| by B. Raman
( September 27, 2012, Chennai,
Sri Lanka Guardian) The Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh was 80 yesterday. He
is the second oldest Prime Minister the country has had. Morarji Desai was the
oldest. He became Prime Minister in 1977 at 81 and left office at 83 two years
later.
2. Dr. Manmohan Singh took over
as the PM when he was 72.He would be 82 if he continues in office till
2014.Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee took over as the Prime Minister when he was 74
and left office at 80 after the defeat of his party in the elections of 2004.
If the BJP had been returned to power in the 2004 elections, he might have
continued as the PM till the age of 85.
3.Rajiv Gandhi was the youngest
Prime Minister in the history of independent India. He became Prime Minister
when he was 40 and left office at 45 after his Congress Party lost the
elections of 1989. His mother Indira Gandhi was the second youngest Prime
Minister in the history of independent India. She became the PM at the age of
49 and was assassinated when she was 67 in 1984. For three years between 1977
and 1980, she was in political wilderness. The remaining years between 1966 and
1984, she was in office as the Prime Minister. The other Prime Ministers of
India were in office between 50 and 70 years of age.
4. Till 1991, when Narasimha Rao,
on being sworn in as the Prime Minister, inducted Dr.Manmohan Singh as the
Finance Minister, he had served as a bureaucrat and not as a politician. He
joined the Congress after taking over as the Finance Minister in 1991. He
enjoyed the total trust of Rao and was totally loyal to Rao.
5.Rao gave him a free hand to
re-shape the economy and he performed the task creditably. His success as the
Finance Minister between 1991 and 1996 was due to the fact that he and Rao were
on the same wave-length on the need for liberalising and modernising the
economy. He did not have to hold any important post in the party in order to be
successful as the Finance Minister.
6. When he took over as the Prime
Minister in 2004 at the request of Mrs.Sonia Gandhi, Dr.Manmohan Singh faced
many handicaps due to the fact that he had never held any post in the party and
people like Shri Pranab Mukherjee under whom he had worked as a bureaucrat were
now required to work under him as the Prime Minister. Initially, this created
uneasy personal equations but he managed to get over them. Another major
difficulty faced by him arose from the fact that the primary loyalty of the
Ministers from the Congress in his Council of Ministers was to Mrs.Sonia Gandhi
and not to him. There was and there still is no Minister whose primary loyalty
is to Dr.Manmohan Singh.
7. During his first tenure as the
Prime Minister, the country faced some major internal security problems. The
Maoist insurgents spread their area of operations over large tracts of Central
India. There was a major act of mass casualty terrorism carried out by
Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorists in the suburban trains of Mumbai in July
2006. There were many acts of jihadi terrorism by the Indian Mujahideen in
different cities of India in 2007 and 2008. There was a three-day
commando-style attack on different targets in Mumbai between November 26 and
29,2008, by sea-borne terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET).
8. Despite the deterioration in
the internal security situation during his first tenure in the rest of India,
the situation in Jammu and Kashmir registered a qualitative improvement with
new ideas for finding a solution to the Kashmir problem with Pakistan being
discussed with positive results through back channels with the regime of
Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. If the terrorism situation in Punjab improved
and normalcy was restored when Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister, the
situation in J&K improved under Dr.Manmohan Singh for which credit has to
be given to him.
9. Under the management of Shri
P.Chidambaram as the Finance Minister, the economy registered considerable
improvement and India was taken as seriously as China in the economic
decision-making circles of the world. Dr. Manmohan Singh along with President
Hu Jintao of China was invited to the head table in all economic summits.
Chindia became a much used expression in characterising the economic race
between India and China.
10. Foreign policy was another
major area of success between 2004 and 2009, with India and the US coming
closer together and with India’s relations with China showing improvement
despite the suspicions caused in Bejing by the Indo-US strategic partnership and
the initiatives taken by the Manmohan Singh Government for improving relations with Singapore, Vietnam,
Japan, South Korea and Australia.
11. During this period,
Dr.Manmohan Singh was only Prime Minister by half with much of political
authority and prominence remaining in the hands of Mrs.Sonia Gandhi. Despite
this, his visible and palpable record was positive.
12. At the same time, a huge
iceberg of corruption, nepotism, crony governance and favouritism was gathering
shape and strength under his administration. His reluctance and inability to
control the Ministers from the coalition partners under the pretext of
coalition dharma or coalition compulsions contributed to the formation of this
iceberg. The tip of this iceberg was seen in 2010 in the so-called Radia tapes
which brought out the enormous political influence that an apparently mediocre
person had been able to acquire over the decision and opinion-making process by
taking advantage of the permissive atmosphere that prevailed. The iceberg hit the
Government in 2011---with one scam after another, with one irregularity after
another and with one wrong-doing after another denting the credibility of the
Prime Minister.
13.But even before the iceberg
hit the Indian ship, one could see the gathering storm and darkening clouds
from different directions. The shifting of Shri Chidambaram from the Finance
Ministry to the Home Ministry after the 26/11 terrorist strikes improved our
internal security management, but considerably weakened our economic management.
This weakening of the economic management took place at a time of the global
economic melt-down. India came to be seen less and less as a success story and
more and more as a stalling economy. References to Chindia disappeared from
debates in international financial circles.
14. The crisis and the drift
called for strong leadership that came to be missing. The duality of control
between Mrs.Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister added to the gravity of the
drift. Instead of admitting the gravity of the iceberg that had hit the State
and his Government and trying to bring the ship back under control, Dr.Manmohan
Singh and his Ministers tried to deny the presence of the iceberg.
15. Only now, there has been a
belated realisation that India is adrift and needs a strong and decisive
leadership to bring it back on the route of progress and development. One has
to welcome the hard economic decisions already taken by the Government and the
support that the Prime Minister has received from his party for those decisions.
As I had pointed out in an earlier article, this is only the beginning. More
hard decisions are required not only in the field of economy, but also in
respect of administrative reforms to deal with corruption and to improve
further the national security machinery.
16. It is time for the Prime
Minister to convince the people that those decisions will be forthcoming and
will be implemented even if they lead to early elections and the possibility of
a defeat for his party. Dr.Manmohan Singh has less than two years left in
office. He can still salvage his reputation and that of his Government and
party by doing all that needs to be done to restore the confidence of the
people.
17. The need of the hour is not
only for better leadership and governance, but also for a greater role for
GenNext in policy and decision making and implementation. It is a time of
transition from the old to the young. The transition should be expedited and
not delayed.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd),
Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director,
Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For
China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com
Twitter @SORBONNE75)
 The Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh was 80 yesterday. He is th...){kind=link}