Manmohan Singh, a helmsman of the post-nehruvian era

Manmohan Singh, India’s 13th prime minister, who had the third longest tenure in the office after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, has retired from the Rajya Sabha after a long, distinguished and sometimes controversial political innings. Lavish praise was heaped on the 91-year-old former premier from both sides of the aisle. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge posted, “Very few people have accomplished as much as you for the nation and its people.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted that his predecessor often attended the Rajya Sabha on a wheelchair.

Singh is more an academician and economist than a politician. It reflects in his quiet, almost shy, demeanour. His slow delivery was at times mistaken for indecisiveness. Towards the end of his second term, he attracted the opposition’s charge of turning a Nelson’s eye to corruption. His silence during stormy public debates drew the epithet of ‘maun-Mohan’ from his detractors. But he was always a reluctant politician. An economist who graduated from the University of Oxford, he served in many advisory posts and as governor of the Reserve Bank before entering politics. He did so well as a consultant to two prime ministers that he was called upon to be finance minister when, in 1991, the country was on the brink of an economic crisis.

Singh fronted PM P V Narasimha Rao’s liberalisation era that set off India’s first post-independence economic boom. There was no indecisiveness in this stint: Singh devalued the rupee, opened up a spectrum of poorly-performing state-run industries, dismantled the License Raj, lowered taxes to levels hitherto unseen, and made foreign investment an attractive proposition for the first time. It was a sharp break from Nehruvian socialism, which had depended heavily on public sector monoliths and high taxation to turn the wheels of the economy.

Then came Manmohan Singh 2.0, when Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly chose him as prime minister after the Congress won the 2004 Lok Sabha polls. As an economist-politician, Singh addressed rural poverty with the groundbreaking employment guarantee scheme. The Right to Information Act, a path-breaking legislation for transparency in public affairs, and the Indo-US civil nuclear pact, too, were breaks from the Nehruvian past and new chapters in India’s growth story on the world stage. As the reluctant politician enters a well-deserved retirement, let us not forget that he always contributed more than his quietude suggested.