"From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status within the Congress party.
Sonia’s word was destined to remain law."
-Washington Post
Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second term in office has been damaged by corruption scandals and policy paralysis.
NEW DELHI — India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh helped
set his country on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but critics say the shy,
soft-spoken 79-year-old is in danger of going down in history as a failure.
The architect of India’s economic reforms, Singh was a
major force behind his country’s
rapprochement with the United States and is a respected
figure on the world stage.
President Obama’s aides used to boast of his tremendous
rapport and friendship with
Singh.
But the image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and
intellectual technocrat has
slowly given way to a completely different one: a
dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat
presiding over a deeply corrupt government.
Every day for the past two weeks, India’s Parliament has
been adjourned as the
opposition bays for Singh’s resignation over allegations
of waste and corruption in the
allocation of coal-mining concessions.
The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his
second term in office and the slow
but steady tarnishing of his reputation has played out in
parallel with his country’s
decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and
as its reputation for rampant
corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the
country was on an inexorable road to
becoming a global power has increasingly come into
question.
“More and more, he has become a tragic figure in our
history,” said political historian
Ramachandra Guha, describing a man fatally handicapped by
his “timidity, complacency and
intellectual dishonesty.”
The irony is that Singh’s greatest selling points — his
incorruptibility and economic
experience — are the mirror image of his government’s
greatest failings.
Under Singh, economic reforms have stalled, growth has
slowed sharply and the rupee has
collapsed. But just as damaging to his reputation is the
accusation that he looked the
other way and remained silent as his cabinet colleagues
filled their own pockets.
In the process, he transformed himself from an object of
respect to one of ridicule and
endured the worst period in his life, said Sanjaya Baru,
Singh’s media adviser during
his first term.
Attendees at meetings and conferences were jokingly urged
to put their phones into
“Manmohan Singh mode,” while one joke cited a dentist
urging the seated prime minister, “At least in my clinic, please open your mouth.”
Singh finally did open his mouth last week, to rebut
criticism from the government auditor that the national treasury had been cheated of
billions of dollars after coal-mining concessions were granted to private companies
for a pittance — including during a five-year period when Singh doubled as coal
minister.
Singh denied that there was “any impropriety,” but he was
drowned out by catcalls when
he attempted to address Parliament on the issue. His
brief statement to the media
afterward appeared to do little to change the impression
of a man whose aloofness from
the rough-and-tumble of Indian politics has been
transformed from an asset into a
liability.
“It has been my general practice not to respond to
motivated criticism directed
personally at me,” he said. “My general attitude has
been, ‘My silence is better than a
thousand answers; it keeps intact the honor of
innumerable questions.
Singh probably will survive calls for his resignation,
but the scandal represents a new
low in a reputation that has been sinking for more than a
year.
‘I have to do my duty’
Singh was born in 1932 into a small-time trader’s family
in a village in what is now
Pakistan, walking miles to school every day and studying
by the light of a kerosene
lamp. The family moved to India shortly before partition
of the subcontinent in 1947,
and Singh pleaded with his father to be allowed to
continue with his studies rather than
join the dry-fruit trade.
A series of scholarships allowed Singh to continue those
studies first at Cambridge and
then at Oxford, where he completed a PhD. Marriage was
arranged with Gursharan Kaur in
1958; they have three daughters.
A successful career in the bureaucracy followed, but it
was in 1991 that Singh was
thrust into the spotlight as finance minister amid a
financial crisis.
With little choice, Singh introduced a series of policies
that freed the Indian economy
from suffocating state control and unleashed the dynamism
of its private sector.
More than a decade later, in 2004, Singh again found
himself on center stage, becoming
in his own words an “accidental prime minister.”
The Congress party led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had
surprised many people by winning
national elections that year, but she sprang an even
bigger surprise by renouncing the
top job and handing it to Singh.
In him she saw not only the perfect figurehead for her
government but also a man of
unquestioning loyalty, party insiders say, someone she
could both trust and control.
“I’m a small person put in this big chair,” Singh told
broadcaster Charlie Rose in 2006.
“I have to do my duty, whatever task is allotted of me.”
From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the
real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status
within the Congress party.
Sonia’s word was destined to remain law.
But Singh made his mark during his first term in office,
standing up to opposition from
his coalition partners and from within his own party to
push through a civil nuclear
cooperation deal with the United States in 2008, a
landmark agreement that ended India’s
nuclear isolation after its weapons tests in 1974 and
1998.
It was a moment that almost brought his government down,
an issue over which he offered
to resign. While no electricity has yet flowed from that
pact, it marked a major step
forward in India’s relations with the United States.
The Congress-led coalition went on to win a second term
in 2009, in what many people saw
as a mandate for Singh.
The 2009 election “was a victory for him, but he did not
step up to claim it — maybe
because he is too academic, maybe because he is too old,”
said Tushar Poddar, managing
director at Goldman Sachs in Mumbai. “That lack of
leadership, that lack of boldness,
lack of will — that really shocked us. That really
shocked foreign investors.”
‘He suffers from doubts’
In a series of largely off-the-record conversations, friends and colleagues painted a
picture of a man who felt undermined by his own party and who sank into depression
and self-pity.
His one attempt in 1999 to run for a parliamentary seat
from a supposedly safe district
in the capital, New Delhi, had ended in ignominious
defeat. His failure to contest a
parliamentary seat in 2009, making him the only Indian
prime minister not to have done
so, further undermined both his confidence, his friends
and colleagues say, and his
standing in the eyes of the party.
Congress, insiders say, never accepted that the 2009
election was a mandate for Singh
and jealously resented the idea that he could be seen to
be anywhere near as important
as a Gandhi. Rahul, Sonia’s son, was being groomed to
take over from Singh, and the
prime minister needed to be cut down to size.
He soon was openly criticized by his own party over
attempts to continue a peace process
with Pakistan despite the 2008 attack on Mumbai by
Pakistani militants.
Singh became even more quiet at his own cabinet meetings,
to the point of not speaking
up for the sort of economic changes many thought he ought
to be championing.
“His gut instincts are very good, but sometimes he
suffers from doubts about the
political feasibility, about getting things done,” said
Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a Columbia
University professor who has been friends with Singh
since their Cambridge days.
Singh will go down in history as India’s first Sikh prime
minister and the country’s
third-longest-serving premier, but also as someone who
did not know when to retire, Guha said.
“He is obviously tired, listless, without energy,” he
said. “At his time of life, it is not as though he is going to get a new burst of energy.
Things are horribly out of control and can only get worse for him, for his party and
for his government.”
