Diagnosing Doctor: PM is a wounded reformer

So what to make of the PM now, never mind the face he was gamely wearing, when he backed off from the policy he said he wouldn8217;t back off from?

So what to make of Manmohan Singh now, never mind the face he was gamely wearing, when he backed off from the one policy he had said he wouldn8217;t back off from?

To get things in perspective let us, like our columnist today, look back at the P V Narasimha Rao era.

Rao may have postponed Pokharan II but he didn8217;t lose nerve on economic reforms despite the huge row it created domestically. There was a good reason for it.

A supremely clever politician, Rao could have as easily donned the mantle of being reformist or non-reformist, depending on how things worked out. The really smart thing he did was to pick an internationally credible reformist whose lack of hands-on experience in mass politics meant economic policy success could be shared but failure could be kept at a discreet distance from the prime minister8217;s office.

In contrast, Dr Singh as PM was the government face of a big policy change, the nuclear deal. He isn8217;t probably the kind of man who wants to keep a tactical distance from a policy he is intellectually committed to. Even if he had wanted, he didn8217;t have much choice.

His first foreign minister proved to be a liability. By the time he got a seasoned colleague as a replacement, the deal was already identified as Dr Singh8217;s. May be the fact that coalitional compulsions had snuffed out economic policy transformation added to the nuclear deal8217;s importance for the PM.

That is perfectly understandable. But it can also be a perfect route to political trouble in case your colleagues and/or your party want to change tack. Dr Singh needed the Congress to not blink. But the Congress did. And for Dr Singh, there8217;s no one to pass the failure to, as Rao could have if reforms didn8217;t succeed.

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That Sonia Gandhi always supported Dr Singh on the deal is in the final analysis not very relevant 8212; she baulked in the end and the PM baulked with her.

Mrs Gandhi, and almost everyone else, can point to politics as an excuse/explanation. Dr Singh can8217;t 8212; policy, not politics, is his calling card in public life. So he is today a wounded reformer, probably with not enough time or opportunity left for those wounds to heal.

Someone else, as our columnist says, will claim the credit for getting the nuclear deal through. Someone else will restart economic reforms. Someone else will take policy out of the vice-like grip of a political group that is nearly irrelevant everywhere in India bar two states.

In India8217;s history, Dr Singh as finance minister will most likely figure much larger than Dr Singh as Prime Minister.