Manmohan: Abiding economic legacy that touched lives across India
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Somewhere near the plains around the village of Gah in north-west Punjab, where former Prime Minister and economist-politician Dr Manmohan Singh was born in 1932, the armies of Alexander of Macedonia and King Pourava (Porus) had clashed about 300 years before the birth of Christ.
Legend is thus seeped even into the mud floor that was the birthplace of the 'gentleman-PM' who passed into the tapestry of subcontinental history on Thursday night.
Generations to come will undoubtedly record his epoch-making contributions to contemporary India, comparable in its sweep to the Greek emperor’s arrival into ancient India and the resultant Indo-Greek commingling. Two thousand years later, Dr Singh unleashed economic forces that enabled crores of Indians to climb out of poverty and reach standards of living unimaginable to most Indians.
Gah, the back-of-the-beyond hamlet was barren under British occupation, there was nominal agricultural activity around, and the villagers were impoverished colonial subjects, condemned to a life on the margins of any chronicle of its time.
Young Manmohan was also not fortunate. He lost his mother early. No different was his household from its neighbourhood.
“I spent the first ten years of my life in a village that had no electricity, no drinking water supply, no doctor, no roads and no phones. I had to walk many miles to a school. I had to study at night in the dim light of a kerosene lamp,” he was to recall often when he later reigned as India’s first non-Hindu Prime Minister from 2004 to 2014. He was by then the main protagonist of the country’s economic metamorphosis.
Up until 1947, Singh’s family lived in Gah, Jhelum district, when one of the largest and most traumatic migrations caused by a bloody partition of land belonging to people of the same stock, made it trudge all the way to Delhi like millions of others, who moved to and fro.
“Lion” is the meaning of the surname 'Singh' of those of his clan, derived from Sanskrit. They are born fighters. But in that sweep of displacement, nobody was lion enough — the wolves and the foxes ruled the roost in that tragic transmigration.
But, years later, the valour and the fortitude of his faith, as laid down by the brave Tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, was in full and fascinating display when Dr Manmohan Singh was called upon by one of the most astute Prime Ministers India had, the polymath-politico and Congress stalwart P V Narasimha Rao to help salvage a national economy which was on the brink of a breakdown.
The economic reforms of 1991, sculpted by Dr Manmohan Singh with the strong political backing of the ingenious Rao, are still a story in progression. The last word on its enduring effect is yet to be written as all subsequent governments have built on the gains of that new calculus of Indian economic strategy. Even as India marches towards the centenary of its freedom, the process set in motion by him continues.
In the field of economics, his was a name to be reckoned with even before Rao thought of Dr Singh as the Finance Minister. He had stints at UNCTAD (1966-69), Chief Economic Advisor to the Government in 1972, Governor of the RBI (1982-85) and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission (1987). At age 30, he also earned a doctorate from Oxford, writing on India’s export performance, prospects and policy implications.
This thesis was to shape his outlook towards global integration and its benefits another 30 years later. Dr Manmohan Singh’s much-vaunted reforms of 1991 have pushed India into the big league of economic powers.
For people who used to view a landline connection as opulence, travel by air as merely a dream, and rationed food as the norm, the new India that he unveiled was appealing. They saw reforms yielding results. Indian “animal spirits” unleashed from the licence-quota-permit raj —against which the likes of Rajaji and Minoo Masani had riled against — ignited growth of a level never before seen in Independent India. It may be no coincidence, too, that the period of one of the highest growth phases of post-reform India was during his term as PM.
The benefits of the mobile phone revolution, the enabling of cheap air travel, the infra buildup using private capital and other changes were felt even by ordinary people. He included the bottom of the pyramid, too, in the development journey. Dr Singh brought in at least three major Rights Acts. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme of 2008, the Right to Education Act of 2009 and the Food Security Act of 2013 were impactful in empowering the powerless.
Of the arc of Dr Singh’s economic philosophy, these were core principles. For those interested in understanding Dr Singh’s mind, there is no better document than his classic budget speech of July 24, 1991, which is, in fact, his opus on economic planning for development.
In that speech, the plaintive voice of Dr Singh intoned: “We must restore the creation of wealth to its proper place in the development process. Without it, we cannot remove the stigma of abject poverty, ignorance and disease. But we cannot accept social misery and inequity as unavoidable in the process of the creation of wealth. The basic challenge of our times is to ensure that wealth creation is not only tempered by equity and justice but is harnessed to the goal of removal of poverty and development for all”.
Not for nothing did the most erudite Western leader of our times, former President Barack Obama, in his memoir “A Promised Land” comment thus: “Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of US intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency”.
On the post-World War global stage, no Reaganomics, not Thatcherism, or Abenomics succeeded as much as Manmohanomics. While Dr Singh’s grasp of economics was marvellous,s there may be valid criticism that his yen for politics lacked depth. In his second term, he had to contend with political developments which tested the good “Doctor Sahib’s” instinct for raw, in-your-face politics. Cabinet colleagues faced charges of corruption, which dented his Government’s image.
But it has to be acknowledged that beyond this carping and cavilling, there is much he did outside even his native sphere of economics — the Indo-US deal on nuclear cooperation, for instance, where he risked even the disaffection of a rumpy but influential Left.
Indeed, when the objective story of our times is written, the chapter on the legacy of Dr Manmohan Singh will be more abiding and memorable than most people may like to acknowledge now. He was not loud, the least about him and his work. Therefore, film and fiction about his life will just remain accidental footnotes to a unique gentleman-scholar-statesman’s life. Perhaps, he was not as wise in choosing his staff and colleagues as he was in policy options for the nation.
(S Adikesavan is an independent commentator on economics, finance and banking)