A unique career

Manmohan Singh served the country in multiple ways

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s long career in public service came into sharp focus with his retirement from the Rajya Sabha this week. Dr Singh has served the nation in multiple capacities: As an economist, a bureaucrat, a regulator, a legislator, a Cabinet minister, and Prime Minister. Few in independent India will have had as varied, as long, and as influential a career as his.

As time passes, it is likely that his tenure as the Union finance minister who introduced liberalising reforms from 1991 onwards will be remarked upon more by historians than his decade in 7 Race Course Road (as it then was). Other economists or politicians could have served as finance minister for that period; and the broad parameters of the reforms that were immediately essential were also generally known and did not require Dr Singh’s particular expertise. Nevertheless, the grave earnestness with which the finance minister stewarded and defended the initial phases of reforms did much to restore confidence in the future of India’s economy and of its growth story.
 

The great weakness of Dr Singh’s career is also visible in the reminder that it is the Rajya Sabha that he is retiring from. In India, where electoral democracy can and must always trump technocracy, the fact that he never managed to achieve “mass” appeal limited his political impact. This led to what many would decry as the fatal weakness of his 10 years as Prime Minister during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments from 2004 to 2014; the apparent division of power between the constitutional executive, led by Dr Singh, and the party and political organisation, which reported to then Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

The fact that Ms Gandhi was the first choice of UPA parliamentarians for Prime Minister and she stepped aside and handpicked Dr Singh meant that he would always be in her political shadow. But it must also be said that neither member of this duumvirate aired her or his disagreements in public; when Ms Gandhi’s son chose to take on some UPA legislation by physically tearing it on camera, it is in retrospect interesting to note that this was shocking because such conflict was so rare.
 

Dr Singh may not be given credit for much of what the UPA achieved in terms of poverty reduction, entitlement expansion, and infrastructure investment —especially given that multiple years of his tenure were consumed by crisis-fighting as policy and administration were paralysed by widespread discontent in the middle class and among the bureaucracy. However, the UPA’s growth achievements were not inconsiderable, even if they built off the record of the governments before them. Likewise, the current government, which can point with pride to its reform of welfare and the growth of digital public infrastructure, owes much of its success to the policy decisions, such as Aadhaar, which were taken in Dr Singh’s tenure.

That government was far too weak in terms of its internal political appeal, relying on external approval for its action. But, on the other hand, there was little doubt that it had a respect for competence, technical knowhow, and expertise. Dr Singh’s training as an economist was hardly his greatest resource as Prime Minister, but he worked in what now appears to be a different era.