Manmohan Singh: Wronged in the popular narrative of a nation he served right

"History will be kinder to me than contemporary media or the opposition" — so said Dr ManmohanSingh at his last press conference as Prime Minister. That speaks volumes about the man and his conduct.

Rare is the politician who is not more generous to himself in the here and now, than the considered judgment of his performance by future historians is likely to be. Most politicians are keen to take credit for all the good things that happen on their watch, while brushing the bad things under the carpet, and we are not talking only of leaders who speak of themselves in the third person and claim credit for every blade of grass growing in the land.

That Manmohan Singh left accomplishments to be discovered and praised by future historians indicates the breadth of his achievements, besides his inability to properly attribute successes of the economy to his government.

Lead technocrat

However, that he could not prevent the unkind characterisation of his government — as the most corrupt in India’s history — despite his sterling achievements, betrays a prime weakness of the man and the manner in which he exercised the powers of his office.

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Manmohan Singh is widely described as the architect of India’s economic reforms. This is wrong. That credit belongs to PV Narasimha Rao.

Only the leader of the government can effect a paradigm shift in economic strategy. Manmohan Singh was the lead technocrat of that change, not its author.

India as global power

But he was the architect of India’s rise as a global power. He alone understood the importance of going through with the Indo-US nuclear deal, in the teeth of opposition from not just political rivals but also allies, the Left, on whose support the government survived.

Singh understood the importance of emerging from technology sanctions that would be possible by signing this key deal with the US, and fought for the deal within the Congress party and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Sonia Gandhi backed him.

Without that deal, India would not be member of the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement on control of dual use technologies and the Australia group on chemical weapons and precursor chemicals. Without that deal, there would be no Quad grouping of India, the US, Japan and Australia. Without that deal, the confidence that American multinationals need that India is considered a reliable partner country would not have been forthcoming, and without that confidence, giant American companies would not have engaged with India as they have.

Also read | Three decades of economic reforms with Manmohan Singh's Liberalisation

Architect of Digital India

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had been set up in 2008, at the initiative of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). But its digital initiatives truly bore fruit only when combined with a nationwide, biometric-based, digital identity programme, and wide telecom access.

The UPA government is identified with a giant telecom scam. Only India allows one of the world’s biggest telecom revolutions to be condemned a scam.

In 2004, when the UPA came to power, rural tele-density was less than 2 per cent. By the time the term telecom scam had gained currency, rural tele-density had soared above 50 per cent.

The profusion of licences granted by the UPA government, without cornering large upfront capital payments as spectrum and licence fees, enabled telcos to invest in expanding networks and acquiring customers through ever-lower tariff plans.

These expanded networks laid the foundation for India’s IT-enabled business outsourcing industry, which has permitted millions of people to gain organised sector jobs and gain social mobility.

The myth of telecom scam

It was not that the licences and spectrum were granted for free. The payment was collected ex-post, after they had started service and collected revenue, as a share of the revenue, each for the operating licence and for spectrum usage.

These amounts added up to lakhs of crore rupees. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), who raised the charge of notional loss from giving away spectrum without auctions and upfront payments, did not take into account the licence fees and spectrum usage charges collected over the years.

Nor did the CAG take into account the superior tax collections enabled by the telecom revolution. One, at low levels of teledensity, even small improvements have a big impact on boosting economic growth. The more the people who climb on to the phone network, the greater the utility for anyone on the network, at a lower cost. Faster GDP growth enlarged the tax base.

Also read | Manmohan Singh obit: Father of liberalisation, MGNREGA, and Aadhaar

Economic boost

Two, the spread of telecom networks allowed computerisation of data, including of tax data. This led to better tax administration.

Does this mean there was no corruption in the allocation of telecom licences? Probably not.

Speed money is a fact of life in dealing with the government. Some amounts of money could have changed hands in the allocation of licences, but nothing on the scale of Rs 1.76 lakh-crore, the upper estimate of the notional loss computed by the CAG.

No coal scam either

Another major scam the Manmohan Singh government was accused of related to the captive mining of coal. The CAG held that undue benefit to the tune of Rs 1.86 lakh-crore was given away by arbitrary allocation of coal mines.

The CAG did not say the exchequer lost any money via captive mining. What it said was that undeserving operators got whopping amounts of undue benefit.

But in the poular narrative of mega scams built up in the media, it came out as the government having lost giant sums of money.

The biggest scam in coal was that it lay buried underground, even as India imported coal to meet shortages of the primary source of energy fueling power, cement and steel plants.

Coal mining was a state monopoly under the grossly inefficient Coal India Ltd and its subsidiaries. India has the world’s fourth largest reserves of coal, but has organised its mining industry in such a fashion that it is incapable of mining enough to meet local demand.

The coal saga

The Left was ideologically opposed to removing state monopoly over coal. All state governments were dead against ending their power of patronage in the allocation of coal mining leases, whether BJP-ruled Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh or Left-run West Bengal. So, opening up coal mining to competitive mining by professional mining companies was not an option.

So, to supplement the output from Coal India, the government formulated a policy of allocating captive mines to cement, steel and power producers. The Centre and representatives of the states jointly allocate mining rights.

It is altogether probable that some with political clout managed to get mining rights, and made a profit on selling the mined coal to fuel-starved power, steel and cement plants. But this did not mean that the state lost any money.

The state receives royalties from the mined coal, as so many rupees per tonne, regardless of who mines the coal, whether an actual owner of a coal-burning plant or a middleman out to make a fast buck. So long as someone actually mines the allocated coal field, the supply of coal in the market would go up, reducing shortage and the need to expend foreign exchange on coal imports.

Superior economic growth

The Indian economy and the stock market delivered some of their best decadal growth performances under the UPA government led by Manmohan Singh.

Policies aimed at inclusion and empowerment, such as the employment guarantee scheme, the Forest Rights Law and the Right to Information broadened democratic participation.

Sustained rise in real rural wages, adjusted for inflation, over 2008-14 drastically reduced poverty. The National Rural Health Mission made the beginning of universal health coverage.

Specific schemes aimed at bringing pregnant mothers to hospitals for childbirth and the expansion of the network of motorable roads that permitted swift access to healthcare facilities made big dents on maternal and infant mortality rates.

Liberalising the skies allowed air fares to fall drastically.

Eroded authority of prime minister

For all this good work, Manmohan Singh failed to take credit for it, and allowed the impression to spread that he presided over one of the most corrupt governments that India has had.

He asked three ministers to go and receive a peddler of fake yoga as he landed in Delhi to join the India Against Corruption campaign, which, it has subsequently been revealed, was orchestrated by the Sangh Parivar.

By failing to appreciate the power and gravitas of his office, Dr Singh eroded the institution of the prime minister.

Prime ministerial authority, to be exercised with effect, has to be derived directly from the people, not received via delegation from a politician with mass support. That is a lesson from the rise and fall of Manmohan Singh as prime minister.

The evil that men do lives on after them, said Mark Antony, while the good is oft interred with their bones. In Manmohan Singh’s case, the good is truly buried, while evil that he did not do lives on as lurid tales of scams in the popular political narrative.