“In Government, one of his chief priorities is to improve the government’s delivery services. Dr. Singh is working to cut what is euphemistically called ‘leakage of funds’ and to improve the quality of health, education and transport. A key priority is to improve the lot of India’s poor, in particular through an Employment Guarantee Scheme now being introduced in the face of formidable political opposition”. In an article written by well-known journalist, Mark Tully titled, “Manmohan Singh: Architect of the New India” published in the Cambridge Alumni Magazine (October, 2005) issue”, such well-known facts and several other lesser known facts about Dr. Manmohan Singh’s personal and political life have been brought out. The article is based on an interview given recently by Dr. Manmohan Singh to Mark Tully.
“Manmohan Singh remains an academic by temperament. He is a reluctant, low-decibel politician, an intellectual, uneasy with personality cults, whose quiet self-confidence he attributes in part to his time at Cambridge”, says Tully. Tully describes Dr. Singh as a “technocrat, widely admired for his probity and ability. Above all, he is widely regarded as the architect of India’s economic reforms, a process he set in train in the early 1990s. As Prime Minister, he continues that reform process today”.
Tully says that the thinking behind his solutions to India’s financial problems was shaped at Cambridge by the theories of John Keynes. However, Dr. Manmohan Singh says, “Kaldor influenced me more, I found him pragmatic, scintillating and stimulating”. At Cambridge, his potential was spotted by Nicky Kaldor, who wrote to his friend, T.T. Krishnamachari, the then finance minister, suggesting that he was ‘ideally suited for the Treasury’. Recalling his student life at Cambridge, Dr. Singh said that when he first came to Cambridge he got a lot of colds, ‘until a friend of mine told me that if you really want to fight colds you had better take cold baths. And it worked. My years in Cambridge were in some ways the happiest time of my life and the period when I learned the most’. Among the good friends of Dr. Singh was Swaranjit Singh and a large number of Punjabis from Pakistan, with whom he got on famously.
After his return to India in 1969 as Professor of Economics at Delhi University, his research on India’s trade was noticed by P.N. Haksar, who after the election in 1971, insisted that Dr. Singh should write a paper for him titled ‘What to do with the victory’? Dr. Singh joined the Ministry of Foreign Trade as an economic advisor, but had differences of opinion with the minister and wanted to go back to academia, but was “instead, kicked upstairs to be the chief economic advisor of the Ministry of Finance”. Dr. Singh recalled that he grew up at a time when there was great optimism and enthusiasm for remaking India as a developed economy, inspired by what was happening in the Soviet Union.
In 1990, Narasimha Rao sent his Principal Secretary to Dr. Singh, saying that the Prime Minister wanted him to become the Finance Minister. Dr. Singh didn’t take it seriously, but was eventually tracked down the next morning and the Prime Minister demanded that he should get dressed up and come to Rashtrapati Bhawan for the swearing-in. “That’s how I started in politics”, says Dr. Manmohan Singh. Looking back, Dr. Singh sees the 1991 crisis as a blessing in disguise, as ‘it helped us liberalise the economy’. Many commentators believe that he would like to take his economic reforms further than the reality of the current political situation, but at the same time, is adamant that ‘you cannot sustain a democratic polity unless those who are at the lower rung of the social and economic ladder feel that they are partners in the process of social change’.
Tully says since May 2004, Dr. Singh has grown in stature since taking office and strengthening relations with Pakistan. Dr. Singh admits that he is ‘not a great orator – though I am learning to do better’. Justly proud of his rise from humble beginnings, his personal life has changed very little since becoming Prime Minister. “A very private man, he never uses his family for political advantage”, adds Tully.
Dr. Manmohan Singh comes from a farming family that he says was “very, very poor” and his father worked in a company in the dried fruit trade in Peshawar, in order to feed his wife and children. Dr. Singh took his exams to matriculate at the Punjab University in Chandigarh, but the results never came through because of Partition’. At the time of Partition, most of the Singh family made it to India by train, a journey he now recalls as ‘very unsafe, though nothing fortunately happened to the train we were in’.
YSR/DS/HK/CS