SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY
Strictly Personal: Manmohan & Gursharan By Daman Singh, HarperCollins, Rs 699
When Manmohan Singh complained to P.V. Narasimha Rao that people were accusing him of selling out to foreign interests, the prime minister retorted dryly, “Who would want to buy this country anyway?” That anecdote, which says more about Rao than his finance minister, doesn’t feature in Daman Singh’s affectionate and intimate portrait of her parents. But there is plenty of other material to show her father’s unhappiness over the opposition of “big industrial houses” and “the left-wing press” to his reforms placing India firmly on the road to modernity. No subsequent government tampered with the guidelines he set in 1991.
But people might wonder who really fathered the measures Singh says he cleared with Rao at every stage. Since it is known — though not mentioned here — that Rao first asked I.G. Patel to handle finance, it may be assumed the thrust had already been decided before Singh was approached. Since Rao had never been accused of free market inclinations, outside inspiration is suspected. Singh’s admission elsewhere that he talked to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund chiefs immediately after taking over might lend credence to the charges Chandra Shekhar and others levelled. Daman Singh is more candid in explaining Singh’s personal transformation from spokesman of the South to liberalisation champion. Being “always pragmatic” he did not “challenge the Mahalanobis” orthodoxy frontally. We get a measure of Singh’s philosophy of life from the admission that he saw no point in espousing solutions that would be rejected. The ultimate pragmatist says in another context that “principle” is immaterial. “The question is — what works.”
The chapter titled, “The Stealthy Seventies”, renders another public service with a more general revelation. Singh took his cue from his leader who told this reviewer he was following “the Nehru line” even as his finance minister was introducing a revolutionary budget. As reported in the reviewer’s Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium, Rao dismissed any suggestion of conflict between Fabian socialism and free market reforms. Manu, the lawgiver, only laid down the law, he said. “It is up to each Brahmin to interpret it.”Apparently, the higher echelons of the government always recognized that “growth can take place only by stealth,” citing P.N. Dhar. Otherwise, “you would be accused of criticizing Jawaharlal Nehru and the establishment line of the Congress party”, Singh says. While “liberalizers” had been peering cautiously out of the closet ever since Indira Gandhi’s re-election in 1980, no one dared touch the Planning Commission until Narendra Modi came along.
Fate seems to have been extraordinarily lavish with Manmohan Singh. He deserves it too. If his grandfather’s murder in Gah and his later brushes with Muslim fundamentalism didn’t affect his benignity, it could be that Bhindranwale, Amritsar and the circumstances in which he sold his Delhi house taught him that communalism doesn’t have just one face. But it’s difficult to say whether the man who failed his American driving tests but drove India’s ship of state without ever winning an election, and made Delhi his home while insisting he didn’t “feel at home in big cities”, is a bemused innocent watching events unfold or a canny operator with a finger on the pulse of change. A job always awaited him at every twist and turn of his career. “Politics is a strange thing”, he says. He should know. Although revolted by “nepotism, corruption or intrigue” he reigned for a decade over a political scene bristling with the “intrigue and low cunning politics of self-aggrandizement” (his words) that destroyed the Mughal court. When he lamented he was a prisoner between his house, South Block and 7 Race Course Road, Daman naughtily added, “And London, Paris, Washington…” When he bemoaned not being able to go and watch a play, she said she hadn’t suspected his interest in the theatre.
Since she can take liberties, Daman might also tell her father that Pranab Mukherjee, with whom he admits to “serious differences”, would question his view that Punjab refugees had to fend for themselves. Mukherjee once compiled a paper on New Delhi’s elaborate, expensive and effective plans for their rehabilitation while fobbing off Bengali refugees with the Nehru-Liaquat Ali pact which ensured they received no compensation and remained suspended in limbo as destitute evacuees. As Singh muses, “economists don’t agree among themselves often.” On the matter of her irreverence, Jagdish Bhagwati might not be too pleased with the disclosure that he thought Joan Robinson’s use of the expletive “Balls!” was the English way of expressing disagreement until pulled up by polite society.
Despite a daughter’s occasional gentle leg-pulling, there is — expectedly — no really damaging criticism here. Although the story ends with Singh’s elevation on 22 May 2004, one also misses references to Sonia Gandhi who must have featured in their lives before pulling the prime ministership like a rabbit out of a hat. Nevertheless, the portrait of a happy family in which her mother’s “Gurudev” nickname probably wasn’t misplaced will prove useful to serious chroniclers. Daman Singh’s cute interjections like, “I am feeling rather pleased with myself”, after chatting with her father can be dispensed with. But her lively question and answer sessions with him, narratives on the state of the nation in which they are set, and her own intelligent insights have produced the very readable raw material for a proper biography of the outstanding maker of modern India.
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