Singh is No King:

May 14/2014: The Manmohan Singh era in Indian politics draws to a close with the Prime Minister bidding goodbye to his office staff Tuesday, followed by his last cabinet meeting. As the heat and dust of the General Elections 2014 is subsiding and the nation is set on an anxious wait for the results three days hence, it is appropriate time to take an objective look at the man who held the reins of the nation for two consecutive terms, a historic decade. Although he had no contribution towards making this period historic, he surely was the chief executive of this nation during the initial years of the 21st Century.

Here is a prime minister who had his strengths  that were progressively overshadowed by his weak points – and to pitiable levels. It is unlikely that history will judge him kindly. The indignities that he has heaped on the office of Prime Minister of India will not be easily erasable.

Looking back, 1991 was the time when he arrived on the political scene as Finance Minister under the Prime Ministership of Narasimha Rao. He was tom tomed as a major protagonist in the turnaround of the economy, supposedly extricated it from the socialist mould and pushed the reform process. The age of liberalization was set in, in tandem with the process of globalization. By doing so, his former admirers claimed he configured the Indian economy with the world economy. With the help of a scholarly Narasimha Rao, Singh was credited to have effected a turnaround to the ailing economy. He became a hero, and when the turn came for the Congress to form the UPA-I, he became ‘king’ because Sonia Gandhi perceived in him, and rightly so, the most pliable character available in this country's political arena.

When Singh became PM in 2004, he was mistakenly considered first a technocrat and then an economist. Being neither but a simple bureaucrat with no political blood in him, he could not get over his feeling of inadequacy nor assert himself. Popular perception is that Sonia Gandhi increasingly took control of governance, and the Prime Minister became a puppet in her hands. Major scams broke out – starting from the CWG, 2G Spectrum to the Coal Blocks allocation where Singh was no more than a willing accomplice-turned-spectator, even failing to explain to the nation as to what went wrong with his own judgement. His silence was scary. People equated it with criminal inaction verging on conspiracy on the part of the UPA-2, and the alliance is set to pay a heavy price for it this election. To boot, he had a Rahul Gandhi to contend with who, in a fit of one-upmanship before TV cameras, tore a copy of a government ordinance that Singh had pushed in the Cabinet. That turned out to be one of the last straws on Singh’s back. He demits office now with such indignity heaped on the all-powerful PM’s Chair that it will be a Herculean task for any successor to regain the former authority and glory . If criticism is strong that he was a disgrace to that post, the nation alone has to rue its luck that it was unable to get out of the situation created by this inpidual.

Former PMO official Sanjaya Baru’s memoirs made it amply clear that it was Sonia Gandhi who ran the government from behind. So much so, Singh had no authority even to select the ministers of his cabinet or to clear the files. Although this is no matter of surprise within a party such as the Congress, Baru also stands exposed as a spineless bureaucrat who never spoke up when his own going was good. All his brave words are pouring out when the damage to the nation is already done and he himself has nothing more to gain. Yashwant Sinha, former Union finance minister in the BJP led Vajpayee government  had once said, “Manmohan Singh is an over-rated economist and an under-rated politician,” to stress the point that the Prime Minister knew how to hang on to power, though he was of no use in effecting a turnaround to the freshly-ailing Indian economy. It  is the outgoing Prime Minister’s lack of assertiveness, possibly due to his understandable desire to hang on to the PM seat, that turned out to be his undoing. He is no hero as he quits office and the office of the PM has suffered a major image loss.

Unfortunately, Manmohan Singh’s perceived sense of integrity – which boils down to misplaced perceptions that he was himself not corrupt – means little, when he has overall proven to be a major failure in stopping mega scams taking place right under his nose. After all, the 2G Spectrum and Coal Block scams occurred under his watch. And, under his term-II, economy is back to one of its worst phases.

Singh might be a good inpidual, but considering the harm that his ‘good’ nature has brought to bear on the nation, Indians at large will heave a sigh of relief that he as PM will now be history. He will, however, be around as a Rajya Sabha member to haunt the youth of this country for another half decade. They will see in him complacency, a man tolerant of and abetting corruption and the worst kind of character that he nation has a nightmare about.