Saturday, 28 December 2024
Saturday, 28 December 2024
Economist, scholar and former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh passed away on Thursday night at the age 92 at New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
Singh, the architect of liberalisation, ushered in reforms in the Indian economy in 1991 when he was the Union minister of finance. His brave decisions freed India from the shackles of license and permit raj and turned the “Hindu growth rate” into an economic boom.
With his passing, many stories about his extraordinary life are worth recalling. Here are a chosen few.
When Manmohan Singh faced black flags at JNU
In 2005, then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi to unveil a statue of the country’s first prime minister. The students welcomed him with black flags and slogans against him.
The JNU administration sent notices to students after the fracas but Manmohan Singh’s PMO intervened and asked them not to take any action.
Banojyotsna Lahiri, a researcher, was present on that day.
“When a prime minister is coming to the campus, there will be protests as not everyone agrees with the same ideologies. They were against economic policies, cuts in the Budget and all that,” Lahiri told The Telegraph Online.
“Students went on to show him black flags and chanted slogans but Dr Manmohan Singh started his speech saying that students and everyone has the right to protest.
“The university administration wanted to take action against the students but then Dr Singh’s office intervened and said that students have the right to protest and no action should be taken against them. They further even said that it is good if students register their problem and speak about it and hence no action was taken against them,” Lahiri added.
Umar Khalid, the JNU student leader imprisoned for an allegedly provocative speech before the Delhi riots, had also posted about the incident on X. Khalid remains in jail for over four years without trial for his anti-government stance since 2016, when Dr Singh was no longer the PM.
When Manmohan Singh returned Rs 7 lakh
Manmohan Singh was a Rajya Sabha member from Guwahati throughout his years as India’s prime minister. But he once contested a Lok Sabha poll, from South Delhi constituency, and lost by 30,000 votes despite support from Delhi’s elite circles and business houses.
The Congress gave Rs 20 lakh to Singh to fight the election.
“But that wasn’t sufficient to keep the MLAs, municipal councillors and the party workers active,” Singh’s campaign manager, Harcharan Singh Josh, told The Caravan in 2011.
“He did not know anything about these intrigues — he was having the impression that since the Congress party has given him the ticket, the MLAs and municipal councillors will all work together.”
Industrialists, from various parts of the country, came to meet Dr Singh. They sought to contribute to his campaign funds. But he refused to meet them. According to his campaign manager, Singh had the hope the party would give money for ancillary election costs.
“But he was a different man. He had never dealt with money. So ultimately, one day, I sat with Doctor Sahib, his wife and his daughter Daman. He said, ‘I will not meet anyone.’ I said, ‘Doctor Sahib, we’ll lose the election—money bina, paise ke bina—we’ll lose without money’.”
Josh coaxed him to take contributions from the various sources for campaigning for the election. After the campaigning ended, Dr Singh returned Rs 7 lakh of unspent funds to the party coffers.
Several senior party men worked against Doctor Sahib, and the councillors who had affiliations with those senior leaders did not work for Doctor Sahib, according to Josh.
Singh “felt very alone, he was very subdued and depressed,” recalled his daughter. Singh never contested a Lok Sabha election again.
When Dr Singh correctly assessed Modi’s demonetisation
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday described Manmohan Singh’s death as an enormous loss to the nation, asserting that his commitment to the people and the country’s development would always be respected.
On November 8, 2016, PM Modi announced the sudden demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes. Three years later, in April 2019 during the Lok Sabha polls, Modi said demonetisation led to a large amount of money in the formal system and boosted economic growth.
Two weeks after demonetisation, Singh, then a Rajya Sabha MP, said in a speech in Parliament: “My own feeling is that the national income, that is, the GDP of the country, can decline by about two percentage point as a result of what has been done..This is an underestimate and not an over estimate.”
The estimate of the economist-politician came true. India’s GDP for the April-June quarter of 2017-18 fell to a three-year low of 5.7 per cent. It had been 7.1 per cent during the same period of the prior year.
When Manmohan Singh took on the communists
Much of Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister was spent with the BJP’s allegation of calling him a puppet under Sonia Gandhi. But he had defied Sonia Gandhi too.
Much before Modi’s hobnobbing with Trump, Biden, it was Manmohan Singh who brought India close to the US.
India’s ties with Soviet Russia during the Cold War era was an irritant for Washington. The nuclear tests of 1974 and again in 1998 had led the US to censure India. It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who started the outreach with the US, but it was Manmohan Singh who saw it through with the India-US nuclear deal.
But the Left parties – who provided outside support to the Congress-led UPA government with over 62 members in the Lok Sabha – came down heavily on Singh’s government, threatening withdrawal of support.
Even Sonia Gandhi was reportedly against a confrontation with the Left.
What did Singh do? He approached Samajwadi Party (SP) leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, who were under pressure from CBI and Mayawati. After managing support from the SP, Singh threatened to resign if Sonia Gandhi didn’t want to go through with the deal keeping the wish of the Left.
After hectic parleys between the SP and the Congress, Singh initiated a vote of confidence in Parliament before the Left could move a no-confidence motion. The government prevailed by three votes in the Lok Sabha.
“I told them to do whatever they want to do, if they want to withdraw support, so be it..” That’s what Singh told The Telegraph about the Left’s stance on the nuclear deal.
When Manmohan Singh gave back to his village in Pakistan
With the economist-prime minister’s passing, many stories are coming to the fore. One particularly telling one was posted by Pakistani journalist Kamran Rehmat
@kaamyabi on X, in which he posted an article from the magazine Pique.
The 2012 article outlined how Gah, the village where Manmohan Singh was born in 1932, is forever indebted to its son. Excerpts from that:
“Despite sore relations, Mr. Singh had not forgotten his schoolmates and school. He arranged funds for the school’s renovation. And the school was to be named after him during President Musharraf's time. Renovations were done but the school still retains the original name, for some unknown political reasons. The school record of Manmohan Singh is still well preserved in the head master’s cabinet. It shows Mr. Singh was a promising student,” the article said.
It also said: “After being elected as Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh funded the construction of a road and also sent teams to install solar-powered lights, and a water geyser for the village mosque.”
Dr Singh, the article quoted villagers as saying, financed a development project worth Rs 100 million for the village,
“Manmohan Singh left his village when he was only ten years old. But ironically the democratic “Peoples” party leadership of Pakistan has not been able to do what he did for his village from across the border, after over six decades,” the article said.
