Manmohan Singh: A gentle colossus

Manmohan Singh's reputation as soft-spoken bureaucrat far removed from the hurly-burly of politics actually served him well during those turbulent times.

By Ashis Ray

A billion words would have appeared on media worldwide about Manmohan Singh since his passing. What can one supplement to it that wouldn’t be repetitive?

‘My father was born (in his maternal grandparents’ home in a village called Gah, now in Pakistan) in the autumn of 1932, no one really knows exactly when,’ Singh’s daughter Daman wrote in a biography of her parents, Strictly Personal: Manmohan Gursharan. Tragically, his mother Amrit Kaur died of typhoid when he was still a child. Thus, he returned to Gah to be brought up there.

When Kiki, another daughter, asked Singh if he wished to go back to see Gah, he replied, ‘No, not really. That is where my grandfather was killed (in communal riots at the time of partition).’ He bore the grief with characteristic silence, never publicly expressing hatred of the killers. It was an inherent Gandhian trait. He told Daman he was quite devastated when the Mahatma was assassinated. ‘I certainly felt very sad when Gandhiji was killed. I felt a personal loss,’ he said.

In 1955, he was admitted to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he secured a first in taking a Tripos in economics and won the Adam Smith prize with an essay on international investment and economic development. As an economist, he saw himself as a Keynesian, but with a deep admiration for the monetarist Dennis Robertson. One of his professors, the eminent Joan Robinson, said of him: ‘I do not think you are likely to find anyone better in this generation of undergraduates.’

In 1960, now married to Gursharan Kaur, he returned to England, this time to Nuffield College, Oxford for a PhD on India’s Export Trends and the Prospects for Self-sustained Growth. He, then, accepted a position at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in New York. And thereafter, served as secretary-general of the South Commission in Geneva.

Heralding a new era

Confabulations with his party colleagues convinced P V Nararasimha Rao – as he prepared to become prime minister in the summer of 1991 - that he needed a specialist as finance minister to overcome the unprecedented balance of payment crisis he was about to inherit. He selected Singh, a brilliant economist and reputedly a man of irreproachable integrity.

Singh later told Daman that Rao wanted ‘that we should undertake liberalisation, but also take care of the marginalized sections, the poor’. But she recalled in the book on her parents: ‘He (Manmohan) was accused of being a traitor to the nation and selling out the country, being the IMF’s lackey and the World Bank’s dog. Singh, on the other hand, underlined, ‘I think people were convinced that a great experiment for change was underway … At that time I also felt a sense of national mission.’

His prescription, landmark economic reforms, forthwith disarmed market-oriented countries from East to West; nations who had been hostile and unhelpful to India for the greater part of the Cold War.

It surprised many that Singh embraced monetarism. A glimpse of his thinking, though, can be found in his PhD thesis, which is, in fact, a critique of India’s inward-oriented trade policies.

An Indian PM with a deep understanding of global issues

Later, the world marvelled at Singh as prime minister achieving high GDP growth – unparalleled in independent India’s history – and his ability to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. There was even talk among authoritative western analysts about India going past China as an economic power sooner than projected.

In 2008-2009, the world was gripped by a crippling financial crisis. At a dinner at Downing Street the night before the London G20 summit in April 2009, world leaders implored Singh to speak. His thoughts expressed therein and at the conference itself were dutifully incorporated in the communique. Numerous countries acted on his recommendations and obtained positive results.

A year later, at the following G20 meet in Toronto, United States President Barack Obama stated, ‘The extraordinary leadership Prime Minister Singh has provided not just to India, but to the world, has helped us navigate through some very difficult times. And I can tell you that here at the G20 when Prime Minister speaks, people listen, particularly because of his deep knowledge of economic issues.’ No Indian prime minister, other than Jawaharlal Nehru, has been appreciated abroad with such awe and admiration.

Singh’s student and professional years abroad rendered him an exposure to international affairs, which he imbibed with typical taciturnity, but with a studied absorption. Consequently, his understanding of external affairs was possibly second only to his expertise on economics.

Overseeing India’s strategic pivot

He succeeded in maintaining a lid over troublesome China. Even the villain of Kargil, General Pervez Musharraf, melted to the extent of Pakistan under him abandoning its historically hard-line position on Kashmir and proposing a peace. As Singh's special envoy on the matter, Ambassador Satinder Lambah recorded, a draft agreement ‘had been approved and was ready for signature’.

To cap it all, he terminated the world’s treatment of India as a pariah in the realm of nuclear cooperation with a path-breaking agreement with US President George Bush in 2008. This not merely paved the way for international recognition of India as a nuclear power; but removed control over exports to India by the 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, even overcoming initial Chinese objection.

Quoting Victor Hugo in presenting his game-changing proposals in parliament in July 1991, he said, ‘No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ He then drove home, 'I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.’

In terms of economic development, he was indisputably India’s greatest prime minister.

(Ashis Ray is the longest serving Indian foreign correspondent, having worked in this capacity for 47 years, mainly for BBC and CNN. Lately an academic visitor at Oxford, he is the author of a thesis on Indian history – ‘The Trial that Shook Britain’.)

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.