6 min readDec 30, 2024 07:32 AM IST
First published on: Dec 29, 2024 at 07:10 AM IST
This is the last column of the year, and it was my intention to write about what I believe is the most significant political development of 2024. In my view, this is the astonishing skill and recklessness with which the brother and sister who control the Congress Party have frittered away the gains of the Lok Sabha election. But this will have to wait. Instead, I feel duty-bound to the memory of Dr Manmohan Singh to pay him a personal tribute. He would have wanted a truthful tribute, so I shall begin by making clear that I both admired him enormously and was deeply disappointed in what he became in his second term as prime minister.
The first time I met him was at one of Khushwant Singh’s soirees. Those lucky enough to attend one of these gatherings know that there were nearly always scintillating guests present. In Khushwant’s salon, you could meet politicians, writers, musicians, poets, socialites and visiting guests from foreign countries. There was a time limit strictly observed, and all socialising stopped when our host got tired. The soiree at which I met Dr Manmohan Singh was in the 1990s, not long after he had begun to dismantle the license raj and filled India with the intoxication of economic freedom that came with his reforms. Having spent most of my life in those socialist decades that turned India into an economic basket case, I was thrilled with the changes that soon became evident and I think this is what I told him in the brief conversation we had that evening.
After this, we met every now and then, and he encouraged me to talk about the changes that I was seeing and the changes I would like to see. I often mentioned that the most important economic reform would be to reform our defunct public education system and he agreed, but never explained why he found this such a difficult reform to bring. When he became prime minister, there was rarely a chance to have a private conversation with him, but I remained an admirer because in his first term, he brought about such a revolution that by 2006 the world was convinced that India would soon become the new China. Our middle class was not as big or as rich, but that there was a middle class was a miracle and that it was growing and aspirational was more miraculous still.
The reason why 2006 sticks in my head is because I remember that in Davos that year at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, India was the shiniest star. Indian businessmen walked with new confidence, Bollywood music drifted out of cafes and nightclubs, and the scent of Indian spices filled the icy air. But already there were signs that Sonia Gandhi was going to assert herself and bring back those old socialist controls and defunct ideas. Her National Advisory Council (NAC) had become more powerful than the Cabinet and was imposing ideas like MGNREGA and the Food Security law. At the same time, the private sector was being subjected, once more, to insane controls and the threat of tax raids and officialdom.
It was during Dr Manmohan Singh’s second term as prime minister that I began to be disappointed in him. He made clear from day one that he would be happy to give up his job to Rahul Gandhi whenever he wanted it, and this diminished the institution of the Prime Minister seriously. It had already been diminished by Sonia Gandhi becoming de facto prime minister without accountability. And Dr Manmohan Singh’s government was weakened because Sonia and her NAC were clearly calling all the shots. The incident that has etched itself into public memory is that press conference when Rahul Gandhi tore up an Ordinance passed by the government. But more insidious examples of demeaning the office of the prime minister have gone unnoticed.
Often, I have wondered why Dr Manmohan Singh allowed himself to be humiliated and often I wrote about these things in this column. It was while discussing Dr Manmohan Singh’s humiliation with a friend that I saw it from a different angle. This friend said that in his view it was out of a sense of duty to this country that Dr Manmohan Singh had sacrificed his pride during his second term as prime minister. Perhaps, my friend said, he believes that if he does not stay on, things could get a lot worse and that would be terrible.
Perhaps. But the result was that the diminishment of the office of the prime minister did not go unnoticed by ordinary Indians and one reason why Narendra Modi won the Bharatiya Janata Party its first full majority in the Lok Sabha in 2014 was because people I talked to during that election campaign said that they wanted a ‘strong prime minister’. Having said this, I would like to add that it is also true that having agreed to be appointed prime minister by Sonia Gandhi there were limits on what Dr Manmohan Singh could and could not have done.
What matters now is that he will be remembered not for his flaws, but for the incredible transformation that he brought about in India with his economic reforms. For this alone he will be proved right that history will treat him with more kindness than he was accorded in his lifetime.
For this alone he will be proved right that history will treat him with more kindness than he was accorded in his lifetime. 
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