“But did she not just do what she promised her supporters?” asked Dr Manmohan Singh to me on September 25, 2022, his 90th birthday.
When streams of visitors were pouring in to wish him, he was more interested in discussing the then UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’ controversial budget that she had just presented which eventually led to the collapse of her government.
This one incident conveys a lot about Dr.Singh, as I fondly called him. Nothing excited him more than nation building. He devoted his entire life to his country’s development and prosperity.
Even after stepping into his 90s, he still had a child-like curiosity about political, geo-political, social and economic developments in India and the world.
He was always looking to imbibe ideas from all around on what and what not to do for India’s development. He understood profoundly that navigating the treacherous terrain of politics was critical and inevitable to make a meaningful contribution to the nation.
But just as he sharply observed in Truss’ budget incident, he had an old-fashioned belief about leaders’ keeping their promises to people. Virtues of sincerity, integrity, loyalty and diligence mattered as much to him as free trade and poverty alleviation. He never believed that they were contradictory.
He was careful to be not dogmatic and was willing to change his views as facts changed. Be it in the importance of pursuing headline GDP growth as a sole economic objective to unabashed free trade to even his opinions on people. He listened, collected information and was open to alter his views. Most importantly, Dr Singh was a true multi-disciplinarian and, contrary to popular belief, decried a siloed technocratic approach to solving complex problems of networked societies.
There have been reams written about the 1991 economic reforms that he championed as India's finance minister and the enormous foreign policy successes that he achieved as Prime Minister. But as he often said, those were possible only because he had his resignation letter handy, ready to sacrifice power if the cause was not right.
He was able to effect dramatic turns in India's governance landscape, not only due to his intellectual heft but also through the power of his integrity and righteousness. "Be detached to power and attached to purpose", he would often tell me.
Manmohan Singh will surely fill many chapters of history books in India and the world. There will be abundant information on his governance achievements and the course of the nation under his stewardship. But the true legacy of Dr Singh, as he may have preferred, would be to inspire and motivate young people to enter public life and uphold the highest ideals in service to the nation.
His life story is about how, in the desert of political cynicism, there can be a flowing oasis. That it is possible to uphold the highest principles and still succeed in public life.
He is the reason I am in politics. His passing is deeply personal to me.
(Praveen Chakravarthy is Chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and a former political economy scholar.)
