The PM who served seven PMs

Ever since she took over as party president in May 1998, Singh has been her most trusted advisor and pointsman — not just on questions of economic policy but also in dealing (as opposed to deal-making) with politicians across the spectrum.

Be it drafting party documents or hammering out difficult alliances, Singh, in his quiet way, was always on call. Unlike other members of Sonia’s shifting inner circle, Singh was never regarded as a member of a ‘‘coterie’’. As one senior Congressman who worked with him in the P.V. Narasimha Rao years pointed out, ‘‘The word ‘coterie’ refers to people who have no talent of their own but derive power by hanging around the leader. Men and women of eminence can never be courtiers.’’

Singh easily falls in this latter category, enjoying the two qualities bosses seek in a deputy — ability to deliver and absolute loyalty.

But loyalty to Sonia is not the sole reason Singh made it to the top post. Long before Sonia was charmed by his clean image and sincerity, Singh had learnt to secure the trust and affection of his teachers and political masters. His humililty, which conceals strongly held convictions and a pragmatic bent of mind, stems from his humble background.

Born in village Gah of Jhelum district on September 26, 1932, Singh lost his monther when he was just five months old and was brought up by his paternal grandmother. He studied in the village primary school and joined his father in Peshawar when he reached class VI.

Soon after his matriculation exam in March 1947, the Partition riots broke out. His grandfather was killed but his grandmother and he managed to escape to India. He had to sit for the exams again — from a private school in Delhi’s Chawri Bazar — and got a high first class and a university scholarship.

He started a pre-medicine course at Khalsa College, Amritsar, but his father had little money and asked him to join a commission agent’s firm. He hated it and soon went back to studies — preferring maths and economics to medicine.

ALTHOUGH he came up the hard way, Singh does not have the usual arrogance of a ‘‘self-made man’’. In an interview to this reporter soon after he became finance minister in 1991, he recalled how much his teachers had helped him. M.R. Jain and S.K. Kalia taught him economics at Hindu College in Amritsar; S.B. Rangnekar at Panjab University, Chandigarh, ‘‘convinced me not to sit for the civil service exams and go to Cambridge to do an Economics tripos instead’’; Joan Robinson, R.F. Kahn and Nicolas Kaldor at Cambridge, of whom Kaldor ‘‘influenced me the most’’.

His experience with government — with politicians more than bureaucrats — was equally rewarding. When he was still a student at Cambridge, Kaldor wrote to his friend and then finance minister T.T. Krishnamachari, ‘‘TTK’’, as he was known: ‘‘I have a student … ideally suited for the treasury.’’

On his return to India in 1957, TTK offered him the post of senior research officer in the Finance Ministry with a starting salary of Rs 600. But Panjab University vice-chancellor A.C. Joshi, who had funded his scholarship, held him to his bond. ‘‘He said,’’ Singh recalled, ‘‘this is just not on, this is a breach of trust and you must pay back all the money we spent on you with interest.’’ Singh didn’t have the money and so stayed back to serve the university for three years.

But he was destined to join government. After completing a D.Phil from Nuffield College, Oxford, a spell with UNCTAD in New York, and a teaching stint at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), he accepted the post of economic advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Trade in Indira Gandhi’s government in 1971.

He had problems with senior officials and decided to quit and take an offer to head DSE. But Indira’s prinicipal secretary P.N. Haksar put his foot down and made him chief economic advisor to the Finance Ministry. In 1976, overruling objections from senior IAS officers, Indira appointed him secretary, economic affairs — a post he held through the Janata years.

YET again, civil servants tried to get rid of him — pointing to his services to the government during the Emergency — but both Moraraji Desai and finance minister H.M. Patel stood by him. He had no problems with Charan Singh either.

When Indira Gandhi returned in 1980, she wanted him to take over as Planning Commission deputy chairman. He told her he couldn’t because he was just 48, had neither inherited or married into money, didn’t have savings, and the Rs 2,500 per month salary (for the cabinet-rank post) was too little to live on. Bureaucrats earned a lot more.

Indira Gandhi solved the problem soon enough. She made him member secretary of the Planning Commission so that he could do all the work in formulating the Sixth Plan but didn’t have to retire from the civil service.

The babus objected once again. Indira silenced them with the riposte: ‘‘Is it written in the Constitution of India that there cannot be a member secretary to the Planning Commission?’’ Incidentally, N.D. Tiwari was then the deputy chairman and Pranab Mukherjee finance minister.

In 1985, after a term as RBI governor, he finally took over as deputy chairman, Planning Commission. Ironically, the one prime minister with whom Singh clearly did not share a great rapport was Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv infamously ran down the Planning Commission as ‘‘a bunch of jokers’’ and Singh was critical of the 1985 budget.

But Singh has never gone on record about it, and only spoken of the cordial relations he shared with opposition chief ministers such as Jyoti Basu, Ramakrishna Hegde, and N.T. Rama Rao because ‘‘I did not politicise the planning process’’.

IN 1987, he came chairman of the Geneva-based South Commission, returning to India at V.P. Singh’s request to chair the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council. By the time he arrived, V.P. Singh was no longer prime minister and Singh served Chandra Shekhar instead. When that government too fell in March 1991, he became UGC chairman. Two months later, on June 21, he was sworn in as Narasimha Rao’s finance minister.

As the man who changed the direction of India’s economic trajectory and lent the term ‘‘Manmohanomics’’ to popular usage, Singh had earned his place in history. But the wheels of destiny never stop turning. Singh is now set to set more landmarks — the first ‘‘apolitical’’ prime minister, the first Congress prime minister who is not the supreme leader of the party, and, who knows, perhaps the first leader of a Congress-led coalition to complete five years in office.

Which, for anyone who knows the byzantine politics of the Grand Old Party, may be a lot tougher than Atal Behari Vajpayee’s record of leading a non-Congress coalition that lasted a full term.