Dr Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India and the architect of India’s economic reforms in the early nineties, who passed away on the night of 26 December 2024, was a versatile genus with humility and compassion.

As the nation mourns his loss, I reflect on a profoundly personal and cherished memory of meeting him on 18th April 2003. At the time, I was an ordinary doctoral candidate at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, diligently working on my research about the Congress Party's Economic Policies and Strategies since 1991. 

Desperately seeking insights from Congress leaders, I sent a humble telegram message to his office. At that time, Dr Singh was the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. To my astonishment, just two days later, a call came to my friend’s landline in JNU, informing me that Dr Singh had graciously agreed to an interview at his office in Parliament Annex.  

Filled with excitement and apprehension, I arrived there with a tape recorder and a list of questions.  Initial challenges with security only heightened my nerves, but eventually, I found myself in Dr Singh's presence. Despite his busy schedule, he carefully reviewed my questionnaire and, seeing its length, arranged a meeting at his official residence the next day. 

The following day, when my friend and I reached his residence, Dr Singh welcomed us warmly at his doorstep, his genuine smile immediately putting me at ease. What was supposed to be a one-hour interview extended to nearly one and a half hours, during which he patiently and thoughtfully answered each question, elaborating with remarkable clarity.

During my interview with Manmohan Singh, he touched upon various aspects of the economic reforms he carried out as the finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government during 1991-96.  

I share below the gist of the interview and the insights gained in this unforgettable interaction with this remarkable and legendary personality.  

The economic reforms of the early 1990s cannot be seen as a sudden initiative on the part of the Narasimha Rao government. Even in the 1980s, there was a growing recognition that the economic policies were not yielding the desired results.

India's time-tested import substitution policies were not effective, industrial licensing was in a fragmented capacity, infrastructure was neither efficient nor employment intensive, foreign exchange was not at the desired level, and corruption and uncertainty afflicted the economy. Since the economy was not responding to these problems, there was a need to change the economic policy as such. Most of the committees appointed during this period suggested import liberalisation and more spaces for the private sector.

The economic reforms were, in some ways, a departure from the earlier economic policies of the Indian National Congress (INC), especially those of the Nehruvian era. In other ways, it also entailed a continuation of the liberalisation policies of Indira Gandhi in her second term and those of the Rajiv Gandhi era. The drastic economic reform initiative, like the New Economic Policy (NEP), was not a serious subject of discussion within Parliament as there was not enough time to debate these initiatives internally due to the acute fiscal crisis.

While accepting the role of subsidies in helping the disadvantaged sections of the community, Manmohan Singh argued that India could not subsidize all things endlessly. He was pretty critical of the perception that even the US was providing subsidies to its agricultural sector while insisting that other developing countries reduce their subsidies for the farm sector.  In the US, farmers are around 2-3 percent of the population, and it was possible to subsidize that small segment.  On the contrary, in India, 70% of the population is in the agricultural sector.

However, the unwanted subsidies should be scrapped in certain areas.

Dr Singh even asserted that despite the reform measures, India would remain a mixed economy with the collaboration of both public and private sectors. India's public expenditure touched about 30-33 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which could not be reduced. 

While affirming the Congress party’s commitment to the broader framework of the mixed economy, he argued that the state should get out of areas where it was not efficient and become more involved in areas where it alone could deliver goods, infrastructure, education, health, and environmental protection, agricultural research and development, etc.

Economic reforms and identity politics

Manmohan Singh does not find any link between the emergence of identity politics and the economic reforms in the 1990s. While rejecting the idea that the socially marginalized sections were alienated from the Congress due to the market-driven economic policies, he argued that since the Congress was a national party, a coalition of various castes, interests, regional entities, and religious, identity-based parties were a threat to it.

The identity-based parties can promise everything to their constituents but cannot deliver, while the Congress cannot promise, but it can deliver. Since the Congress, by definition, is an umbrella party, a balance of various interests is essential, and it has its advantages and disadvantages in the democratic politics of India.

On the defeat of the Indian National Congress in the 1996 general election, Dr Singh disagreed with the argument that the party had lost the election due to the adverse impact of the economic reforms.  He saw the defeat owning to two discrete tendencies of the pre-reform era – Mandalisation and Hindutva.

Mandal politics fragmented the consensus among the diverse social groups in the 1990s.  Primordial identities like caste and religion acquired political power, thereby shrinking Congress’s political space. 

Secondly, the emergence of Hindu nationalism, which was in one way in response to the Mandalisation, as manifested in the upsurge of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), created religious polarization in Indian politics. The emergence of caste, religion, and regional identities in Indian politics is in the Congress vote base. The 1996 election verdict explicitly manifested the continuation of the fragmented politics that started during economic reform.

Building consensus over economic reforms

The BJP's brief stint in 1996 saw a receding ideological opposition to economic liberalisation between the ruling party, the BJP, and the main opposition party, the Congress. Dr Singh felt that there was broad national consensus among all political parties, cutting across the left, right, and centrist, as there was no alternative paradigm to deliver.

The BJP government, in fact, intensified economic reforms in various sectors. The privatisation of the public sector was replaced by a more fashionable word, disinvestment, and a separate disinvestment ministry was formed. 

While critiquing the BJP’s disinvestment policy, Dr Singh viewed that there should be more competition between the public and private sectors on an equal footing. Though all public sector enterprises may not be able to make a reasonable profit under competitive conditions, he felt, they still did not need privatisation. Dr Singh even objected to calling the economic reforms of the BJP government as second-generation reforms. 

He, however, saw the political motive of the BJP government in differentiating its activities from those of the Congress. The reform process initiated by the Rao government was a comprehensive agenda, he emphasized.

In his opinion, all major political parties in India were in the process of introspection since the world was undergoing changes. The stubbornness in their ideologies was quickly diminishing. While there was criticism on the outside, an area of consensus was developing among the political parties on the economic reforms. Both the Congress and the BJP were converging to pragmatism. 

Even the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) were diluting their stand on the reforms.

While the Congress was a critique of the BJP government’s economic policies at the national level, various congress governments in the states were also pursuing vigorous reforms. Dr Singh endorsed the reforms by the state governments of Congress. In his opinion, the state governments were facing fiscal constraints, and there was no option before them but to accept the ongoing reforms. The union government could create money through deficit financing, but the state governments could not, so financial bankruptcy forced them to adopt the reforms.  

His assertion was loud and clear: economic reforms must stay in India despite political changes at the centre and the states.

An inimitable legacy

In a nation known for its political stalwarts, it was a rare and unique twist of fate that an economist, who described himself as an ‘extinguished’ rather than a ‘distinguished’ one, came out of nowhere and took the helms of a failing economy, resuscitated it to global standing, and was chosen to eventually lead the nation and emerge as a globally-respected statesman.

While Manmohan Singh’s legacy will be cast in stone for his grand economic vision that transformed India into the world’s fastest-growing economy, the place he has etched out for himself in independent Indian history was one of an inscrutable, unassuming and modest leader who could initiate transformative governance in a country on the cusp of its own great leap forward, and yet doing it without much ardency, vehemence or cacophony.  

Even as we celebrate the virtues of economic liberalization, notwithstanding the battering the resultant reforms were subjected to in its initial years, Manmohan Singh’s legacy is also about securing India’s place at the global high tables, reinforcing its international standing and kickstarting a new era of strategic partnerships with the great powers, particularly the United States of America.  

Through the nuclear deal of 2005-2008, announced through the India-US joint statement of 18 July 2005, India’s status as a State with Nuclear Weapons outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the cornerstone treaty governing global nuclear affairs, was formalized, which not just removed the stigma of its nuclear weapons but also enabled its uninterrupted access to global nuclear commerce.

The deal also marked the beginning of a strategic partnership between India and the US, after decades of estrangement, even while its historic friendship with great powers like Russia remained intact, as much as its strategic autonomy.

Dr Singh’s exit from office in 2014 was largely ignominious, thanks to the alleged corruption scandals none of which have achieved legal fruition even a decade later, and for which Manmohan Singh felt that “history will be kinder to him than the Indian media.” However, lost in the din was the immense significance of his transformative governance initiatives.

These include the Right to Information (RTI), which empowered citizens and enhanced accountability of public institutions on an unprecedented scale; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), which provided India’s rural economy with the much-needed stimulus and drove rural employment and incomes; the Unique Identify project, which facilitated Aadhaar, as a single point instrument for citizens to access public services besides providing them with a national identity number; Right to Education, which instituted the fundamental right for all children, irrespective of gender and social category, to have access to education.

Other significant initiatives like the National Rural Health Mission and the establishment of Central Universities in all states need no emphasis other than to affirm that the significance of these transformative policies and reforms is yet to be befittingly given their pride of place in contemporary dialectics on the nation or when evaluating Dr Singh’s legacy.

As is evident from the messages pouring in from all parts of the world in the hours after his demise, history is indeed now being kinder to him.