By Indranil Banerjee
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appears to be an optimistic man. Over a two-hour media interaction on January 4 — the first proper press conference he had attended on Indian soil in over three years — the PM made it clear that he doesn’t believe his legacy will be defined by the adjectives that currently get attached to his name: weak, ineffective, silent. “I honestly believe,” he even went on to say, “that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media, or for that matter the opposition in Parliament.” This “history,” however, is not a pre-ordained object. Singh might have announced his intentions to step down after general elections, expected later this year, but he remains prime minister until then — and has the potential to be an active, if unusually placed, player in politics even afterwards.
The few searching questions that were asked, he ducked with his usual deadpan non-committals. A lot of fudge and evasion was on display, but no fresh insight was forthcoming about the workings of the UPA and its future prospects. Apologists would argue that the big news was his non-availability for heading the UPA-III government. But wasn’t that a given, considering that only a miracle can make a UPA-III possible? Besides, was Singh the prime ministerial candidate at the time of the UPA-I formation, or, for that matter, could he have staked his claim to the post had Sonia Gandhi nominated someone else to the PM’s post in May 2009? So, Singh impresses none while opting out of the race to lead the UPA-III. For all you know, whatever remains of the UPA might disappear after the next general elections, given the ill winds blowing against the Congress as evidenced by its rout in the recent assembly polls.
But what he said about Modi was very much unlike Singh. In all likelihood, he was keen to humour the Gandhis, who espy in Modi a very real threat to their own cosseted world, by using rather harsh words against the Gujarat chief minister. Singh’s prognostication about Modi’s prime ministry to be a disaster clearly had a great element of self-delusion and self-absorption. Had he paused for a moment to reflect on his own record, we are sure the PM would have refrained from using the “disaster” word for anyone else’s present or future government.
Again, the PM’s allusion to the Gujarat riots and to “the bodies lying on the Ahmedabad roads” was in rank poor taste. It showed a deep sense of personal bitterness at Modi’s soaring popularity even as his own leaders’ was sinking with each passing day. The prime ministerial restraint was missing in the attempt to paint Modi in the darkest of hues.
For a prime minister who had personally lived through, with an uncommon equanimity, the worst ever pogrom in the post-Partition India, in 1984, to talk of “bodies lying on the Ahmedabad roads”, was rather disingenuous, nay, opportunistic. Ahmedabad did not happen under his watch. Muzaffarnagar did. And if Singh felt so strongly about communal violence, how one wishes he had said a word edgeways in the 75-minute press meet to show that he cares for the Muzaffarnagar victims, who are running from pillar to post to rebuild lives after being uprooted from their centuries old homes. Humanity and goodness ought not to be trumped by the compulsions of electoral politics.
On corruption and various scams, the PM mouthed the defence that is usually the preserve of the corrupt and criminal legislators. Since the 2G and the Coalgate scams had occurred in the UPA-I, and since the people had re-elected the UPA in 2009, corruption was only an issue for a section of the media and the Opposition. We did not expect the PM to try and whitewash the sins of the government by relying on electoral outcomes. For one, these scams might have occurred under UPA-I but these were revealed to the people only under the UPA-II. Besides, electoral verdicts never condone or justify crimes. If that was so, the Congress party had won a record 420 seat in the parliamentary poll that had followed immediately after the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi and elsewhere in the country.
Also, the PM congratulated himself for having performed wonderfully well in framing a slew of new laws, in steering the economy in the difficult times and passing the Lokayukta law. Much to-do was sought to be made about the economy recording 9 per cent growth for the first time ever in 2004-05. Again, Singh was being too clever by half. As any economist would readily acknowledge, growth rates are not like instant coffee, ready to be made at the turn of a key. The truth is that it was the momentum, the business cycle set in motion by the NDA government which resulted in the 9 per cent growth in 2004-05. Since then it has been a downward march for the economy. And in the last year of the UPA-II, it would be a miracle if the economy can log even 5 per cent growth.
The economist prime minister, would neither credit the Vajpayee government for the accelerated growth in the first couple of years of UPA- I, nor would he accept responsibility for the sharp deceleration in growth thanks to the mis-governance and policy paralysis of the UPA governments. Having assumed that he is a saint who can do no wrong, Singh would blame all that is wrong with the economy on the global factors, while reserving kudos for self and his government. Frankly, that makes one ask: is Manmohan Singh sleep walking through the prime minister’s job?
The prime minister seemed to have no use for the opinion of his contemporaries, saying that history would be kind to him than the prevailing public wisdom about his performance in office. Such historians who may rank him high in the pantheon of prime ministers would have to be totally oblivious to the current realities or must belong to the Congress school of history where a leader’s place is determined not by his intrinsic worth but by his proximity to the reigning durbar. Thus, one of the greatest Congress prime ministers, Narasimha Rao, can be airbrushed out of history while a goody-goody one like Rajiv Gandhi accorded a pride of place. For Singh to get on top of history, he will have to choose his own hagiographer. INAV