Clearing the Cobwebs - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 65

trade reforms, and he was always worried about the effects that wider reforms would have
on the poor, as he used to tell me in the 1980s during background conversations for the FT
when he was the RBI governor. But there were other pressures in 1991 in addition to the
financial collapse. The Soviet Union, which had always supported India economically and
diplomatically for decades, was breaking up, and economic reforms had begun in China, so
the immediate financial crisis made instant action both essential and sensible.
Singh only pushed reforms for as long as the prime minister authorized him to do so, and
he backed off when Rao became nervous of a political backlash and put on the brakes in
1994-95 after unfavourable regional election results. Rao later told Gurcharan Das, author
of India Unbound , that India had 'the right pace of reform and a faster pace might have
led to chaos'. 35 He was also not in favour of wide-ranging privatisation, saying, 'You don't
strangulate a child to whom you have given birth.' He favoured pro-poor and politically
useful employment schemes. 'Growth was not enough. We had to attack poverty directly
through employment schemes,' he said.

'Your Legacy Is at Risk'

Singh's overstated reputation as a liberalizer took a beating after he became prime minister
for a second term in 2009 and mostly failed to win support for reforms from either Sonia
Gandhi or coalition partners. As his reputation sank, his friends and colleagues gathered
in Delhi one evening in April 2012 to launch a new edition of a book that updated what
had been written in 1998 as a 'festschrift' or celebration of the 1991 reforms. 36 The event
took place at a time when the government seemed to be losing control of events. Interna-
tional investors' views of India had been seriously upset by retrospective amendments to
corporate taxation laws that hit foreign companies including Vodafone, the mobile telecom
operator, and other factors such as project delays and corruption scandals.
Unfortunately, I could not be at the launch, but Adam Roberts, The Economist' s South
Asia correspondent, was there and neatly caught the mood in a blog article. Headlined
'Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, cut a lonely figure on the evening of April 14th',
it said: 'The evening had the mood of an intervention: when friends and relations get to-
gether and, without warning, confront a loved one who has some sort of destructive habit
that he won't admit to. In normal life, it might be an addiction to drugs or booze. In India's
political life, and the case of Mr Singh, it is a desperate failure to push on with reform.' 37
I talked to some of the speakers and read their speeches that were more critical than any-
one could have expected. The prime minister had sat silently while economists and others,
far from lauding his recent achievements, told him, in the words of one of those present,
'your legacy is at risk'. 38 It was surprising and sad for Singh, then 79, to hear this from