Indians seem so enthralled with their Prime Minister in waiting — Narendra Modi — that they have all but forgotten the incumbent of that high office, Manmohan Singh. This accidental prime minister will be judged less harshly by history; epithets like Sonia’s patsy, a robot that frequently malfunctions and a mummy that occasionally shows signs of life trivialise the man and his contributions.

Sanjaya Baru’s tell-all book — The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh — confirms what many have said for long: that this is so-called duality of power centres was just a figment of imagination; real power always resided with one person all along, namely Sonia Gandhi. Singh was just a rubber stamp, serving at the pleasure of the dynasty.

Books written by so-called insiders — Baru served as media adviser to Singh and exited in 2008 — can frequently mislead and do a great disservice to the very cause they wish to serve. Parallels can be drawn with another infamous, and largely fictional, account of the last years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s life by another insider, M.O. Mathai, who served the great man to only denounce him later. To be fair to Baru he has not stooped as low as Mathai did but his book is unlikely to redeem the current prime minister.

Indeed, many may question the timing of the book. Surely the publication could have waited until the elections were over, for if it is a serious endeavour in trying to understand how the world’s largest democracy was run by dual centres of power for so long and with such disastrous end results, this book could have waited a little longer. Now it suffers from the indelible taint of wilfully wanting to muddy the waters before the elections. Baru was on the brink of re-joining the prime minister’s office but Sonia Gandhi is rumored to have pulled the plug on his return.

The deconstruction of Manmohan Singh needs more time to make an honest undertaking of the effort but a few pointers are worth looking at in the current habit of rubbishing him. Shamefully, the Congress party has made no attempt to defend the man or to put the record straight. Uncharitably, the dynasty and the party take credit for all the good done during the 10-year rule of the UPA — precious little many would say — and dump all the bad on Singh.

The 16th Prime Minister of India may be called an accidental occupant of office but before that he served with great distinction in a variety of positions. The continental shift in the 1990s in the country’s economic policy and the consequent secular trend seen thereafter in growth — from a base of 3 per cent pejoratively called the Hindu rate of growth to close to 8 per cent now — was fathered to a large extent by Singh. The nuclear deal of UPA-I, which was almost sabotaged by the dynasty according to Baru, owes its success single-handedly to Singh.

All the scams — from coal-gate to telecom — need to be also viewed in the larger context of putting in place a fair and transparent process of pricing its public goods. Discretionary powers of allotment need to be done away with and Singh was at the heart of this very exercise but was consistently thwarted by the powers that be. Indeed suspicion is strong that the dynasty itself was working at cross purposes with its prime minister and was undermining his authority.

All the grandiose welfare measures, from the food security bill to the employment guarantee scheme, are pointedly said to be doings of Sonia Gandhi and the PM’s role in all this is brushed away; almost as though he simply sleep-walked through the deliberations that went before these programmes were implemented. Let it also not be forgotten that despite all the venom against the man’s economic stewardship during the past 24 months, the economy is now slowly picking up pace; the rupee has strengthened slightly and the Sensex has rediscovered the animal spirits of the economy. Only a die-hard Modi fan would say this recovery is on account of the imminent ascendancy of their Iron Man.

This, however, is no attempt at eulogising Manmohan Singh, for he has to take responsibility for a lot of things that have gone wrong. His leadership skills have quite often been sketchy to invisible. His apparent diffidence to use the enormous powers invested in his office to run rough shod over opposition within the cabinet and outside on critical matters is most definitely a glaring flaw, fatal some may say.

The former coal secretary P.C. Parakh’s book — Crusader or Conspirator? Coalgate and Other Truths — which was released this week, is devastating and captures yet again the difficulty of pigeon holing the prime minster. Was he indeed a crusader or a conspirator in the so called coal gate scam and other scams?

The one real weapon that was always available to him and which was capable of steering the ship of state away from running aground was never used. His resignation at a time of his choosing — and one could cite many occasions — would have stemmed the tide and saved the country and himself from much opprobrium; the weakest prime minister in the country’s history may well have gone down as its strongest. Why didn’t he?

Perhaps we need a bigger man than Sanjaya Baru to answer that!

 

Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.