An old tune

PM's speech should have broken new ground

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speeches are rarely electrifying. But in none of the years since 2004 that he has stood and addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort has India's economic outlook been so in need of a pick-me-up as this year. What was needed, therefore, was a bracing set of reformist promises, that would enable observers to look into the future with more confidence - not a tired assertion that the economy would shortly turn around. However, Dr Singh did not deliver. In this he has continued his tendency to avoid committing openly to more reform in the time he has left in this term as prime minister, when that is what is needed; and instead to repeat the various achievements of the United Progressive Alliance's nine years in power. These have already been internalised by the public, which wants the UPA instead to correct its mistakes. On that front, the PM promised nothing substantially new.

To his credit, Dr Singh restated his government's commitment to rapid economic growth as an imperative. However, with little evidence of any turnaround, he nevertheless claimed that the coming few months would see the effects of the government's efforts to restart investment. This claim is not new, but has never been proved to be true in the past. And the prime minister, when saying "economic growth has slowed down at present", continued to avoid linking the fall to any failures of policy or administration. An admission of where the government has gone wrong in its attempts to revive growth, and how it will correct those mis-steps, would have instead helped convince listeners that the prime minister was not merely repeating already discredited claims.

Dr Singh may have less than a year left in office. But a government's legacy is rarely determined by an official insistence that things have indeed got better in the years that it has been in power. The UPA should stop tom-tomming its record and focus instead on creating a more concrete legacy by putting into place administrative reforms and laws that will aid economic recovery and more years of high growth in the future. Sadly, although the prime minister's speech often used the future tense - "will" and "shall" - these were always in the context of existing schemes or programmes that he promised would be implemented more effectively. That is not a forward-looking agenda. And if UPA-II does not treat even the few months it has left - the most critical, probably, of its tenure - as a time to look forward instead of back, then no number of statistics will help it retrieve how its legacy is perceived.