Honest and dignified but Manmohan would hate to rate himself as PM

By Saroj Nagi

New Delhi: Manmohan Singh is not given to being expressive about his emotions. But he bared his wounded heart when he came face to face with the media this January, his third press conference in the last 10 years: “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media, or for that matter, the Opposition parties in Parliament.” He might well have added “and my own party and leaders’’ to the utterance but for obvious reasons he could not.

He did make it a point, though, to underline that notwithstanding the circumstances and compulsions of coalition politics, he did the best he could.

Inherent in his statement was a signal as clear as he could give out that his self-assessment was in complete variance with what was being projected about him in the last few years. In 2005, when he had readily handed out six out of 10 to his government; this time he had scrupulously avoided rating himself. “It’s for people to judge,’” was his stock response to such queries thereafter.

But like any leader, Singh too leaves behind him a legacy that is a mixed bag of the good and the bad. Whether the positives outweigh the negatives or vice versa can be assessed only with the passage of time and the advantage of hindsight.

Be that as it may, as he walks out of 7 Race Course Road–his home for 10 years–for the last time this week, Singh’s shoulders would be carrying not the burden of governance but of worries of what the post-retirement period would be like and how his tenure would be defined.

Reviled or Respected?

Prickly about maintaining his image as a clean and honest leader, Singh’s biggest concern would be whether the controversies that dogged him in UPA-2 would follow him to his new abode in 3 Motilal Nehru Marg—once he submits his resignation to President Pranab Mukherjee after the announcement of the election results on 16 May  –or whether he would be allowed to lead a life he wants, watching sunrises and sunsets, focusing on writing, giving lectures in India and abroad and pitching in with whatever help he can whenever the Congress party wants him to.

The big question staring at the man who was the third longest serving prime minister since Independence, is whether he will be respected or reviled, complimented or castigated, lauded or lambasted, praised or… persecuted and worse still prosecuted? Will he be hailed as another Atal Behari Vajpayee who faded into quiet retirement after losing in 2004 or be painted as another PV Narasimha Rao who had to spend his retirement days trying to wash off the stain of the demolition of the Babri Masjid or the many charges of graft?

While in power, Singh had to fight off allegations of corruption that virtually reached his doorstep, in particular the telecom and the coal block allocation scams. Indeed, demands were raised both in the Public Accounts Committee and the Joint Parliamentary Committee thereafter for the prime minister to appear before it. If the CAG report pegging a presumptive loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore in the telecom scandal damaged the party and government’s image and derailed parliamentary proceedings, then telecom minister A Raja repeated claims–the latest made last month before the CBI’s special court–that the 2G spectrum was allotted with the prime minister’s concurrence only threaten to make things worse for him once he has to give up the protective shield of being a prime minister. It would be a grim reminder of what Rao had to go through after he lost the 1996 elections and had to make a courtroom appearance in the St Kitts forgery, Lakhubhai Pathak cheating and the JMM payoff cases.

If reports are to be believed, Singh has already started consulting legal experts, not sure how the new dispensation–led presumably by BJP’s Narendra Modi who is an unknown entity in the corridors of power in Delhi–would deal with him as he has only his personal honour and his individual honesty as his armour. Indeed, even his worst critics credit the scholarly Singh with a squeaky clean image when it comes to him personally.

Conflict or cooperation?

The ten years he spent helming the government and the country have been a mixed bag for the man who opened up the economy under Rao’s stewardship in the early 1990s. That was an enduring legacy that he brought with him into South Block after Congress president Sonia Gandhi renounced the prime ministerial post in 2004 and decided to anoint him instead.

Those were heady days. The Congress had just won the elections. Sonia had revamped the party’s image and enhanced its appeal. Her own stock shot up when she renounced the PM’s post and gave South Block a respected and noted economist and its first Sikh prime minister in Manmohan Singh. The experiment of dividing the political and the governmental work between Sonia and the PM proved to a success. The outside support of the Left parties gave a moral and ideological bent to the government until is pulled the plug in 2008 over the government’s decision to sign the contentious Indo-US civil nuclear deal.

By involving civil rights activists through the National Advisory Council, Sonia allowed the government to give a pro-people and inclusive thrust to its programmes and policies which led to path-breaking legislations like that of the right to information. There was a coordination committee to maintain a channel of communication with allies and a common minimum programme to steer the government’s agenda with the focus on inclusive growth and social harmony. In time, a trimurti of Rahul, Sonia and Singh–the Congress’s very own RSS –emerged as icons of youths, the poor and the middle classes, thereby forging a social and economic coalition that allowed the Congress to leapfrog over the caste divides fomented by rivals and return to power again in 2009.

It was a run that was too good to last.

Everything that gave a positive spin to UPA-1 turned out to be an unmitigated disaster in its second edition. The diarchy developed cracks within two months of the new regime when Singh—still basking in the success of signing the nuclear deal—allowed delinking of terror from the talks with Islamabad and permitted a reference to Baluchistan in the Indo-Pak joint statement issued the meeting with Yousuf Reza Gilani at Sharm-el-Shaikh in Egypt.

The cracks only widened over the months and years as the contradiction between the dual centres of power was magnified by the duality of ideologies where Singh wanted to pursue one line and the party another, specially when it came to doing away with subsidies, bringing the food security law or amending the right to information act on bringing political parties under the ambit of the transparency law.

The emergence of Rahul as the third lever of power only compounded the problems and added to the party-government divide as evidenced from the Amethi MP’s move of publicly trashing as “complete nonsense” the ordinance that sought to shield convicted lawmakers. The prime minister, the cabinet, the allies and the core committee which had cleared the contentious ordinance, swallowed the humiliation and rolled back the decision.

Not surprisingly, the signal that went out was that if Sonia was steering the government without making a public exhibition of it to protect the sanctity of the office, Rahul was openly dictating. The PM’s authority, already at stake, stood eroded, with his cabinet colleagues and party leaders walking their own talk. Though Rahul sought to make amends for the public denunciation of the government’s decision on the ordinance, the damage had been done and could not be reversed. The leader the world community respected virtually stood isolated at home, with the BJP, in particular, dismissing him as “weak.’’ Until Singh could take it no longer and shot back :  “I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister. If by strong prime minister you mean that you preside over a massacre of innocent citizens on the streets of Ahmedabad…. I do not believe that sort of strength this country needs, least of all, in its prime minister.’’

Lest there was any doubt about who he meant, he added, “It will be disastrous for the country to have Shri Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister.’’ It is ironical that Modi emerged and grew on the national firmament because he wasn’t seen to have a grip on the situation.

But the impression that there were three people running the government is bound to raise questions whether Singh would have been a great prime minister but for their interference, with statements of Congress leaders wanting to see Rahul in South Bloc publicly dubbing the experiment of diarchy as a failure. Indeed, Singh’s legacy cannot be appraised without assessing the roles that Sonia and Rahul played in the two editions of the UPA.

What would also gnaw at Singh’s legacy are the very factors that stand to oust the Congress from power: rising prices, continuing inflation, unchecked corruption, economic slowdown and a paralysis in decision making, that virtually turned UPA-2 into a lameduck government till in a last burst of energy it came out with a couple of key legislations including the food security law.

Even more dangerously, it contributed to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in virtually every section of society, including the corporates who turned their back on it and the middle classes and the youths who switched their loyalty to the BJP.

Party leaders and workers have openly blamed the government for its failure to package its achievements, manage prices and corruption or sense the brewing anger among the people as contributing factors to the Congress’s declining fortunes. Notwithstanding the fulsome praise showered on him as he gets ready to step down, the attack is expected to increase in the coming days as loyalists throw a protective ring around Rahul who had led the election campaign.

Positive or Negative?

Indeed, Singh’s is a story of a negativity accompanying every positive element he personally brought to the table in government. He was personally squeaky clean–even his worst critics would say that–but turned a blind eye to the rampant corruption taking place under his eyes within his own government, including the scams relating to Adarsh cooperative housing, 2G, coal block allocations and purchase of helicopters and Tetra trucks.

He was a professional economist, who was often sought out by world leaders for his views on economic and other issues, but he could not do anything to check prices, control inflation or lift the economy or the growing gloom among the people over jobless growth in the best of circumstances and slowing growth when things got tougher.

He could connect with world leaders and establish a rapport with them but he could not connect with the general mass of people so much so that the common man of the party’s slogan “Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath” was bent double with the weight of price rise and corruption was pushed to the margins.

He showed determination in refusing to bow down to the Left when the communists opposed the Indo-US civil nuclear deal and decided to pull the plug from his government but meekly swallowed the insult Rahul meted out to him by publicly rubbishing the ordinance on convicted lawmakers. He held out the threat of stepping down several times but held back his hand on this one occasion which observers believe perhaps merited it perhaps because he may have thought that it would embarrass and hurt the party and the country more if he did so.

He was loyal to the Congress in general and Sonia in particular but could not elicit the same response from those who worked closely with him. In the last few weeks, books have come out that talk about the dark shadow that fell over his government. His former media advisor Sanjaya Baru’s ended up riling him and his family with his book `The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh’. Ex coal secretary PC Parakh maintained in ‘Crusader or Conspirator? Coalgate and other Truths’ that the coal scandal could have been avoided. Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission which is chaired by the Prime Minister, like Baru asserted in his book `Redesigning the Aeroplane While Flying: Reforming Institutions’ that Sonia called the shots on all important appointments and policies of the government.

But if there was one dream that Singh dreamt for himself it was to carve out a name for himself as a leader who established peace in the region and normalized relations with Pakistan. A few years back he had even talked of a situation that allowed a person to have breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. The deterioration in Indo-Pak relations after the 26/11 terror strike in Mumbai put paid to that dream.