Manmohan Singh: The technocrat who reshaped India's economic destiny

Manmohan Singh showed that technocrats can change nations' destinies as effectively as any populist

The India of today, with all its successes and imperfections, is more a product of Manmohan Singh than of anybody else in recent history. He was always called an “unlikely” politician; but, through its successes and failures, his career is a useful reminder to us today that technocrats can change nations’ destinies as effectively as any populist.  

Objectively, if Singh was an unlikely politician, one might be forgiven for thinking that he was an even more unlikely liberaliser. He had spent an entire career, after all, as an economist-bureaucrat serving the grey, ersatz socialism that was India’s official ideology prior to 1991. It was only when he was almost 60 that he began his second career in politics, and came to be identified with the reform process.  

Singh’s Budget speeches — not just the famous one from July 1991, which he concluded dramatically by paraphrasing Victor Hugo that “the emergence of India as a major economic power” was “ an idea whose time has come”, but also the one eight months later in which he defended the record of reform — still make for quite inspiring reading. He thanks Jawaharlal Nehru for “his vision and insistence that the social and economic transformation of India had to take place in the framework of an open society, committed to parliamentary democracy and the rule of law”; and adds that reform will “unshackle the human spirit of creativity, idealism, adventure and enterprise that our people possess in abundant measure”. That speech ended, famously, with Bismil’s revolutionary “sarfaroshi ki tamanna” couplet. But the lines prefacing that give us a sense of what reformists must have felt like at that point: “Tonight, I feel like going to the theatre. Let the assassins be informed, I am prepared to meet their onslaught.” 

This talk of revolution, of being beset by metaphorical assassins, is a useful reminder of the conditions under which Singh operated at the dawn of the reform age. Today we tend to assume, lazily, that pushing through reform requires a “strong” government, politically united and with a majority in Parliament. But none of these were available in 1991. 

In stewarding this transformation, he had no ideological allies in the political class. Parliamentary records from the time make this eminently clear. The left, both outside and inside the Congress, despised any hint of the profit motive; the right, both outside and inside the Congress, was deeply suspicious of global openness. The soft and aimless Centre — mainly inside the Congress, and superbly personified by P V Narasimha Rao, the Prime Minister under whom he served — cared far less for growth than it did for survival. It seemed like the grandees in Rao’s government tried to block every change from within. 

At a time when attempts to launder Rao’s reputation are a constant and tiresome background buzz in Indian discourse, it is worth remembering that the Prime Minister, far from being a committed backer of the reform programme, attempted to abandon it on several occasions when the immediate crisis had passed. He definitely chose not to discuss it during his 1996 campaign, focusing instead on the continuity that his government represented with previous Nehru-Gandhi Congress administrations and policies. Those of us who hanker after “strong” governments with easy majorities for economic reasons might do well to remember that more reform in Rao’s term happened when his government was in a minority than after he cobbled together a majority, two or so years in.   

The political class may not have been allies of the reform process in its early days, but Singh did have the solid support of many who had laboured in the trenches of India’s ersatz socialism: The would-be technocrats who had written papers and attended seminars for a decade on how India’s statist growth model had collapsed. It was thanks to these “experts” — a term that, in today’s populist times, we are told to despise — that India was able to turn on a dime in 1991. The groundwork had already been laid, the consensus had already been built; in Rao’s own words at the time: “All the… measures which were really written about in newspapers times without number. For months and months they were being discussed. Panel discussions took place. So, it is not as if the measures which we have taken just dropped from the heaven overnight, we were not even three-four days old. How could we prepare all those papers? The papers were ready.” When sitting through interminable and apparently pointless panel discussions today about issues that it appears are politically impossible anyway, I comfort myself by remembering Rao’s words, and hoping some future Prime Minister might have the opportunity to use the existence of such panel discussions as an alibi for reform. 

What technocrats like the 1991 Singh can never do, however, is create a political movement that backed up their ideas. Reform, its opponents constantly complained, was being delivered by “stealth”. Odd terminology, since legal changes published in the Gazette aren’t exactly stealthy. What they meant is that nobody in the political class went to the electorate and declared: “Give me a mandate to change the state”. They’re not wrong about that: There were no Javier Milei-like chainsaws in Indian politics, and there never have been.  

This, in the end, limited the success of Singh’s premiership. He stewarded India through the financial crisis, but was undone by the higher deficits that required, alongside QE-induced fuel price inflation. No committed bank of pro-growth voters came to his rescue. The Indian electorate, infuriated by deficit-induced inflation, turfed him out unceremoniously. His successor learned well; Narendra Modi’s single greatest economic policy priority as Prime Minister has been keeping prices under control. 

You may never be sure of what politicians believe, but you can be sure of what they’re saying. Technocrats may know what they are doing, but often, like Singh, they fail to communicate it effectively. Yet Singh’s priorities — social integration, reformed welfare that is paid for by higher growth, and the revival of Indian manufacturing, for example — should still be India’s priorities. The most important initiatives of the Modi administration, from digital payments to export-oriented manufacturing, have emerged from initiatives piloted by Singh. Too many of the Singh government’s priorities, however — free trade, for example — have fallen by the wayside. India has suffered as a result.  

In 2010, Barack Obama said of Singh’s contributions when world leaders met to sort out their common response to the 2008 crisis: When he speaks, we listen. This country greeted that statement with derision; surely Singh was a silent Prime Minister? History will probably judge, however, not that Singh spoke too rarely — but that India listened too little.  The writer is director, Centre for the Economy and Growth, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi