#ThankYouDrManMohanSingh: India is being unfair to you

As Dr. Manmohan Singh comes to the end of his tenure as a prime minister, and, perhaps, as a politician, the headlines are about his inept handling of UPA 2.

Dr. Singh, say the headlines, presided over a corrupt cabinet and was part of the corrupt Congress party, with the mud of Coalgate and the 2G scam, to name a few, sticking to him.

He is also credited, if that is the word, with the fall of the rupee in the past few years, with the falling GDP, with rising inflation, with high interest rates, with the hesitant investment climate, with fall in manufacturing, with policy paralysis.

It’s a litany of failure, it seems.

If all these errors of omission and commission are his, then we must credit him (and this time it is the right word) for all the positives we have seen, and been beneficiaries of, in the 1992-2014 period when he was either prime minister or finance minister or both, except for the 5 years of BJP rule that interrupted this over two-decade chunk in India’s history.

So I thank him for freeing us from the tyranny of being forced to watch only the state-owned and controlled TV stations and allowing us the pleasure, the freedom and the luxury to choose from over 700 satellite channels – even for those satellite channels brought the stories of corruption into our drawing rooms.

So I thank him for allowing private FM stations free rein (except for news and current affairs) and creating a revenue model that allows private stations to survive.

So I thank him for creating an environment which brought Pepsi into the country, brought Coke back, and turned Indian metro high streets and malls into world-class shopping centres with world-leading brands. So I thank him for revolutionizing telephony in the country, with Indians enjoying virtually the lowest costs in the world, and consequently empowering and connecting hundreds of millions of Indians.

So I thank him for his role in boosting the IT industry, employing millions and earning billions in much needed foreign exchange.

So I thank him for the courage to change forex rules for both individuals and industry, allowing all of us the ability to travel for vacations, for work, for migration carrying legal foreign exchange.

So I thank him for world-class airports and for a competitive environment which keeps airfares in relative check.

So I thank him for letting India learn that there are cars beyond the Ambassador, the Premier Padmini, the Standard Rover and the Maruti, turning the auto market into an embarrassment of riches for the consumer.

So I thank him for the expressways, the highways, the metros, the flyovers and the bridges that have been built in the last 22 years.

So I thank him for largely insulating India from the effect of the Lehman Brothers collapse while economies across the world teetered and collapsed.

So I thank him for a superb, ever-growing banking industry, for the ATMs that we see at every street corner, for the ability conduct banking transactions on the Internet.

So I thank him for his contribution to the Rural Health Mission, the Unique Identification Authority, the Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and the Right to Information Act and for the historic civil nuclear agreement with the United States.

So I thank him for allowing 18 year old Indians a vote.

If it seems over-generous to credit Dr. Singh with all these advancements and developments, think back to 1992 and compare what India was in comparison with the western and developed nations then.

And do the same today.

Finally, I thank him most for maintaining the dignity of the office of the Prime Minister of India; I thank him for being soft-spoken and gentle, I thank him for never speaking ill of his colleagues and his political opponents.

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” Mark Antony said of Julius Caesar. Dr. Singh deserves a Mark Antony; so many Indians, sadly, are happy to play Marcus Junius Brutus.