From Business World of 19 May 2004. I was his advisor when Manmohan Singh did reforms in the early 1990s; though he eased me out once the crisis was over, I continued to think highly of him.
The importance
of being Manmohan
The stock market
was in a panic last Friday; the prospect of red-toothed communists entering the
central government put the fear of Marx in it. At that point, the Congress
exposed Manmohan Singh to the cameras. "Investors can rest assured that the new
government will pursue policies to create a favourable climate for growth in
savings and investment, leading to rapid growth in output," he said,
"We are not pursuing privatisation as an ideology...we are not against
divestment per se, if it is shown to be in the national interest. We are open
to all options…The new government recognises the role of a healthy stock
market. The investor community can rest assured that the new government would
not pursue any policy that will create fundamental difficulties for growth in
savings and investment."
Why Manmohan Singh? Because he
was the only leader in the putative coalition who would carry authority and
whom industrialists would trust. He was senior enough to ensure that his word
would carry weight. And he has the reputation of not misleading people. The Congress has official spokesmen. But they
could not have carried conviction that the Congress would be bound by their
word. Even he cannot speak authoritatively on everything. You can see this in
his statement, “"The rise in oil prices has repercussions on the balance
of payments, internal price structure and profitability of oil firms." He
was answering the questions: will you let government oil companies set prices, ir will you force them to cross-subsidize LNG and kerosene as Ram Naik did? If
oil prices continue to rise, will you make the oil companies give bigger and
bigger subsidies? And his answer was, I will not tell you, except to say that
oil pricing is a question of government policy because it affects payments,
prices and the health of oil firms, and cannot be left only to oil companies.
And
it was not only his seniority that gave him such credibility; it was also his
trustworthiness. For he does not knowingly tell a lie, and he does not
knowingly mislead. Politicians are not all liars; but most of them will
prevaricate. There are too many uncertainties in their lives – the will of
their leader, the politics within their party, the pull of self-interest – so they
often give meaningless answers. One only has to listen to the party spokesmen
to see this at work. Shuffle is not all they do; they also brag, praise and
vituperate. But to a simple question, “What will you do when you come to
power?”, they will be hard put to give a simple answer. And if you speak
without meaning anything day after day, you also begin to think without
meaning. An excellent exemplar is L K Advani. He often makes sharp observations
about political formations; but otherwise, I dare you to listen to him and then
say, “That is interesting, or illuminating, it tells me something.”
Manmohan Singh’s trustworthiness makes him
very valuable in politics. Politicians implicitly believe that if they give him
a message, he will deliver it accurately and without putting a spin to it. They
believe that he would give them honest and competent advice irrespective of
which side he is on.
This quality makes him a useful hub in
any network. Parties can be networks, though Indian parties are usually hierarchical
and develop a durbar-like pattern – a king or queen in the center and courtiers
around who shuffle and intrigue. But whatever the structure of parties, a
coalition has to be a network, for it will consist of parties whose heads would
consider themselves equals. They may have the communication skills to get
together and sort things out amongst themselves. But many of them have not; and
then you need people who would mediate between them.
These qualities – authority, discretion,
trustworthiness – have been crucial in the past eight years that the Congress
has spent in the wilderness. Eight years ago, when Manmohan Singh stepped down
from the finance ministry, he was a man of distinction to the outside world,
but in the Congress he was still a rookie. He had been catapulted in politics
because he was the only one Narasimha Rao could find that would command
international confidence in the payments crisis of 1991. But till then he had
been a civil servant; he had joined the ranks of Congressmen who had been
ministers and whom he had served in various capacities. He stepped off the
stage and became a backbencher in 1996. But slowly, in a moribund party, his
loyalty, his diligence, his readiness to step in, his reasonableness, moved him
from the periphery to the center, and from being a prop to a principal
character.
Still, it surprised many, and upset some, when
Sonia Gandhi proposed him for Prime Ministership. Politics is an intensely
competitive game; it attracts extrovert people who like grandstanding,
manoeuvring, expressing themselves. For them, it seems against the rules that
this quiet man who almost refuses to play the game, should suddenly beat them
to it. In him they see a frailty, imagine an innocence, they look for a chink in his
armour. But he has surprised them once, and he will do so again. He is no babe
in the wood. He has seen politicians at their best and their worst; he may not
deploy all the weapons they would, but he has lived and dealt with them for
three decades. There is nothing they can teach him. And there are a few things
he will teach them.
So I think that Manmohan Singh’s day has come.
At last he gets an opportunity to serve the nation in the highest capacity.
When he was finance minister, he used to say, “In all the brilliant ideas you
give me, there should be something that would help the poor, something that
would make the common people better off.” Now he has the chance to do that
something. Whatever he does, I hope he will be with us for a long time. For he
is a patriot, and in our political structure there is no one like him.
