India’s former Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh (1932 – 2024) – who was also a former Finance Minister, a former RBI Governor, a former professor at the Delhi School of Economics – passed away last week. Those of us who lived through the unforgettable summer of 1991 – when PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh pulled India back from the brink of ruin – and then the nail-biting vote in Parliament in 2008 (on the historic India-US nuclear deal) will have no hesitation in saying that Dr Singh, more than any other modern leader, has defined modern India’s place in the world.
Shekhar Gupta of The Print rightfully focuses on the latter achievement (because in the former, PV Narasimha Rao was the lead protagonist whereas in the nuclear deal with America, it was Dr Singh who led the charge). Mr Gupta writes:
“When Singh became prime minister in the summer of 2004, most of the discussion was about what kind of economic agenda the UPA was going to follow. Was he going to pick up the thread from where he and Rao had left it in 1996, or would he return to the ideology of his party and its largest parliamentary ally, the Left Front? Even the most astute watchers of North and South Blocks were not prepared for the more substantive and historic changes to come in foreign and strategic policy.
This was especially so given the Congress’s chronic suspicion of the US and the West and its persistent nostalgia for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and Third-Worldism. If you had told somebody on the morning of 24 July, 1991 that by the afternoon Rao would junk Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution with one industry minister’s speech preceding the Budget (Rao held the industry portfolio), you’d be asked to get your head examined.
In the summer of 2004, you’d be even more brainless to imagine that within a couple of years, a Left-of-Centre coalition, surviving at the sufferance of the Left Front with 61 MPs, would be finalising India’s first substantive treaty with the US. A strategic one, as it turned out.
This change was rooted in deep, intellectual thinking, even more than the reform of 1991. Then, at least there was the alibi of a crisis, the demands of the IMF. There was no such compulsion to reposition India strategically.
That India had to warm up to the West is an idea that had been brewing since Indira Gandhi’s return in 1980, when she was deeply troubled by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and India’s strategic compulsion to back it at the UN. She did reach out to Ronald Reagan at Cancún in 1981.
But the relationship didn’t pick up pace. Rajiv Gandhi and then Rao also made some moves, but these were carefully measured baby steps. Of course, the Soviet Union had disappeared, but suspicion and scepticism of the US were still formidable. Atal Bihari Vajpayee made some significant moves, and was attacked by the Congress for the ‘shift’.
Singh’s success lay in making the same shift much more decisively at the head of a Congress government. It was also audacious, in my book even more so than the 1991 reform, given how little support this had within his party and among the UPA partners. The Congress was still filled with Cold Warriors, including some of his senior-most Cabinet colleagues. And 10, Janpath was simply not prepared for it. Nor did it see the need or compulsion.
Forget support, there was deep resistance—even resentment—in the foreign service bureaucracy. Many there were hoping that with Vajpayee’s NDA gone, there would be a return to the Congress normal. Nobody was prepared for the opposite.”
RIP Dr Singh. The India that we live in today was shaped more by you than by any other national leader in the post-Nehru era.
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