The Manmohan Singh I knew: A legacy of quiet strength

I was a young reporter on the political beat in 2004 when the Congress came to power with allies to form the United Progressive Alliance ( UPA) government. For nearly a week, journalists camped outside Sonia Gandhi’s residence in Delhi as the party grappled with who would lead this coalition.

Finally, Mrs Gandhi took the decision to say no to the Prime Minister’s post and chose Dr Manmohan Singh for the role. Over the next decade, the man behind India’s economic reforms left a huge imprint on the country’s economic and political trajectory. 

One of the stories I covered closely was the landmark Indo-US nuclear deal. The deal along with the historic waiver for India by the Nuclear Supplier's Group or the NSG, catapulted India on to the world stage like never before. It marked a huge foreign policy shift for India which endures till today.

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For all the critics who say Dr Singh had no spine, this deal proved the exact opposite. Despite strong opposition to it from within his own coalition, from the Left, Dr Singh stood firm and nearly lost his government in the process.

The Left front withdrew support to the government in July 2008 over the deal and left Dr Singh in a precarious position. But he survived a confidence vote in parliament despite this. The Prime Minister knew this deal had significant strategic implications for the country and did not back down.

For journalists, those were different days. That was when ministers and bureaucrats would talk to you on and off the record. We travelled extensively with Prime Minister Singh when he went abroad and he did press conferences on board where all kinds of questions were taken. Prime Minister Vajpayee used to do the same.

The BJP government today has made a virtue of excluding journalists from the Prime Minister’s plane but the fact is much of what has been said about those trips has been blatantly false. These were not free junkets. They were gruelling assignments and gave the media the opportunity to interact with the Prime Minister and senior officials to understand and report on a range of issues. We paid for our hotel stays, the government did not.

I remember when Prime Minister Singh travelled to Bali for the ASEAN summit. I was there and needed a reaction from him on a story. An official tipped me off that the PM would be at a particular spot where I was welcome to wait and throw a question at him on camera. I did, and Dr Singh answered it. There is no possibility of that happening today. 

Manmohan Singh’s first term was marked by economic growth and went well enough for the UPA to come back to power in 2009. Dr Manmohan Singh was the face of the Congress party heading into that election and middle class India loved him. But things took a turn in his second term. With a series of corruption scandals rocking his government, the Prime Minister was roundly criticised for staying quiet.

On television debates night after night, we openly questioned Dr Singh’s silence and took the government to task on all the allegations, from the alleged 2G scam to the coal scam. We were scathing about women’s safety when Nirbhaya was raped and killed. Nobody from the Prime Minister’s office called even to complain. 

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Yes it is true that some journalists became too cozy to the corridors of power back then as the now infamous Radia tapes revealed but today’s journalists are even worse, essentially working as stenographers of the government with little or no criticism, happy to regurgitate the ruling party’s propaganda. They simply put out WhatsApp forwards as ‘news’ and call themselves journalists.

Dr Manmohan Singh was not perfect. His handling of corruption issues, the fraught relationship with Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, were all rightly criticised. But when you take a step back and look at his ten years in office, the positive outweighs the negative. At his last press conference he famously said history would judge him more kindly than the media. He was right.