Judging Manmohan Singh

After reading this article, many people will label me a chamcha . And at least one very dear friend will say that as always I am being contrarian.

But the fact remains: The Prime Minister is not guilty, at least as charged. Or, as P. V. Narasimha Rao once said at a private function at 7 RCR, “Only those who have worn the shoe know where it pinches.”

He was responding to a question about his removal as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1972. His reference was to the politically clueless Gandhi family.

What he did

Perhaps the real question to ask about Dr Singh is whether, given the presence of Sonia Gandhi, would anyone else have been able to act differently? She was, after all, insistent on two things.

One, that Dr Singh stay on as PM — which is why when it comes to his detractors, ambitious Congresssmen put the BJP in the shade. And, two, that he did whatever it took for the UPA to stay on in power for the full term.

Indeed, a better way to judge Dr Singh would be not by what he was not able to do — which is a lot — but by what he was able to. And this was to neutralise Sonia Gandhi, not once but twice.

He did so once in 2008 over the nuclear deal; and he has done it now again. This is evident from the fact that she has been obliged to give him a carte blanche on the economy. The tyranny of the NAC over the economy has thus finally ended.

But what about the things he could have done? A very senior advisor to Dr Singh recently said during a conversation that Dr Singh “had ceded too much ground to his ministers” and that this really was his worst mistake.

Binding constraints

Here he became a victim of what in linear programming is called the objective function. The more binding constraints that it has, the less optimal is the final solution.

Dr Singh was faced with two binding constraints: The party president and the need for UPA-II to survive in office at all costs.

Ask Atal Bihari Vajpayee how these two constraints can hobble a PM. This is the reason why the Congress used to have the same person for the two jobs.

This inevitably leads people to say, “Oh, but he should have quit in that case.” He probably would have, if Rahul Gandhi had agreed to take his place. But that became the third binding constraint: Sonia Gandhi would not hear of any other name.

It was Manmohan Singh or Rahul. No one else was acceptable.

Are the two equal?

There is, then, the question of corruption. Was his an act of commission or omission?

Are the two equal? Do Dr Singh’s acts of omission — what he calls the compulsions of coalitions — stand on the same footing as the acts of commission of the others?

This is for some jurist to answer. On the face of it, though, one would have to say that the two are not equal.

For Dr Singh, though, who is seeking to restore his image and leave a legacy other than as a failed prime minister, here is a sobering fact: From Robert Peel to Tony Blair; from George Washington to George W. Bush; from Konrad Adenaur to Gerhardt Schroeder; Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy; Nehru to Atalji; you name them, no head of government has ended his career well.

That’s how the cookie crumbles. It is the modern version of the Faustian deal.

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