Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar
The importance of being Manmohan Singh
When sessions judges and metropolitan magistrates finally let
historians get on with the task of brushing off public prurience
from the crust of historical reality to get at the truth below,
it is probable that the single act which historians will consider
as defining the P V Narasimha Rao era would be his startlingly imaginative,
innovative and totally unexpected appointment of Dr Manmohan Singh
as his finance minister: and the unstinted political backing he
gave his finance minister over five long years, notwithstanding
the relentless efforts of Manmohan's detractors, outside the party
but much more importantly within, to pull down this Johny-come-lately
technocrat and put in his place a full-blooded vintage politician.
It was Rao's Congress predecessor, Rajiv Gandhi, who had exiled
Manmohan to the outer reaches of the South Commission. True, it
was a prestigious (and, for the relatively impecunious Manmohan,
a fairly lucrative) post, and true too that Manmohan had been
spared at the express behest of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the Grand
Old Man of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Rising Star Mahathir
Mohammad, the Malaysian prime minister, but there was no denying
that in Geneva, the headquarters of the South Commission, Dili
dur ast.
And when Manmohan returned to India, it was Chandra Shekhar who
claimed him to his bosom, appointing him as chief economic advisor
to the prime minister to help him tide over the unprecedented crisis
that was overtaking the economy. Manmohan soon realised that without
a real government in Delhi, it would be impossible to restore
that intangible thing - confidence - which is at the root of all
good economic governance.
It was at this juncture that I earned my little footnote in history.
I was sent by Rajiv Gandhi to sound out Manmohan on what needed
to be done. He was in his sick-bed when I arrived up unannounced.
His wife kindly led me to his bedside and there ensued a brief
conversation, with my having to almost put my ear against Manmohan's
mouth to catch what he was attempting to say through a very sore
throat.
I reported back; other contacts followed - and although
Rajiv did not live to win that election, Narasimha Rao's very
first act as prime minister was to rush Manmohan to his North
Block office even before the formalities of swearing in and the
allotment of portfolios were quite over.
Within days, one man, in the manner of Horatio on the bridge over
the River Tiber or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the
dyke, saved an entire nation. Confidence was restored. The rest
was mostly paper-work.
It is this ability to inspire confidence that is now turning a
neo-political into the Congress party trump-card for the restoration
of its declining fortunes. It has taken the Congress party's most
political politician to see this - and act on it. In an ethos
in which the sensitised classes are turning to non-political Holy
Grails, the only way of restoring legitimacy to the democratic
process is to restore confidence in the democratic process.
Civil service mavericks like Seshan, Khairnar and Alphonse
cannot give sustenance to the political system without themselves
becoming part of the political system. And judges cannot be the
answer unless we wish to replace the political process by the
judicial process.
In the end, the answer must come from within. Confidence in the
political system has to be restored by the political system. And
in Manmohan, democracy has found a politician who can restore
public confidence in the democratic system.
True, he is, at any rate relatively speaking, a political neophyte,
but a neophyte who has survived the longest stretch ever in that
most political of all positions next only to the prime minister's
- the finance ministry. There he was badgered, no less than his
predecessors were badgered, by illegitimate demands from self-centred
and, therefore, short-sighted politicians. He resisted these demands.
That requires not only personal probity of a high moral order
but also some pretty deft political footwork.
No one doubts that
deft footwork would not of itself have protected and preserved
him. It was the patronage of the prime minister that kept him
in office in the face of the grumbling and the growling of the
hardened politicos.
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