The passing of the technocrat age

Manmohan Singh, who retired from the Rajya Sabha this week, may be the most successful technocrat in history. Few have been granted, on the basis of their expertise, positions of leadership that are in any way comparable in status and influence to the ones that Dr Singh occupied over his long career. His retirement serves thus as a reminder that the age of technocrats and theorists is over. It has been replaced by the age of populists and project managers.

The 1990s and 2000s were a golden age for technocrats globally. Government — and not just in India — was, depending upon your point of view, either depoliticised or too highly politicised. On the one hand, there was a broad consensus about the economic and social welfare policies that should be followed for growth, development, and uplift. This meant depoliticisation to the extent that sharp policy differences were no longer the stuff of party politics.

On the other hand, the growth of identity-based mobilisation meant that the composition of government became ever more politically fraught. In some parts of the world, this led to turbulent internal party politics. In India, this was expressed through coalition machinations. The question of who obtained what within the administrative sphere became the main object of politics. Thus, from that point of view, government was more politicised.

Both these apparently contradictory trends in fact allowed a special place for technocrats. The depoliticisation of policy choices meant that policy discourse devolved to questions of how efficiently the consensus could be applied and implemented. Technocrats offered the promise of getting the hard work of policymaking out of the way, allowing the politicians to focus on identity struggles. Meanwhile, the existence of those identity struggles meant that technocrats served another useful purpose: They could occupy certain roles and positions of “national” importance, marking those posts as off-limits for political contestation.

Dr Singh was, to an extent, a beneficiary of both these trends. He was not the first choice for finance minister during the crisis of 1991 — that was probably I G Patel — but there seems to be little doubt, in retrospect, that when faced with a crisis of that magnitude the Union finance minister appointed would be an economist. Further, there was general agreement on what needed to be done. In the then Prime Minister’s words: “All the other [1991 reform] measures were really written about in newspapers times without number. For months and months they were being discussed… The papers were ready [when we took office].” What was needed was a technocrat who understood the purpose of reform and how it could be carried out, and Dr Singh fit the bill.

When he was appointed Prime Minister in 2004, the other side of the coalition age was in evidence. By choosing a loyal technocrat, the Congress president made it clear that the post of Prime Minister in the United Progressive Alliance government was not a prize for political contestation, but a position that required expertise. This reduced the scope of politicking considerably, especially as compared to the chaos of the 1990s, when everyone thought they could be PM.

This sounds like ancient history now, whether in India or elsewhere. Across the world, charmers or populists have ousted boring technocrats, beginning with dour Third Way architect Gordon Brown losing to a [then] charming and inexperienced David Cameron in 2010. And the supposed expertise that technocrats, with their grasp of policy, would bring has been replaced at the highest level with the PowerPoints and bullet points of project managers who prize policy implementation over formulation. The lateral entrants into the council of ministers in this government are more likely to be bureaucrats than economists.

History has tides, however. The populist 1930s and 1940s were replaced, after a crisis, with the technocratic 1950s and 1960s, run by the “best and the brightest” in JFK’s White House, the welfarist “Butskellism” bipartisan consensus in the United Kingdom, and the post-Mahalanobis planning bureaucracy in India. This was the period, in fact, in which Dr Singh was trained, and he seemed to retain, in spite of his famous humility, some of the intellectual arrogance that characterised policy economists of that era.

When the wheel turns, populists will be out and technocrats will be back in fashion once again. Let’s hope it doesn’t take yet another crisis for that to happen.