The poor are voting for economic prosperity to accelerate for them. Singh cannot afford to ignore this reality

Interestingly, the youngest of his three brilliant daughters, Amrit, would follow in her father’s footsteps and also win the Adam Smith Prize, though she has now turned to Law after studying it at Yale.

Manmohan Singh’s brilliance was proven in perhaps the most prestigious school of Economics at the time. He turned to Oxford for his D.Phil—I followed a similar pattern, starting at Cambridge and finishing at Nuffield College in Oxford.

We would remain the closest of friends, a friendship deepened over the years as our daughters grew and we followed their and our careers even though he remained in India and I went abroad in 1968, and as our views on India’s economic policies and the need for correction grew closer together and came to dominate the Indian economic and political scene.

His Oxford thesis revealed yet another side of his strength: his willingness to follow wherever his research and convictions carried him. He examined the potential for India’s exports and concluded that it was far from bleak. This was at a time when many of us were the victims of ‘‘export pessimism,’’ an assumption that fed the disastrous import-substitution strategy that would be a major factor in consigning us to a low growth rate for a quarter of a century.

His willingness to confront reality, and to abandon mistakes when necessary, has been a source of his enormous success as a reformer. So has his enormous integrity. While he has reached the pinnacle of glory in politics, the paradox is that he lacks the guile that often marks the successful politician.

When I and my wife, Padma Desai, met Prime Minister Morarji Desai, a childhood friend of both our fathers, he told us: I respect your friend Manmohan Singh most because he always tells me what he thinks, not what I want to hear.

Ever since our student days, I have observed this fierce sense of personal integrity in him: an unwillingness to surrender himself to personal ambition and a willingness to take the consequences instead of his convictions. I recall how, unlike many of us who were at Cambridge and had upper middle class to well-heeled and often well-connected parents, Manmohan Singh came from a modest family and was on funds provided by his Vice Chancellor in Punjab. He returned to serve his University.

But when there was an attempt by the low-grade fourth-division staff at the university to unionise, I believe, and the Senate stoutly supported the Vice Chancellor in his opposition to the demand, Manmohan Singh followed his conviction and quietly voted otherwise even though he owed his career to the Vice Chancellor and his future career on campus depended on him too.

His integrity is so immense that no personal scandal has ever touched him, though it is not for lack of trying. I once visited him when he was a Cabinet Minister and had shifted to another house. His wife, Gursharan, whose grace matches Manmohan Singh’s and whose singing talent is remarkable, was coping with the broken jalis through which Delhi’s flying squads of mosquitoes and insects were breaking in to the living room. They had been living there for a few weeks. She said that CPWD had been asked to fix the jalis but they were slow. Another Minister and the CPWD would have had to pay a heavy price for its tardiness! The Singhs have never used their connections and friendships to benefit themselves.

To give yet another example, when their daughter Amrit was applying to Columbia for a Fellowship and a Ph.D. programme, we did not hear one word from Manmohan to look into the “matter”! Imagine any parent, especially one in India, abstaining from this natural instinct. We were astonished and impressed when my wife, who happened to be in the Admissions Committee, told me that Amrit had applied.

Manmohan Singh surely understands the value of India’s historic transition to economic reforms which he himself led, especially after 1991 (though begun in the mid-80s), will not abandon them, for sure.

But the pace at which he will move forward will depend on his pragmatic approach to them. My colleague Joseph Stiglitz, whose shallow book on Globalization’s discontents is occasionally cited by the Indian opponents of our reforms but whose claims have been effectively dismissed with evidence and analytical argument in my new book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), often argues that trade liberalization, privatization, more permissive inflow of direct foreign investment etc., the so-called “neoliberal” reforms that embrace rather than fear globalization, are ideological moves to the “right”.

But he forgets, or rather has never known, that it was ideology that led to many of these policies. We are moving from ideology to a pragmatic acceptance of a reduced role for privatisation, controls, trade autarky etc. Manmohan Singh, like several of us, arrived at these reforms because the earlier policies were tried and they failed and we will not go back to them.

As John Kenneth Galbraith once said wittily about Milton Friedman: Milton’s tragedy is that his policies have been tried! Manmohan Singh knows that these policies have helped reduce poverty, a slogan for decades with no achievements to match, significantly. Yes, our reforms have had a human face. But we need to add to the glow in that face, partly because (as Manomhan and I agreed in the early 1960s when we were both working on how to reduce poverty and, in the great Indian planner Pitambar Pant’s phrase, bring to the poor minimum standards of living) acceleration of reduction in poverty has to remain our dominant objective, but partly also because the poor are now into the ‘‘revolution of rising expectations.’’

The very success of our policies has led to their demands for more. Until the mid-80s when our failed policies produced low growth rates and little impact on poverty, we could have had the “revolution of falling expectations.” But that revolution did not transpire: when little is happening, our fatalism returns, as does acceptance of poverty as destiny. But when things improve, and the poor see possibilities, the revolution of rising expectations occurs.

This is not to be deplored. The poor, who bundled out Mrs. Indira Gandhi after the Emergency, were voting for “political freedom”: the vasectomy drive, among other things, had alarmed the poor who were targeted. Now, among other factors that determined the vote in our complex economy and society, they are voting for economic prosperity to accelerate for them.

Manmohan Singh cannot afford to ignore this reality. But he also cannot, and will not, buy into sterile “garibi hatao” slogans which plagued the Congress Party for decades.

I am confident that he will move steadily towards this goal, mindful that cheap solutions like deficit spending will reward the poor now only to cripple them when inflation strikes, and will adversely affect the globalization process that has yielded such good returns to date.

His work is cut out for him. But we cannot have hoped for a better leader as we stand now on the next cusp of change as India moves forward on its historic war on poverty.

Bhagwati’s latest book In Defence of Globalisation (Oxford, 2004) has been called by Economist his ‘‘best popular work to date and until further notice, the standard reference, the intelligent layman’s handbook on global economic integration.’’