“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
(Release ID :13290)