Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Manmohan's Over-stated Role
The role of Manmohan Singh in the early 1990s is often overstated. As has been seen in
this chapter, he was certainly not the 'architect' of the 1991 reforms - an easy but inaccur-
ate tag that is often used by foreign journalists and others. Nor was he even the primary im-
plementer, though he did have a public role in pulling together and extolling the various re-
forms that emerged, and in painting a favourable picture internationally of a new and open
India. He worked in particular with Chidambaram on the trade reforms and then had to sell
them to colleagues and the country. The fourth person who played an essential and central
role along with Rao, Singh and Chidambaram was A.N. Verma, Rao's principal secretary.
An experienced senior bureaucrat, he understood what was required because he had been
involved, as industry secretary, with Ajit Singh and Rakesh Mohan during the V.P. Singh
government. He steered the implementation of the 1991 policy through the government
with daily and weekly committee meetings on specific areas such as economic reforms and
foreign investment, operating with the full authority of the prime minister.
Rao was an unlikely leader and reformer. A politician of considerable intellect but little
charisma, he was Indira Gandhi's downtrodden foreign minister when I first saw him in
the summer of 1983. He was being ignored by a bunch of braying Indian businessmen as
they pressed forward around Gandhi, anxious to be seen bidding her goodbye as she left
an investment conference in a Swiss alpine village. The businessmen were fleeing India's
heat and had gone to the conference (some with girlfriends, at least two of whom had been
flown in from London to the retreat) to be seen by Gandhi before moving on to weeks of
leisure in the UK and the US. Rao was standing in the doorway of the chalet hotel, unno-
ticed and alone, when Gandhi left.
He was on the verge of retirement when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated and the Congress
won the general election in 1991, but was picked as a safe interim prime minister after So-
nia Gandhi resisted sycophantic pressure to take the job. No one expected him to tackle the
financial crisis or anything else with the focus and determination that he showed. Maybe, at
his age and at the end of his career, he felt he had nothing to lose by challenging those who
resisted change. He certainly had the intellect to recognize the depths of the crisis and to
realize it could be a turning point in history. There is a nice story he told a colleague: that he
had picked Singh as finance minister because he reckoned that he (Rao) would get the cred-
it if the reforms succeeded, while ex-bureaucrat Singh could be blamed if they failed. As it
turned out, Rao's calculation was wrong because the reforms were a success and Singh got
the credit. 34
Singh had learned how far India was lagging behind economically when, as secretary-
general of the Geneva-based South Commission from 1987 to 1990, he saw the economic
progress being made in south-east Asia. Before that, he had mainly been an advocate of
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