Economical with his words, but gentle in his phrasing, the conversations he struck up were with the times. And he persuaded the times to change.
That was Dr Manmohan Singh, the self-effacing savant who rose to perform two big roles for an India in transition — that of Prime Minister and finance minister. In both roles, he is likely to win a contest with history for having been the most clean of spirit and genuinely courteous, the most knowledgeable and, arguably, the most transformational.
Perhaps only India’s first Prime Minister could run him close. If Jawaharlal Nehru was the founder-statesman of independent India, the guardian spirit of our formative decades, it was Manmohan who fathered the India we see around us today. Its architect, its engineer, its reticent philosopher.
When another gnomic Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, picked a safari suit-clad ex-RBI governor as his second choice FM in 1991, it was in a country not yet out of a long famine of new ideas and fresh energy, also one wracked by a decade of militancy, riots and assassinations.
Everyone associates Manmohan Singh’s FM years for the way he clanged open the shutters of the Indian economy, the wholesale shift to the so-called Washington Consensus. That became grist for interminable debates — eliciting hurrahs, protectionist fears from local industry and trenchant socialist critique all at once.
It didn’t register much in that moment how the unleashing of India’s free market “animal spirits”, to use one of his favourite phrases, helped sublimate animal spirits of the other kind.
New cities came up, new landscapes of desire, malls, TV channels, affordable flights, mint-fresh IT industries, the telecom boom, the Internet, global cuisine on the local thali — in fact, everything we now know India to be experientially. We perhaps didn’t then realise how much all of that healed us from other traumas of the past.
That silent therapeutic effect scaled up to another level during Manmohan’s decade-long incumbency at 7 Race Course Road. Instant historians often saw only the ‘notional losses’, the long-range lens captures some of India’s best growth years, qualitatively deepened with humane reform.
But that was not all. Did India really have a Prime Minister from a minority community for a whole decade — and nobody didn’t even much notice? Yes, till just the other day.
That’s the kind of conversation Manmohan Singh had with history, the future and the present, in his quiet monotone. That will not die away.
