Good man, wrong job: 10 years of PM Manmohan Singh

As Manmohan Singh prepares to make a quiet exit from 7, Race Course Road, one cannot but feel a tinge of regret about it. A good man, a humble man, a man who had some achievements to his credit in 10 years as Prime Minister, but a man who will be remembered more for what he was not equipped to do than his successes. Your reputation is only as good as the last job you accomplished, and the tragedy of Manmohan Singh is that in his last job as PM, he was found to be seriously wanting. The high point of his career was 1991, when under Narasimha Rao he, as finance minister, opened up the economy. His low point is really his exit point – his elevation to the most powerful office in the land. He managed to reduce the Prime Minister’s authority to a caricature. The Peter Principle holds that every man rises to his level of incompetence, and the prime ministership of this country was beyond Singh’s level of competence. He is a good follower of orders, not the type to give them authoritatively. He was No 2 material, not No 1. Maybe that was why Sonia Gandhi chose him for the job, but Singh certainly should have figured it out over 10 years and quit well before his time. But he didn’t. [caption id=“attachment_1523315” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Manmohan Singh. Reuters.[/caption] One of the most important human rules of success is to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. You play to the former and try and work around the former. As PM, Manmohan Singh played to his weaknesses and worked around his strengths – exactly the reverse. This why he will be remembered more for his failures than his successes. Every success of his in fact also carried the tinge of failure. His government saw a boom in tele-density, but this was bankrolled by a spectrum allocation scam of gigantic proportions under A Raja. The country modernised its airports and even privatised two of them (Mumbai and Delhi), but airport charges are now one of the highest in the world. A policy to liberalise coal block allocations triggered another big scam – and no coal has been dug out as a result. The Indo-US nuclear deal, the high point of Singh’s career, while breaking India’s nuclear isolation, has not actually delivered on the ground. The scams put together delivered unwelcome intrusions in policy-making by the Supreme Court, leading to a prolonged policy paralysis. Manmohan Singh was a great bureaucrat - hard-working, diligent and failsafe – but that is not what prime ministers are paid to do. As economist Bibek Debroy once wrote about Manmohan Singh, he was the greatest cabinet secretary the country never had. The job of PM is not to be a file-pusher or technocrat, but to get the big political picture right, communicate with his people, provide leadership to his team of politicians and bureaucrats, and provide the nation with a vision it can buy into – among other things. As an erudite and highly intelligent man, Manmohan Singh could intellectually grasp his challenges as PM, and could also articulate his vision and ideas to small groups and in prepared speeches to controlled audiences, but he had no innate ability to connect with people. One of things that appeals to people about Narendra Modi is precisely this strength: he can talk directly to crores of people. Manmohan Singh, on the other hand, never actually connected with the people of India in the way a prime minister should. To be sure, one could easily put the ever-pouting PV Narasimha Rao as someone who had no direct people connect either, but Rao had other abilities: to manipulate the system, the party network, and the bureaucracy to get things done. He provided an indirect form of leadership which worked as long as he was in government. However, he had no ability to win an election for the Congress party. He was probably India’s first accidental PM, preceding even Manmohan Singh, having been catapulted into the job after the mid-election assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Having got the job, he made sure his rivals could not dislodge him. He bought himself room for political manoeuvre. Manmohan Singh, on the other hand, had no such strengths – either in party manipulation or direct voter appeal. Much is made of that fact that in 2009, the Congress party may have done much better in cities because of the Manmohan Singh factor. Among other things, commentators have said that the urban voter may have been impressed by Singh’s performance and his determination to get the Indo-US nuclear through. But TN Ninan, writing in Business Standard, debunks this thesis, pointing out that the evidence for this is “thin.” The Congress did poorly in Bangalore, got less votes in Hyderabad-Secunderabad than before, was not a player in Kolkata and Chennai, failed in Ahmedabad and Vadodara, and had won in Mumbai because the MNS cut into Sena-BJP votes. The only clear win was Delhi, which the Congress swept. In short, Manmohan Singh was not a politician with a people-connect, capable of winning any kind of election. Sanjaya Baru, his media advisor in UPA-1 who recently wrote a tell-all book on Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership, thought he should have contested the 2009 Lok Sabha election instead of remaining a Rajya Sabha MP. In the mild pro-UPA wave of 2009, Singh could certainly have won from Delhi or Amritsar, but the party would have none of it. Moreover, the fact is Singh was sent to the Rajya Sabha precisely because the Gandhi clan did not want him to be seen as a popularly elected leader. Actually, they need not have worried, for he was never that kind. A Lok Sabha win would merely have made him an elected MP, not a selected MP. Either way, he would have remained a selected PM, not an elected one. This is where we come across his fatal flaw: he put loyalty to the Gandhi Dynasty above loyalty to the office he came to occupy. He came to see Sonia Gandhi’s decision to make him PM as reason for eternal gratitude rather than as merely a job that came with strings attached – and needed tough negotiations between two principals, instead of principal and agent. As PM, you can’t afford to be the agent of any principal – even if that principal happened to be party president Sonia Gandhi. You have to be the principal, and have to treat her interest in influencing policy as a matter of compromise and negotiation. Instead, Manmohan Singh chose surrender – and became her agent in the office. Sanjaya Baru quotes Singh as telling him this: “I have to come to terms with this. There cannot be two centres of power. That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power.” This was the fatal flaw from which his prime ministership could never recover. Dual centres of power may create tensions in party-government relationships, but they at least give both centres a reason to negotiate their way through political priorities and governance requirements. But Singh effectively ceded control of the government to Sonia; governance ceded control to political imperatives alone. This is why he could do nothing about A Raja or Suresh Kalmadi or anyone who he saw as ales than fit for a job. This is why he could do nothing to stop the fiscal rot and the economic slide despite a fondness for saying that “money does not grow on trees.” His achievements, thus, relate to what a bureaucrat could effectively do: deliver on the political mandate alone by working out spending schemes. When UPA-1 ran into tax bounties in a booming global economy, the money was funnelled into rural areas, pushing up rural growth and agriculture, and bringing down poverty dramatically – the fastest since independence. This is Manmohan Singh’s greatest achievement: spending money based on political priorities and getting poverty down. What he could not do was prevent money from going to ignoble causes like middle-class subsidies on petroleum products – a full Rs 8,00,000 crore was wasted over 10 years, money that could have saved the country from long-term slowdown. This subsidy burnt a fiscal hole in government finances and stoked inflation and brought down growth. As an economist, Manmohan Singh would have known what damage his policies would have caused. But he did nothing. He allowed the country to go down the tubes out of a false sense of loyalty to one family.