There is a general perception that Dr.Manmohan Singh is a man of conviction and a die-hard reformer economist. Nothing could be far from truth than this. Singh had a long career as a bureaucrat under the various Congress regimes, including a long stint as the RBI Governor in the 1980’s. During this period, he had supported the pseudo socialistic, license raj regime of the Congress, which is as far away from the reformed India as chalk and cheese. Over the years Dr.Singh has been like all other bureaucrats, when they were asked to kneel, they crawled. His reputation as a reformer in fact came after 1991, when he was thrust upon Narasimha Rao by the US and IMF. In fact, so much was Dr.Singh loyal to US that they wouldn’t hear of anyone other than him as the FM and made it a pre-condition for India getting the much needed IMF loan. It is well chronicled that the shrewd Narasimha Rao was not very keen on Dr.Singh, but had no choice but to take him in the Cabinet.
Reform of 1991 came about not because of the inner conviction of Dr.Singh that we have to reform, but because there was simply no choice. We faced a severe balance-of-payments crisis, and the IMF loan we needed to save the country was conditional on reforms being carried out. And so they were, and worked wonderfully well. However, once that crisis passed, the pace of reforms actually slowed. In fact Dr.Singh left an almost empty treasury in 1997 for his successors. To be fair to NDA, Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha as FMs did a commendable job of taking the reforms forward. They left the economy in a great shape in 2004 despite global recession in early 2000/2001 and the sanctions post pokhran nuclear explosion.
Dr.Singh in his current tenure as PM in fact enjoyed a very healthy period for the first 4 years. Global economy was booming, credit availability was on the high side, and there was overall global prosperity. But, as PM, Dr. Singh carried out very few reforms. To be fair to him the government depended on the support of the Left for much of this time, and they blocked many of the reforms that we need. But he also supported schemes that Nehru and Indira would have been proud of, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme—though one could argue that this was Sonia Gandhi’s baby, and he didn’t have an option. Regardless, nothing he has done in these last five years justifies his reputation as a reformer. It is no irony that the Congress party is very silent on the reforms credentials of Dr.Singh or even the nuclear deal. The Congress manifesto is a throwback to the olden days of Nehruvian socialism and has no resemblance to the modern fact of Indian reforms purportedly architected by Dr.Singh.
