Opinion
The understated leadership of Manmohan Singh was rare and inspirational
Summary
- He was gentle, self-assured and open to all views, with a keen ear for those who disagreed. These are valuable qualities for decision-makers who must resist groupthink, especially in sycophantic workplaces.
A year into his undergraduate degree in economics at Cambridge, Manmohan Singh found his scholarship from Punjab University was not adequate for his expenses there. He occasionally had to resort to skipping meals or making do with a Cadbury’s bar.
He wrote an abject letter to a close friend asking for £12-13 in each of the coming two years. Two months later, a money order for £3 arrived. It was all his friend could afford in the budget-straitened 1950s. Soon after, the results of Manmohan Singh’s first-year exams made him confident he would receive additional funding from his Oxbridge college.
According to Daman Singh’s memoir of her parents’ lives, Strictly Personal, Singh immediately wrote to dissuade his friend from sending any more money.
Also read: India should advocate trade optimism in Manmohan Singh’s honour
To understand how much India’s economy has changed thanks to Singh’s stint as finance minister, one need only contrast the relative ease with which middle-class and upper middle-class Indians send their children overseas or even travel abroad for destination parties with the deprivations Singh experienced. Fast forward to the early part of his stint as finance minister.
Among the reforms were two successive devaluations of the rupee and a unifying of the exchange rate, paving the way for rupee convertibility on the current account. To look back at the early 90s is to marvel at how an unwieldy coalition government that did not have a majority in Parliament tackled so much so efficiently.
In addition to trade and industrial licensing reforms, the government also brought down personal and corporate taxes and embarked on banking reforms. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati noted the sequencing of reforms was so rapid that the opposition struggled to coalesce around a single issue.
In some instances, such as the second rupee devaluation, even prime minister Narasimha Rao sought to stop it, but the Reserve Bank of India had moved ahead already. Montek Singh Ahluwalia recounts in Backstage that these budgets were prepared with music audible from bands rehearsing for the Republic Day parade not far from North Block, which perhaps explains how reforms were done on a war-footing.
Coincidence and circumstance come so elegantly woven together in Manmohan Singh’s life that much of it seems a fairytale. If the protagonist had not been so modest, quite literally to a fault, we might have benefitted more from his personal example.
But, the circumstances of losing his mother when he was barely a toddler might have played a role in making him the understated man he was. As early as his defence of his PhD thesis on India’s export pessimism, published as a well-reviewed book in 1964, his advisors at Oxford thought he needed to be more forceful in putting his well-reasoned points across, just as many did when he failed to discipline cabinet members when he was prime minister.
You would have to be a Salman Rushdie-style magical realist to have predicted that someone whose thesis looked at six industry groups and sought to explain why our export market share was declining in the 1950s would be picked to be finance minister decades later to tackle these very issues.
The story of his family unexpectedly receiving a phone call from the prime minister’s office in the summer of 1991 is trumped only by that of John Maynard Keynes being summoned from Cambridge to London in 1914 to, in effect, stop a run on the Bank of England as World War I began.
Also read: Manmohan Singh: A testament to the power of quiet conviction
In an eulogy, it would be customary to say that Singh’s legacy will long outlive him. In material terms, this is self-evidently true, but otherwise not. India’s current account deficit is not a concern today, thanks to our buoyant services exports. Yet, New Delhi remains a reluctant liberalizer. Our manufactured exports story is one of serial underachievement.
Successive budgets have raised tariffs on a swathe of goods, hobbling our small and medium enterprises. Export controls are imposed almost as erratically, as they were in the pre-1991 era. Fanciful China-plus-one claims and projections of $1 trillion in goods exports by 2030 are used as justifications for a widening subsidy raj through Make in India.
Boosterish headlines of iPhone exports appear against the backdrop of a general loss of export competitiveness and an overvalued rupee. A recent article in The Economist underlines that India’s workforce is only three-quarters of China’s because so few Indian women work compared to that country, whose workers are also far better educated, and that our workforce will not overtake theirs until the 2040s.
Singh’s personal example of unfailing courtesy and gentle leadership also made him an outlier. A bank union leader, charmed by finance minister Singh walking him to the door after trying to placate his concerns about computerization, said he opposed Singh’s ideas but that his son was a fervent supporter.
Having journeyed from New York for a cover story on Singh for Fortune magazine in 1992, I became tongue-tied when I entered his office. Alert to the bizarre challenge of trying to coax a journalist to speak, Singh made small talk till I recovered.
In a touching tribute, former foreign secretary Shyam Saran recalls he once felt the need to apologize to Singh after a spirited disagreement on India’s stance on climate change. Singh made light of it, saying that Saran would not be of much use as an advisor if he parroted Singh’s words.
In a country of reflexive ‘sirring’ and sycophantic work cultures, we need more leaders like Singh.
Also read: Manmohan Singh, the leader who liberalized India
