Homage: The Principled Prime Minister
Dr. Manmohan Singh (1932-2024) served as India’s 13th prime minister for a decade, from 2004 to 2014. An untypical politician who defied expectations, Dr. Singh was also an economist, a bureaucrat, and a finance minister in a long and distinguished life.
Dr. Manmohan Singh died on December 26, 2024. He was a good man. He was a great patriot. He was a person truly wronged by history, especially in the twilight of his momentous public career. Wronged by constitutional institutions. Wronged by mercenary rhetoricians. Wronged by unscrupulous politicians. But such was his legacy, his levity, that much of the muck left him untouched, falling instead on his detractors.
I first met Dr. Saheb for a television interview immediately after his landmark budget of 1991. India’s economy had been asphyxiated by years of regulatory choke. The Kuwait invasion was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. We had to pledge our gold to stave off an IMF default. Egged on by Prime Minister [P.V. Narasimha] Rao, Finance Minister Singh seized the crisis to unleash reforms that were impossible, unthinkable in state-strangled India. The rupee was devalued by over fifty percent in two bold strikes in less than a week. Industrial licensing was abolished. Foreign capital could flow freely into Indian securities, propelled by a fully convertible rupee, at least in stock markets. Imports were delicensed.
Manmohan Singh was a good man, a great patriot, and a person truly wronged by history.
The “commanding heights” hitherto captured by the government were thrown open to private players—telecoms, banking, airlines, insurance, media etc. Interest rates were decontrolled. He crowned that breath-taking sweep of reforms with this Victor Hugo quote in his budget speech: “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
As we were lighting and setting up our two-camera unit for the interview, Dr. Singh, after greeting us with a terse smile, began striding up and down his cavernous office. His impatience was obvious. Then all of a sudden he started whistling. Yes, striding up and down the room, swifter steps, sharper whistles, up and down, up and down. I winked at our cameraman to record that unusual spectacle. And he did. Dr. Singh wasn’t whistling a popular tune—at least I could not identify it. Just a sharp, get-on-with-it whistle to accompany his quickening strides. I am sure that remarkable piece of video footage is lying somewhere in an archive, but it’s seared so clearly in my mind. Anyway, finally we were ready to roll, and Dr. Saheb sat down to elaborate on the economic tsunami he had triggered. After that interview, it became a ritual where I would talk to him after every budget speech, year after year.
Cut to May 2004. India was in the throes of a general election that was widely seen as a shoo-in for the incumbent, Prime Minister Vajpayee. Dr. Singh, then the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha [Upper House], agreed to an early morning sit-down-in-the-garden interview at his Tughlaq Road residence. It almost got derailed by his enormously dignified wife, who was cross with Dr. Singh for “overexerting” while he was a bit under the weather. But she relented, sending out deliciously warm cups of tea and biscuits as we set up under the shade of a huge tree. Dr. Singh ambled out, limply shook my hand (his handshake was a feather touch for such a firm reformer), and we began the interview, both convinced that Dr. Singh would continue his stint in the opposition. An animated Manmohan Singh lit into my excited endorsement of Vajpayee’s streak of privatization. “The Congress party strongly denounces these wanton sales of public sector units. I believe we need these companies to exercise social control on private profits.” I had never heard such a unique and colorful defense of slothful government companies—social control on private profits!
Imagine my—and I am sure his—disbelief when the Congress inflicted a shock defeat on an over-confident BJP to form the government. And when an even bigger shock was delivered by Sonia Gandhi, who nominated Dr. Saheb as India’s 13th PM, I was ecstatic. Because my routine interaction with him had serendipitously become a “viral phenomenon” in those pre social media times. Clips from that interview played and replayed and over-played for almost a week, as CNBC-TV18 (then our channel) celebrated its “lucky scoop” with the new Prime Minister!
I may be in a minority of one, but I believe Dr. Manmohan Singh had a seminal, transformative 10-year tenure at the helm. Contrary to half-baked commentary (currently so fashionable), his stint was extremely successful. Just look at the facts, at cold data (not opinions or perceptions). The Nifty jumped four-fold in those ten years, compared to a three-fold increase under the current regime (2014-2024). Foreign direct investment, as a percentage of the GDP, was much higher. India saw three continuous years of 9% plus growth, something that’s never been repeated.
Those were such heady times that I wrote my first book—Superpower? The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise—on a euphoric impulse. I was delighted when Dr. Singh agreed to meet me. I proudly clutched a copy to Race Course Road and presented it to him (I have a photo to prove this!). “Oh, Mr. Bahl, I did not know you are a China expert,” he said.
“No, sir, not an expert. But I was always curious to figure out how China engineered its economic miracle. And since I’ve had a ringside view of the reforms you unleashed here, I thought it imperative that I should teach myself how China did what it did so I could compare the two stories. That’s how I stumbled on to this somewhat amateur, instinctive piece of work.”
“Oh no, I am sure your study is very substantial. I promise to read it.”
I am sure he never got the time, but he was always very kind to me.
A few years earlier, he had agreed to launch CNBC Awaaz, our Hindi business news channel. Unfortunately, I had been felled by a slipped disc and could barely hobble on to the stage. The Prime Minister gracefully reached out, held my hand, and helped to seat me next to him. He implored me not to stand up to observe an unnecessary political courtesy. He went on to give a ringing applause to our initiative to “democratize the equity cult among the Hindi-speaking masses.”
I had another light dalliance with him in 2008. Dr. Singh had defied all political odds to sign the nuclear deal with America, easily the most signal geo-political moment since Independence. The frail politician had stood like the “rock of Gibraltar” (to borrow Lala Amarnath’s iconic cricketing phrase) against the naysayers, including his allies, India’s communists, who voted to sack him in Parliament. Manmohan Singh called their bluff by putting his job on the line. Eventually he won 275-256, a numerically slim but humongous political victory.
Just about then, our film company had released the Akshay Kumar blockbuster, Singh Is King. Fortuitously, the signature tune from our film became the anthem over which Dr. Manmohan Singh’s triumphant raised hand waving the V sign was immortalized on television screens and digital videos. I was ecstatic that a film produced by us was being used to celebrate the supreme courage of the good doctor! My thrills were cheap, but his triumph was amazing.
One year later, Dr Manmohan Singh got re-elected to office by a mandate that was nearly fifty percent higher than the first one. Even Prime Minister Modi has not been able to emulate this singular feat. Unfortunately, the Congress party completely misread the mandate. The country had voted for an aspirational, bold government, exemplified by Manmohan Singh’s rapid economic growth and powerful global assertion. But the Congress swiveled sharply towards discredited leftist policies, increasing doles, taxes and the dominance of the state. The about-turn was disastrous. It completely non-plussed Dr. Singh. He lurched from one crisis to another, falling prey to a conspiracy virtually engineered by his own team.
Wild charges of “presumptive losses” running into mythical figures—completely conjured, non-existent “losses” of lakhs of crores of rupees—were thrown at him by his auditor general. It was at best completely illiterate accounting, and at worst a diabolical conspiracy to undercut an honest man’s legacy.
Alas it succeeded, and the Manmohan Singh government unraveled.
(Postscript: almost every fantastic accusation against his government—of squirrelling away lakhs of crores of rupees in granting telecoms licenses or coal mines or private airports—have proven to be false in various courts of law a decade after he left office in 2014).
So goodbye, Dr. Singh. RIP. You were, are, and always will be KING.
Raghav Bahl, who founded The Quint with Ritu Kapur, is a serial entrepreneur and investor based in India. Besides founding and scaling the media company Network18, Bahl has seeded other media outlets. Reprinted with permission from The Quint (thequint.com), where this article originally appeared in a slightly different version.
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