Silent Manmohan versus An eloquent Modi
The nation had lost Rajiv Gandhi to the LTTE design, the
suicide bomber who had been on his trail brought this young ex prime minister’s
electoral campaign to an abrupt and painful end. Elections took place and the
Congress was returned to power. The choice of premiership fell on Narasimha Rao
who took Manmohan Singh as his Prime minister. Rajiv was a man who was given to
modernization and reforms and the nation had witnessed a glimpse of such
inclination when he twice became the Prime minister. Once when the nation lost
his mother and the nation its great Prime Minister to the bullets of her own
security staff whom she continued to retain despite advice against such
insistence on her part. The nation had witnessed the “Operation Blue star “in
Punjab and in the days following that she was advised against keeping any Sikh
staff in her security. She would not accept such an advice; she maintained that
no price was big enough to secure secularism in the country. The price as it
turned out was big which she and this nation painfully, but graciously paid, as
she fell to the bullets of the staff she had retained.
The nation knew little about scams during her lifetime. The
economy by and large remained closed during her tenure that followed two Prime
ministers namely Nehru and Shashtri. While Nehru was often questioned by his
secretary for squandering his salary as he doled out sums generously to the
needy who approached him. The secretary had to ask Nehru’s staff to stop
lending him money which he, of and on borrowed from them to help the needy in
his personal capacity. The secretary later made some arrangement in the Prime
minister’s relief fund to take care of this Prime minister’s penchant for
generosity. Once his sister had incurred an expense of about Rs two thousand
and five hundred in Punjab and when this was brought to his notice by the state
CM he requested that the same be converted into a loan which he continued to
pay in installments. Shastri another revered prime minister continued to follow
the policies of his predecessor and the nation by and large continued in its focus on capital formation
with a view to making the nation and its economy self reliant. The insistence
of the two prime ministers on discouragement of consumption to augment savings
and investment needs to be read in the background of the insolvency that the
nation and its economy had inherited from the British masters. Indira Gandhi as
the succeeding Prime minister also saw soundness of this logic in the
background of no external support for nation building. A backward economy
despite external challenges and the influence of the cold war threats from
neighboring Pakistan and China continued its march trudging towards self
reliance. Rajiv in his second tenure as prime minister showed first signs of
readiness to go for reforms and modernization and also exhibited courage to
order a gradual opening of the economy but his term got marred by a controversy
relating to the Bofors gun deal, a charge that was brought to stand against him
but which eventually fell and his name getting cleared albeit posthumously.
Credit is due to him for having realized very early that future wars would be
fought or avoided on the strength of missiles and to which cause he encouraged
the missile man and the scientists of this nation. The responsible possession
of the missiles silently assembled over decades and accounting for the nation’s
inclusion in the missile control regime has traversed a long journey equally
and perhaps even more vigorously pursued by the BJP government under Atal
Bihari Vajpayee and is and cannot be termed as a biannual achievement. Silence
in development and non demonstration of nation’s defense assets is perhaps a
very sound strategy of the past governments with a very sound logic to take the
adversary by surprise. Between Rajiv’s second stint and Narasimha Rao’s
ascendency, the nation saw first exercises in the politics of coalition. The
experiments did the nation no better. When Rao came to power the nation’s
coffers were empty, its bullion lay mortgaged, and the state of the economy was
terrible. The PM’s choice fell on Manmohan Singh who had excelled as the
Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, whom he took in his cabinet, as his
finance minister.
The finance minister for what he is accused got about his
work silently without fanfare or indulgence in the recounting of the financial
non wisdom of his predecessors and was taken to task when he took a very
considered view to devalue the currency. The risk was great but calculated
judiciously, in the midst of the growing demand for bringing down the controversial
structure at Ayodhya which was tearing apart the social and secular fabric of
India, demand for Indian products rose in the international market, the export
graph rose and the balance of payments position improved. The coffer was now
gracefully filled and the foreign exchange reserves lost on account of the
mismanagement of the economy by the newly experimented coalition politics grew to
a level of assurance.
History has not been just to the man who single handedly
under the guidance of an enabling prime minister lived up to the confidence the
latter reposed in him. It is this phase in India’s history which has not been
properly acknowledged because it was from here that the nation’s strengths
started getting revealed to the world but then there was a price this
government had to pay for having failed to protect the controversial structure
at Ayodhya. The majority electorate somehow came to believe that those who had
engineered the destruction of the structure would replace it with a temple to
Ram and the minority had reasons to be offended as they believed that Rao had a
tacit role in it. Whether or not it was true is questionable but reports
suggest that the PM ventured out of his closed room only after the structure
had fallen. Once in power the advocates
for the temple forgot about redeeming the pledge they had made to the people.
The temple never came to its place despite numerous lives lost in the frenzy that
marked such demand and the coming and going of so many BJP governments.
Coming to Manmohan’s second stint one has to take into
account the affects of globalization, the terrorist strike on the twin towers,
the all time high oil prices and the global meltdown. While economies of the
world began to succumb to the pressures that resulted, the Indian economy did
not submit and though it might have appeared slow in comparison to China its
policy of consolidation of its strengths worked and credit has to be given to
this Prime minister for the greatness of his silent stewardship undoubtedly
bereft of any eloquence. Manmohan headed a coalition which one has to concede
could never have been selfless. That he stood strong to the need of this nation
and its economy refusing to submit to the pressures that internally and
externally came to burden him can hardly be termed paralytic. Where there was
corruption, and it appeared so prima facie, he did not hesitate to bring his
cabinet ministers to justice. As prime minister he cannot be held responsible
for not having acted on here say which unfortunately has been the sad
mechanization of his detractors who themselves seem wanting in practicing what
increasingly accounts in their rhetoric.
Manmohan, when he had relinquished charge had left to the
nation a growth rate of four percent. Within months the magic of the conjurers
raised it to over six percent, their claim now stands at over seven percent.
The nation indeed gallops but the hinterlands emit a dark picture, sad as ever,
marred by successive droughts, possibly awaiting the vagaries of flood. Yes the
orchestra is fine tuned, and the baton ready but to what purpose and with what
pain should the symphony commence to gather the hearts of the forgotten and
forlorn sobbing in the segregated part of their motherland as the miserable
body of the manipulated face so projected.
No comments:
Post a Comment