Leadership matters. It makes and unmakes a nation. While democracy allows the freedom for anyone to run a nation by virtue of his clout in a party and numerical strength in Parliament, a juxtaposition of the terms of now deceased Manmohan Singh and the current prime minister Narendra Modi is in order. In all fairness, both these leaders who led India for two or more consecutive terms each provided political and economic stability to the nation. Another prime minister Narasimha Rao saved the nation from a critical situation. India was adrift, saddled with an economic mess that forced the government to ship 47 tonnes of its gold reserves abroad. This was in the face of a phenomenal rise in loans India took from foreign agencies and a sharp depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The government of Narasimha Rao with Manmohan Singh as finance minister introduced Economic Liberalization, embraced Globalization and uplifted the economy. Before Singh completed his second term in 2014, the Indian economy had registered a GDP growth of 9 per cent plus – the largest-ever growth. It now is back to below five per cent.
Thanks to Rao and Singh, India began showing the courage to dream of a SuperPower status. The Atal Behari Vajpayee term, which came in between, launched the national highways projects, which pushed the nation’s growth and at the same time injected government money to the rural areas for work and land acquisition. India eventually stepped out of its stigma of being a poor third world country. A problem, though, was that this growth benefited only the top 20 per cent of the population. A trickle-down effect, which Manmohan Singh envisaged, never came true in any significant manner. It must be said to the credit of Singh that his government introduced the rural employment scheme — which was later extended to urban areas too. This helped the poor get some work and a small pay. It was also Singh’s government that introduced the subsidised foodgrains scheme through ration shops, which helped the BPL families fight hunger.
Narendra Modi, into his third consecutive term, is noted for the implementation of GST, which is fetching the exchequer huge sums as taxes. This by far is one major reform he effected, while he failed in introducing agricultural reforms. GST, originally, was Singh’s idea. Modi failed to effect administrative reforms to shake the bureaucracy out of its slumber and corruption. He showed no courage to introduce judicial reforms, even as over five crore cases are pending in courts and these take decades to settle. Course-correction or reform requires both vision and guts. Modi has proven by now that he is caught in the constraints imposed by the RSS through its narrow vision and feudalistic outlook. He’s the anti-thesis of a Manmohan Singh, who was progressive and had a wider world view.
