Dr Manmohan Singh never received credit for this political achievement

There is little doubt that Dr Manmohan Singh’s achievement as finance minister in 1991 was more monumental than all his best achievements as Prime Minister between 2004 and 2014. India today would be a very different country had Dr Singh not been chosen as finance minister in 1991.

Dr Singh’s celebrity status as the sage finance minister was surely part of the reason why Sonia Gandhi chose him to be prime minister in 2004, when she developed cold feet about taking the job herself as she deserved to as the head of the single largest party. Another was that he was a political lightweight — light as a feather.

The missing credit

Obituaries of Dr Singh so far have failed to give him credit for what was his biggest political achievement: the 2009 general election. Only five months before the election India had faced its most chilling terrorist assault yet. The 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks had stunned the world and were immediately called India’s 9/11. The Indian media and opposition demanded war against Pakistan. People wondered if war would postpone the elections.

Dr Singh chose to not militarily retaliate against Pakistan and instead used the moment to globally shame the country. The move was hailed at the time as “strategic restraint” but the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party made it an election issue. Its leader Lal Krishna Advani ran a national security campaign, accusing the government of not carrying out a death sentence against Afzal Guru, convicted of his role in another terrorist attack in 2001.

Besides, the 2004 upset election was hardly a victory for the Congress party which won only 145 of 543 seats. It was more the surprise underperformance of the BJP and its allies that brought the Congress into power, giving birth to the United Progressive Alliance. The real test was now in 2009. Was India going to reward its soft-spoken technocratic prime minister supported by a self-effacing Sonia Gandhi?

To its own surprise the Congress not only returned to power but actually increased its seats to 206, many of which came from big metros where the BJP often does well. This remains the Congress party’s best general election performance since Rajiv Gandhi’s 414 seats in 1984, thanks largely to the assassination of his mother and predecessor, Indira Gandhi.

The face of trust

Future historians will marvel that a liberal Congress government won a re-election after not militarily retaliating against a spectacular terrorist attack, defeating a Hindu nationalist leader who had been a past master at the politics of polarisation.

The 2009 general election victory was credited mostly to economic reasons: Dr Singh had delivered a miraculous balance of high economic growth and landmark welfare schemes. If government-sponsored rural jobs and farm loan waivers helped Congress win seats in Uttar Pradesh, the high growth helped them win seats in Delhi and Mumbai.

But it was more than just economics. Indian voters were clearly happy with Dr Manmohan Singh as their prime minister. No party can improve its numbers in an election without its leader having high “approval ratings,” as pollsters would put it. Dr Singh was a face India felt it could trust.

In life as in death, Dr Singh was never given due credit for the 2009 victory because credit only goes to politicians and Dr Singh was an anointed technocrat.

Fall from grace

The 2009 victory made the Congress take power for granted, as is often the case when parties win a second consecutive term. When Dr Singh left office in 2009, things were so bad that he famously said historians will judge him less harshly than the contemporary media. In saying so he influenced future historians.

With the distance of time, future historians will also be critical of Dr Singh’s tenure as prime minister.

Firstly, many of the big crises of UPA-2 had their genesis in UPA-1. This included an alleged Coal scam, a telecom scam and the embarrassing neglect of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The point is not whether Dr Singh was personally involved in any of the corruption or indeed, whether any such scams took place.

The lack of outcomes from those investigations highlights Dr Singh’s failure in political communication when the tide turned against him. It wasn’t just the corruption scandals—his inadequate response to events like the 2012 anti-rape protests underscored a growing disconnect and an erosion of public trust in his leadership.

All political careers end in …

Future historians will wonder if Dr Singh would have served his country well if he had resigned in 2012 because of his declining health and rising unpopularity. The disaster of UPA-2 led to a seemingly permanent BJP era.

It is true that much of the credit for the political mismanagement goes to the politicians. His party colleagues had finally succeeded in undermining him. This included almost his entire cabinet. Sonia Gandhi, Ahmed Patel and Rahul Gandhi should get their share of the blame.

If Dr Singh deserves more credit for 2009, he can also not escape the blame for 2014.

The truth about UPA-2’s corruption scandals is that while they dominated the media and public narrative, survey after survey showed it was inflation that bothered voters the most. Persistently high inflation from 2010 to 2013 pinched voters’ pockets. This inflation was caused mainly by high global oil prices. Even the best economic mind as India’s prime minister couldn’t do much about it.

How do you win an election despite high inflation? That’s not a question an economist can answer. The Congress needed a politician at the helm to answer that question.

Both the 2009 election high and the 2014 historic defeat are extremes through which Dr Manmohan Singh as a politician must be judged with an emotional detachment not possible in 2024. The political failure of Dr Singh in 2014 may have put to rest forever the technocrat fantasy that some in the middle classes tend to have.

The political adage that all political careers end in failure did not spare Dr Manmohan Singh in its sweeping generalisation. In the end, the best that could be said about him was that he was too decent a man for politics.