Manmohan Singh: A personal memoir

He had a humble manner that came naturally, but I have long suspected that in his own estimation, he stood taller than those around him - with good reason, writes T N Ninan

I first met Manmohan Singh in 1981. As a reporter for Business Standard in Delhi, I had accompanied my bureau chief to meet the member-secretary of the Planning Commission. They were old friends, and as we sat on the sofa in the expansive office, my boss noticed that the leather upper of Dr Singh’s well-polished shoe had a tear at the crease. Why don’t you get new shoes, my bureau chief asked in friendly banter. Dr Singh’s response was that with the savings from his last UN assignment, he had built a house for himself. Now he needed to save for getting his daughters married.

 

 

Shortly afterwards, I visited another member of the Commission at his home. The distinguished scientist apologised for not being able to offer me a cup of tea. Sugar has become so expensive, he explained.

 

Such were the times, when people even at the apex of the government lived modest lives on modest salaries in an economy known globally for poverty and domestically for shortages and controls of every kind. And such was the economy that Dr Singh released from controls in 1991. Producers now chase consumers, as they should.

 

In truth, Dr Singh got more than his fair share of credit for what was done in 1991. As he himself once said in an interview, it was a team effort, and everyone, from the mostly unsung PV Narasimha Rao to his principal secretary AN Verma, and others in the industry and commerce ministries played their roles — including Yashwant Sinha, who, as finance minister under Chandra Shekhar, did the fire-fighting to stave off bankruptcy until the Rao government was sworn in. But there can be little doubt that the critical event signalling a new era for India was Dr Singh’s 1991 Budget in which he quoted Victor Hugo to say that no power on earth could stop an idea whose time has come, and ended with the ringing words: “Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now awake. We shall prevail, we shall overcome.”

 

As though to balance things out, Dr Singh got more criticism than he perhaps deserved for some of the things that happened under his prime ministership. He had been dealt a very difficult hand: A rickety coalition government in which every coalition partner did what it wanted, a government hamstrung by the need for support from obstructive Communists, a Cabinet in which many ministers owed their loyalty to Sonia Gandhi, not to the prime minister, and Mrs Gandhi herself who kept some of the reins in her hand and created a dyarchy. Dr Singh was in office, but not really in power or in full control.

 

And yet, he failed to provide the leadership that was his role. While he philosophised that politics is the art of the possible, he did not assert himself and expand the range of possibilities — as I made bold to tell him during a frank but friendly personal interaction. His response was that he had no political ambitions. It was an odd thing for a prime minister to say. And to give Mrs Gandhi her due, she was the originator of many of the Singh government’s big initiatives, like the right to information, the rural employment guarantee programme, and the right to food. Dr Singh himself seemed to have run out of ideas of his own, except for the cancelling of farmer debt.

 

In the end, what remains with you are his personal qualities. The transparent integrity and sense of public purpose, the decency and courtesy that marked every meeting, the depth of understanding and wisdom that he displayed in every encounter, the occasional chuckle that showed his ability to laugh even in trying times. What remains also is the obvious regard in which he was held by leaders of stature such as Lee Kuan Yew.

 

And he could say a lot with a few words. Back in 1996, when I mentioned that the Rao government would not be highlighting economic reforms in its election manifesto, he paused for a moment before asking: What else is there to talk about?

 

Commentators have referred to Dr Singh’s humility. Yes, he had a humble manner that came naturally, but I have long suspected that in his own estimation, he stood taller than those around him — with good reason. If it was so, he had the good sense to keep this self-assessment well hidden. In fact, he was a shrewd player of other people’s vanities, disarming them with effusive praise — as I saw more than once. This came out wrong in the over-the-top statement that he made to George W Bush at a lunch in Delhi’s Taj Palace hotel, when he told the visiting US president that all of India loved him, or words to that effect.

 

He did the same with Michel Camdessus, the IMF managing director who had sanctioned the life-saving loan in 1991. Later, at a dinner in Delhi, when Camdessus had come visiting, Dr Singh was typically effusive in praise, referring to his guest (if memory serves me right) as “Sir”. Perhaps this was just Indian mannerism. But, sitting there, I felt that no finance minister of India should be addressing an IMF executive in that manner.

 

When faced with criticism, he was all grace, never referring to it in personal meetings or during interviews. When releasing the first book published by this newspaper’s short-lived books division, he said that he understood the criticism for what his government failed to do, but added that the paper should at least give credit to the government for what it did achieve. It was a fair point.

 

The criticism worth recalling was by Ashok V Desai, a contemporary and friend of Dr Singh’s at Cambridge. As a sharp and indeed acerbic columnist at Business Standard, Dr Desai wrote in 1995 or thereabouts that Dr Singh was personally honest but tolerated corrupt people around him. Dr Singh called me to protest, asking how he could defend himself against such criticism. I told him that the author was his friend and I would get Dr Desai to speak to him. Many years passed before Dr Desai told me that Dr Singh had finally forgiven him. But the fact is that Dr Desai had put his finger on the spot.

 

Still, the free air that we breathed found reflection in how people spoke at an event in Vigyan Bhavan for releasing a festschrift in Dr Singh’s honour, co-edited by Isher Judge Ahluwalia and Dr Singh’s tutor at Oxford, Ian Little. Dr Ahluwalia had asked me to be one of the speakers at the event, and while I said what I wanted to say, I leavened my critical comments with humour. Not so Raghuram Rajan, then advisor to the prime minister while still teaching at Chicago, who delivered some pretty heavy-duty criticism. I can think of no other government under which an event to honour the prime minister would see speakers criticising his government to his face and then joining him at dinner! Such was the freedom of the times.

 

It has been my good fortune as a journalist to have been able to interact with Dr Singh as often as I did over 35 years, enjoying his warmth and courtesy, leaving every meeting with fresh awareness of his wisdom and, for all the criticism that I directed at him and his government, having always the greatest respect for a truly great son of India. His passing has been for me a more saddening event than that of any other public figure. 

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TN Ninan is former Editor and Chairman, Business Standard