Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi: Successive PMs, but with a yawning gap

PM Modi thanked Singh for “guiding the House” and the country. Calling Singh a “shining example” of what an MP should be, Modi said the former PM even came to the Upper House in “a wheelchair to help strengthen democracy”.

Modi on Manmohan Singh

As he mounted his campaign to become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and oust the UPA from power, Modi began targeting Singh well in advance. At a rally in October 2012, when he was the Gujarat CM, Modi called Singh “Maun (silent)” Mohan Singh. Almost a year later, in March 2013, while speaking at the BJP National Council meeting in New Delhi, Modi called Singh a “night watchman”.

The following month, addressing BJP workers, Modi said Singh was not accepted as a leader in the Congress. “If you ask 100 Congress workers as to who their leader is, no one will name Manmohan Singh ji, irrespective of him being the Prime Minister…How can such a prime minister lead a nation?” he asked.

In February 2017, having already replaced Singh as PM, Modi, speaking in the Rajya Sabha, expressed surprise at “the clean record of Dr Singh” even as his government faced various corruption allegations. “Not a single corruption charge against Manmohan Singh that too during the most corrupt government. The art of taking bath while wearing a raincoat in the bathroom can be learnt from Dr Manmohan Singh,” he said.

The remark infuriated the Congress and led to Opposition walkouts.

On December 10, 2017, in midst of the Gujarat polls, Modi spoke about a meeting held at former Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar’s residence in which Singh and a former Army chief were present, suggesting that the Congress was colluding with Pakistan to interfere in the state elections.

Singh responded saying: “I am deeply pained and anguished by the falsehood and canards being spread to score political points in a lost cause by none less than the Prime Minister … Fearing imminent defeat in Gujarat, the desperation of the Prime Minister to hurl every abuse and latch on to every straw is palpable.”

Later, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said in Parliament that the government did not believe there was anything to suggest Singh had “colluded” with Pakistan.

Manmohan Singh on Modi

On January 4, 2014, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Singh said at a press conference: “Without discussing the merits of Narendra Modi, I sincerely believe that it will be disastrous for the country to have Shri Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister.”

Having lost power in 2014, Singh was asked about this comment while he was addressing a press conference in Indore in November 2018, ahead of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections. Singh said: “I did say Modi will be a disaster as the PM. Now I recognise I used a harsh word I should not have used. I don’t want to repeat it. But time is not far off when the public at large will have the chance to pronounce on the efficacy or otherwise of public policy which has been put in place by Modiji.”

Singh was also critical of his successor’s economic policies. In November 2016, speaking in Parliament during a debate on demonetisation, he said that the way “the scheme had been implemented was a monumental management failure”, and called it “a case of organised loot, legalised plunder of the common people”.

A year later, in November 2017, Singh said at a gathering in Ahmedabad that demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) were “a twin blow to the economy”.

In an interview to The Indian Express in April 2018, Singh criticised Modi over his “silence” on the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua and the alleged rape of a teenager by a BJP MLA in Unnao. Modi “should follow his own advice to me” and “speak more often”, he said.

Asked about the BJP taunting him with the ‘Maun-Mohan Singh” comment, the former PM said he “had lived with comments like these his whole life”.

In May 2019, in an interview to PTI, Singh called the NDA regime up till that point “a sad story of governance and accountability failure”.

He remarked that Modi’s rule was the most “traumatic” and “devastating for India’s youth, farmers, traders and every democratic institution”.

In September last year, Singh, in an interview to The Indian Express on the eve of the G-20 summit, pointed out that India has a “pivotal role” in “steering” the new world order and in the contest of the Russia-Ukraine war said New Delhi has “done the right thing in putting its sovereign and economic interests first while also appealing for peace.

Singh had said that he was “more optimistic about India’s future than worried,” but that optimism is “contingent on India being a harmonious society.”

Another rare intervention by the 91-year-old former Prime Minister came recently at the end of the bitter and gruelling Lok Sabha campaign that saw Modi repeatedly targeting Singh’s UPA government, claiming that the Congress wanted to allocate 15% of the government’s budgetary allocations for minorities during its tenure.

In one of his speeches in Rajasthan, Modi referred to Singh’s December 2006 speech at the meeting of the National Development Council to argue that the Congress government wanted Muslims to have the first right to the country’s assets and that the party’s manifesto hints that a government led by it would take stock of “the gold of our mothers and sisters” and distributing the wealth.

After the campaign drew to a close, Singh spoke up, accusing Modi of having delivered the “most vicious” form of “purely divisive” “hate speeches” during his electioneering, lowering the dignity of public discourse and gravity of his office.

“No Prime Minister in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary and coarse terms, meant to target either a specific section of the society or the opposition… This narrative of dehumanization has now reached its peak…”

In an appeal to voters of Punjab during the elections, Singh said that “in the past ten years (of Modi rule), the BJP government has left no stone unturned in castigating Punjab, Punjabis and Punjabiyat”. He went on to refer to the year-long farmer protest at Delhi’s borders. “As if the lathis and rubber bullets (against them) were not enough, none less than the Prime Minister verbally assaulted our farmers by calling them ‘Andolanjeevis’ and ‘Parjeevi’ (Parasites) on the floor of Parliament.”