Clearing the Cobwebs - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 67

Through all this and much more, the prime minister sat silent for over an hour, speaking
at the end only to say that he had agreed to come provided he did not have to speak. Many
of those there found this stance not only inexplicable but worrying - had Singh really lost
the wish to debate as well as the will to govern? The topic's editors and contributors, the
prime minister said, had 'thrown a new light on old problems' and had mentioned many
challenges. 'There are difficulties. Life will not be worth living if there are no diffi culties.
I am confident, with great determination, we will overcome,' he said.
Privatisation - A New Word and Its Origins
Where, one wondered, was the 'great determination' to be found? What came to the fore
that evening was a belated and unspoken realization that, despite his image, Singh had nev-
er been the sort of enthusiastic liberalizer that Chidambaram became from 1991. Neither
he nor Rao provided the zeal and leadership that are essential to pursue a continuing pro-
gramme of active reform against the political odds, such as Margaret Thatcher showed
when she was prime minister of the UK ten years earlier, 39 nor the vision and strategy that
Deng Xiaoping brought to China's opening up from 1979 as the country's supreme leader.
Thatcher's approach was that of a bulldozer, pushing through opposition on the road map
she knew she wanted to follow. Deng was more subtle and talked of 'crossing the river by
feeling the stones under the feet'. 40
Privatisation was not initially a priority for Thatcher though she became an enthusiast
once she realized the potential, and it was not a target for Singh, who has never believed
in changing India's economic base. In March 2009, he said: 'We are a mixed economy.
We will remain a mixed economy. The public and private sector will continue to play a
very important role.' 41 Just after he became prime minister in 2004, he said that no profit-
making public sector unit (PSU) would 'normally' be privatised. To underline the change
of policy from the former BJP-led NDA government, the Disinvestment Ministry, which
aimed both to privatise (i.e., sell control) and divest (sell partial stakes) was scrapped and
merged into the Ministry of Finance. That echoed the 'M' policy paper where Ahluwalia
wrote that privatisation 'as a general strategy is ruled out'.
Privatisation became one of Thatcher's most significant legacies - not only because she
introduced the policy itself, but also because she brought the word into the world's every-
day vocabulary. I played a role is that when we launched the word on 28 July 1979 in The
Financial Times. 42 The day before, I had telephoned Nigel Lawson (now Lord Lawson),
a Conservative Party MP who had just become Financial Secretary at the Treasury, for a
background briefing on denationalisation, as selling off government stakes in business had
always been called.