A report card? Ha! Play school stuff, I say. But, we mean serious business at ET. It’s time to take stock of Manmohan Singh’s performance. Better expand the scoreboard to include one-year of UPA government’s performance at the Centre. And then, why give tradition a miss. ET’s been doing this report card reporting for so many years now. We did it for Narasimha Rao’s stint at the Centre, when Manmohan Singh drove the reforms bus to the global village, only to push the brake too hard mid-way through his tenure as FM. And then, for Deve Gowda’s Humpty Dumpty coalition. And Inder Gujral too. If memory serves me right, we did one for Vajpayee’s 13-day stint as well, before the old guard of the Hindutva brigade came back for a full-term in office.
Now it’s Manmohan Singh’s turn at the helm. Better still, why not get down to a one-year stock taking since the great renunciation act that shook Indian democracy, installing a proxy head of government for the people, not quite by the people. Just come to think of it, here’s a prime minister installed by a party boss who never quite had the mandate to install a person who had once lost his only elections. And that too on the reforms plank. Which is quite like saying, you go and give my boards for me, and I’ll announce myself the topper. The purpose gets defeated.
Of course, this is not quite the same thing as saying that Manmohan Singh is a defeated man. He never was. And at the end of it all, he’ll always be a winner — the son of a middle-class trader, uprooted from his moorings by the rumblings of partition, doing well in school, taking up academics as full-time vocation, before settling down to an anonymous life of a babu in the corridors of power in Delhi, and finally, by sheer chance of providence, emerging as the ultimate symbol of power. Makes for an impressive CV. But that’s just about it. If the incumbent prime minister is a man of a dream curriculum vitae, we should report the life and times of Manmohan. Why just a one-year report card on his government? That calls for different stuff.
And that stuff’s made up of several images. Of mirages, rather than milestones. The forex kitty is bulging at $142 billion. But it’s been bulging over the $100 billion mark for some time now. Inflation is down with a 5.64% rise. But it’s been quite a while since you last heard of galloping prices. Exports are booming. But they have been booming 10 years in a row. Software earnings are up, telephones have penetrated deeper, and textiles are on a spin. So far so good. But what do they tell us of the government? India’s been doing well in software services because all these years the government never knew what to do with people who would have otherwise queued up at employment exchanges all over the country. Telephones have reached the masses, not because this government went that extra mile to wire up our homes and offices, but because people running the telecom businesses proved smarter than those running the government. Even textiles, where industry watchers are placing their next big bet, is happening, not because the government willed it so, but because global demand for cheaper clothing is forcing down barriers to international trade and shifting manufacturing bases from the more prosperous western economies. In fact, this whole business of outsourcing from India, which started with call centre services, and now promises to revolutionise the entire manufacturing chain, is happening because, the West no longer considers these profitable business ventures. One day, there will even be large scale movement of manpower out of India because a man named Bill Gates willed it so.
India is on a growth path. But it’s been so for 15 uninterrupted years. And it’s been on an upward trajectory even during the times of political upheavals. Remember the Third Front? There comes a time in the history of a nation when the force of circumstances propels it to massive civilisational changes beyond the imagination of its political masters. Then, individuals hardly matter.
So, what does all this make of Manmohan Singh’s report card? Quite frankly, he never asked for one himself. History will remember Manmohan Singh as the right man in the right job at the right point of time. Period!
That’s enough for general remarks? A report card can wait.
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