goswami’s panel to discuss the Prashant Bhushan assault deliberately included two “village simpletons” — Bhim Singh of Panthers Party and Rakesh Sinha of the RSS, the kind that can be predictably relied upon to provide the incendiary material that the sophisticates cannot stomach. The rest are glib tongued “intellectuals”. Arnab knows the Bhim types will fall for the bait he has in store for them. Predictably falling for this bait, Bhim and Rakesh while criticizing the violence, also say that Prashant Bhushan has no right to ask for plebiscite in J&K. Arnab and fellow buddhijeevis tch, tch this “uncouth”, “violent” Sanghi behavior and suggest that by the secular law of associativity and by a neat jump in logic, Bhim is actually ok with this violence. Ergo, this is typical violent behavior from the Sangh and the root behind all this is BJP-RSS. Mission accomplished. No such super logic is used when Islamic terrorists blow up people on a regular basis to arrive at similar general inferences.
Bhim Singh and Rakesh Sinha could have turned this around to Arnab actually. Using the same jump in logic it could be argued that those who fail to criticize Prashant Bhushan for saying that Kashmir can be independent are actually ok with losing J&K. And by the same law of associativity these are anti-nationals who can be jailed for sedition.
Prashant Bhushan assaulted
Prashant Bhushan was roughed up in his chambers supposedly by a youth of the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena. Karmic retribution perhaps. While Prashant has been baiting nationalistic Indians recently with his vitriolic and anti-national views, the correct course of action for those who would like to respond to the likes of Prashant Bhushan is to make them answerable in a court of law. A hundred cases of sedition and treason, around the country, making him ping pong from court to court would work wonders. Also quite ironic that a maoist sympathiser should be so rattled by a few slaps.
Prashant’s father Shanti Bhushan has in the past defended the Arundhati ”Gandhians with Guns” Roy and also the notorious Teesta Setalvad. Like Arundhati Roy, Prashant Bhushan has been critical of supposed armed forces excess (asked for DNA profiling of unmarked graves) in Jammu and Kashmir. Prashant has not so much as blinked for the 350,000 Pandits languishing in refugee camps in his native Delhi but is hyper active with “liberal” causes — which in the Indian context is about pandering to the lowest common denominator in other religions/political systems.
Recently this column pointed out that the BJP/RSS should dump team Anna which has the likes of Prashant on its rolls. In light of his latest statement on plebiscite in J&K, this looks like a no brainer now.
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Prashant Bhushan says BJP/RSS is communal
Prashant Bhushan made an outrageous statement on Arnab Goswami’s program on Times Now today by saying that they would welcome support from the BJP and RSS even though they were communal. Team Anna is basically a group of rabble rouse leftists — the kind if in power, would ensure that their ego-centric leftist ideologies trump development and progress with a myriad of “intellectual” arguments to back them up. If the likes of Prashant Bhushan ever had the opportunity to run this country they would ensure that the country remained poor and hooked to handouts from the World Bank/Ford Foundation. The Magsaysay award is indeed precisely reserved for such worthies. I would predict that if they start tasting success, this movement would begin to look like what we had seen with say V.P Singh — seemingly clean at the outset but would later degenerate to some bizarre anti-national cause (like the Mandal movement) of their liking.
The JP movement against the dictatorial Indira Gandhi succeeded only with the support of the RSS and the Jan Sangh. If the BJP has the slightest iota of self respect they should ask Prashant to apologize else leave him and his team of opinionated limelight seekers to grind to dust. Even if the BJP helps them out, they will be dumped in the end and there will not be even the hint of a bare nod of gratitude as is evident right now. Far from it, it is likely that the Lok Pal bodies will be loaded with the likes of Prashant Bhushan and Santosh Hegde which would happily hunt the toothless tigers like the BJP down and bask in the limelight. Team Anna does not have the vertebrate strength to simply appreciate fundamental good from wherever it may come but constantly seeks to further their pet causes while pandering to pop political correctness (like the “communal BJP” view) no matter how absurd their basis. Team Anna better clarify what their view of the BJP/RSS really is before it can be lent support by the BJP. But given the lack of realpolitik on the part of the B JP leadership at the center I think the BJP will be used and flushed by the likes of Team Anna.
Kiran Bedi says BJP support was crucial
BJP support was crucial in getting over the Janlokpal impasse as per Kiran Bedi. Nice that somebody in the Anna team at least honestly acknowledged the support of the BJP. Left to the BJP itself, given its ineptness in media and publicity management, it would have done all the good work and been unable to extract any mileage out of it.
Nuclear deal is the biggest scam of soft spoken Manmohan
I have said this many times before, the “nuclear deal” will prove to be the crowning glory of the bloody scam trail left behind by the “honest and softspoken” PM Manmohan Singh, I mean “Dr Manmohan SIngh”. One more scam waiting to be uncovered is the EVM rigging scam the kind of which won P.Chidamabaram his election. P.C now nonchalantly struts around like the mother hen of the ministry as if nothing happend at all.
Read the below piece on the “nuclear non-deal” by Bharat Karnad and be very afraid of what lies for the free world.
http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/destroying-nuclear-india/289636.html
Bharat Karnad
Manmohan Singh will be remembered, if at all, for the nuclear mess he quite deliberately led India into. Whatever his other failings, Singh understands the Congress’ political terrain well. Conscious that Rahul Gandhi was still wet behind his ears and lacking in political heft to be hoisted as prime minister by his mother, and that Congress president Sonia Gandhi did not trust Pranab Mukherjee not to do a Narasimha Rao if handed the top post, Singh played his trump card in Spring 2007. He dared Sonia Gandhi to order an ambivalent ruling party to support the nuclear deal on the anvil, or to accept his resignation.The reasons why the United States desperately wanted the nuclear deal were as clear from the start, as the traps and pitfalls in it that the Indian government chose to disregard, despite being warned about them by a few of us, including some of the most respected veterans of the nuclear establishment, writing against it. It was in the interest of the US to both prevent India’s emergence as a comprehensive nuclear military power, because that would unsettle the status quo it presided over, and to draw it into the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty net. These aims were realised by Washington cleverly using India’s dated non-proliferation rhetoric and its professions of being a ‘responsible’ nuclear power against it, and flattering a gullible Manmohan Singh into converting the ‘voluntary moratorium’ on nuclear testing, thoughtlessly announced by the Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, into a binding commitment to desist from testing again and to abide by the NPT norms. The other equally significant goal was to switch India from relying on the weaponisation-friendly plutonium (per the 3-stage plan drafted by Homi Bhabha in 1955 to achieve genuine energy and military security) to depending on the proliferation-resistant uranium fuelling imported reactors.Manmohan Singh has thus jeopardised the country’s strategic nuclear security — because the 1998 thermonuclear test was a dud, absence of further testing will translate into unproven, unreliable, and unsafe fusion weapons and a strategic deterrent lacking in thermonuclear credibility, and ignored the home-grown solution for energy independence, envisaged by Bhabha, based on interlocked first stage pressurised heavy water reactors, second stage breeder reactors (now in the take-off phase), and third stage thorium reactors (the prototype ‘Kamini’ 40MW experimental operating in Kalpakkam, which requires more concept, design, and engineering work and upscaling). Instead, Manmohan Singh’s purchasing 40 foreign reactors worth $150 billion (at today’s dollar value) producing 40,000 MW of electricity by 2050, will at once sustain the nuclear industries in America, France and Russia, and provide Washington the handle to keep India in line. Resumption of testing, say, will prompt immediate cut-off of uranium fuel, resulting in rapid shutdown of foreign reactors and precipitous fall of power in the grid. All this apparently makes sense to our blinkered economist-prime minister.What the United States offered India in return for Singh conceding so much, was only a promise (expressly stated in the July 18, 2005, joint statement he signed by President George W Bush) to treat India as a nuclear weapon state with all the rights and privileges. While the US has delivered little, India has gone whole-hog in implementing such self-injurious pre-conditions as separating the weapons units from civilian-use facilities, thereby destroying the integrity of the once dual-purpose nuclear energy programme, and putting the bulk of the indigenous pressurised reactors under international safeguards in perpetuity. This last, besides killing the capacity for surge weapon-grade plutonium production, has cemented India’s status as a non-nuclear weapon state. Under the NPT, weapon states are permitted to pull reactors out of the safeguards regime at will. To cover up for his government’s myopia, miscalculations, and misdoings, the PM has purveyed half-truths and outright lies regarding various aspects of the deal in Parliament and outside.For Washington nuclear trade equals selling reactors, because it is specifically barred from transferring advanced technologies relating to uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, and heavy water production that India has evinced interest in, by the enabling US law passed in December 2006, which ban was reconfirmed by the US Congressional ratification of the so-called 123 Agreement concerned with restricting transactions in nuclear materials, goods and technologies under the overarching US Atomic Energy Act. In the event, it is a bit ingenuous of the Indian government to act hurt/surprised every time the Nuclear Suppliers Group imposes new restrictions and tightens regulatory mechanisms to pre-empt India, as a non-NPT state, from accessing such technologies. Delhi believes the US government can be induced to violate its own laws — an impression created by Washington now and again hinting at attempts to try and ease the NSG rules for India. This happened early last week with news reports about the US circulating a paper in the NSG championing India’s membership in it. It is no coincidence that just then the visiting US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, Robert Blake, was urging the Indian government to sign the Convention on Supplementary Compensation limiting the liability payouts by nuclear technology suppliers to $300 million so that US companies can cash in on reactor sales. It suggests Washington manipulates its NSG initiatives as a sales stratagem. Learning from the Bhopal gas tragedy, Parliament recently voted the Civilian Nuclear Liability Act that exposed foreign firms supplying nuclear technologies which prove to be faulty, resulting in loss of life and destruction of property, to liability without ceiling.An Indian law is thus pitted against an international convention motivated by the commercial interests of supplier states. While the US holds its 2006 law as sacrosanct, the Indian government, astonishingly, thinks of the Indian liability law as a mere scrap of paper, and is preparing to get around it by signing executive agreements with suppliers to limit their liability to the CSC mandated sum, or resorting to some other diplomatic ruse. Not content with the harm the nuclear deal has already done the nation, Manmohan Singh seems determined to run what remains of sovereign nuclear India into the ground.
Bharat Karnad is a research professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. E-mail: bh_karnad@yahoo.com
Where are the Pink Chaddis?
More than a week since the rioting in Shimoga and Hubli by Islamic terrorists opposing Taslima Nasreen and not a pip squeak from the pink chaddis who ostensibly stand for women’s rights, nor from the likes of Shabana Azmi and Renuka Choudhary. Of course they loudly and aggressively go after the Ram Sene types because they know that the cost involved is nearly nil and they will be supported by Congress goons themselves. There is also a more serious issue with the Taslima Nasreen case and that’s of the freedom of press but I don’t see any heated debates about danger to the country’s values, the kind that was there when the Shree Ram Sene roughed up some women in a Mangalore pub. A case of what is good for the goose not good for the gander ehh?
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