As Americans remain fixated with their own partisan politics, in the world’s largest democracy — India — a major political transformation is taking place: India’s long-serving and elusive Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has announced he’ll step down, opening the door for a new era that could one day end in a political dynasty’s restoration.
India’s veteran prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has announced he will step down after almost 10 years in office, setting the scene for a polarising clash between personalities and ideologies in polls due within months.
The world’s largest democracy is likely to hold a general election – almost certainly the biggest such exercise ever – in April or May. It will pit Rahul Gandhi, the scion of India’s first political family, against Narendra Modi, a controversial Hindu nationalist opposition candidate.
Singh, 81, told reporters in Delhi, the capital, that Gandhi, whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather all led India, had outstanding credentials to become the next prime minister and leader of the Congress party. He said that if Modi was elected it would be disastrous for the country.
Congress, which has led coalition governments since ousting the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in 2004, is expected to break with the tradition of not announcing a candidate before polls by naming Gandhi later this month.
The press conference – only Singh’s third in a decade – was interpreted by analysts as a belated attempt to change the perception that his leadership has been at best lacklustre, at worst negligent. Though economic growth in India peaked at almost 10% early in his tenure, it has slowed in recent years and any incoming government will face intimidating structural economic problems.
Barkha Dutt of The Hindustan Times (a paper on which I interned as a college student from January 1972 through May 1972) was devastating in his take on the PM:
Has he overstayed his welcome? That question, cruel as it is, dominates any objective assessment of Manmohan Singh’s decade in power. The answer is entirely self-evident.
Had the PM shown the sagacity to quit at the peak of his popularity in 2009 or mid way when corruption scandals swallowed his capacity to commandeer a clean government or even towards the near-end when Rahul Gandhi’s outburst against a patently flawed ordinance clearly mocked the last vestiges of his personal authority, he may still have been remembered differently.
Instead, his assertion — “I never thought of resigning” — (at a press conference that is in the news less for what he said and more for the fact that it took place at all) only furthered the impression of a politician more attached to power than to anything else.
At the media interaction, Singh repeated his claim to personal integrity — “I’ve never used this post to enrich myself or my family.”
Perfectly true, but what of the others in the government you presided over for 10 years, Mr Prime Minister?
It was his astonishing disassociation between himself and the team he captained that made Singh seem unsporting in defeat at Friday’s press briefing.
The emphasis was on the individual, not the collective. On both the telecom and coal corruption scandals he positioned himself as the one person who had argued in favour of transparent auctions, saying the fact that this was forgotten made him “sad”.
In other words, he was unwilling to accept any responsibility — moral or political — for corruption on his watch, by members of his own Cabinet, in a remarkably convenient but unconvincing distancing between the post of PM and his government. The subtext: I didn’t pocket any wheeling-dealing money (completely true) so it’s not my fault (completely false).
What remained unexplained was Singh’s own failure as a leader in containing this corruption, his crisis-driven delayed interventions and the allegations against his own office in a coal scam that saw a law minister lose his job for vetting an investigative report that he never should have been reading, leave alone editing. In an inversion of Harry Truman’s mantra, the PM simply passed the buck on corruption.
Worse still, he sounded as if he did not think corruption was a matter that required urgency of response, saying he had “not had the time” to look at the written charges against Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh made in a letter to him by the BJP’s Leader of Opposition.
Nor is the Financial Times’ report a valentine to his time in office. Nor did the Sydney Morning Herald’s South Asia correspondent find much to praise in his performance as Prime Minister:
For nearly 10 years, one of India’s most brilliant men and a key architect of its modern economy, has been, to this nation’s detriment, a Prime Minister without power.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Singh outlined the achievements of his government, stressing efforts in poverty reduction, improvements in the lives of women, food security and education.
But even his efforts to sell his government’s decade in office struck a defeatist tone, as though the election had already been lost.
“Our government will work ceaselessly until its final day, Jai Hind [long live India].”
Singh has never been a comfortable media performer – part of the reason he so rarely speaks to reporters – his reputation is instead built upon his economic management, and the modernising reforms he championed in the 1990s.
While his first term in office was lauded for its unprecedented economic growth, his second, beginning in 2009, has been marred by successive corruption scandals.
Singh is seen as a dedicated public servant, and scrupulously honest, but, too, as a man put in charge of a deeply corrupt government he is powerless to control.
As Prime Minister, Singh has been constricted, the unspoken power-sharing arrangement with Congress President Sonia Gandhi – the real centre of power in India – has made him appear uncertain, even timid.
For the past decade, Mr Singh has headed a coalition government led by Congress.
He has often been criticised for not speaking out more forcefully. Friday’s press conference was only the third such briefing during his whole term of office.
Mr Singh spoke on a wide range of issues, including the economy, inflation and corruption.
“In a few months’ time, after the general election, I will hand the baton over to a new prime minister,” Mr Singh said in his opening remarks.
He said he was “confident” that the next prime minister would be from the Congress-led coalition and that Rahul Gandhi had outstanding credentials to be nominated as the party’s candidate.
“I am confident that the new generation of our leaders will also guide this great nation successfully through the uncharted and uncertain waters of global change,” he said.
“I have ruled myself out as a prime ministerial candidate,” he added.
Mr Singh said the government was “deeply committed to the objective of combating corruption. An array of historical legislations has been enacted to make the work of the government transparent and accountable”.
He defended his legacy, praised his government’s work for the rural poor and farmers, and said that his government had “transformed the education landscape of the country”.
Mr Singh has been one of India’s longest serving prime ministers and is widely regarded as the architect of India’s economic reforms programme.
However, in recent years, his government has been beset by corruption allegations, with disenchantment rising steadily.
The bottom line: it’s likely he’ll go down in Indian history as a pivotal figure in Indian government and highly unlikely he’ll go down as one of India’s best Prime Ministers.
h/T: RealClearWorld
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.