Manmohan: Nothing ventured,
nothing lost By Ashok Malik
NEW DELHI - Just two years into his first
and almost certainly final term as India's most
educated and inherently most non-political prime
minister, Manmohan Singh is contemplating the big
six-letter word: legacy. What will history
remember him for?
It's a question that
must eat into him. After all, before he became
prime minister - handed the job when the Congress
party president, Sonia Gandhi, turned it down -
the answer would have been easy. Manmohan was the
distinguished technocrat who, as finance minister
in 1991, opened India's economy to the world.
Today, the picture isn't quite as clear.
Manmohan seems less and less in control of the
government. His Congress party colleagues regard
him as a stopgap until such time as Sonia's son
Rahul
Gandhi, 36, is ready to lead.
(Indeed, one political commentator has referred to
the Singh prime ministry as "The Regency".)
The numerous smaller parties that
participate in the Congress-led United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) consider Manmohan a political
lightweight, not the person to speak to if you
want to cut deals with Big Sister. In recent
weeks, despite the best efforts of diligent spin
doctors in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), it
has become difficult to explain away Manmohan's
inability to rein in senior ministers as merely
"an example of the traditionally chaotic democracy
in the Congress". In its worst moments, this
government is a free-for-all.
This has
brought into serious doubt elements of Manmohan's
planned three-pronged legacy:
Sustained if politically calibrated economic
reforms that would push India's GDP (gross
domestic product] growth rates to 10% and more for
the coming decade.
Focused interventions - from biotechnology in
agriculture to spreading higher-education
facilities to remote areas - that would ameliorate
inequities.
A growing relationship with the United States,
giving a political-strategic seal to a
social-economic relationship and accepting,
however vaguely, the potential of this partnership
in the 21st century.
The sum of this
legacy, to quote an official in the PMO, would be:
"the peaceful rise of India ... An India not
suspicious of the world but willing to engage it,
on its own terms".
Yet that proposed
legacy is at risk.
For a start, economic
reform is decidedly in the slow lane. The Left
Front - a collective of four Marxist parties that
supports the UPA in parliament but isn't part of
the government - continues its role as an in-house
opposition. It has scuttled privatization and
snarls at even sales of minority stakes in
state-owned companies. It has shut the gates on
greater foreign direct investment in retail, and
has opposed changes in labor laws.
A few
weeks ago, a junior commerce minister made a
speech cautioning against free trade agreements
with, among others, countries belonging to the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations and warned
that these would hurt Indian producers. He
contradicted his senior minister as well as the
prime minister. Yet, only days later, Sonia wrote
to Manmohan making the same protectionist points.
Ironically, it has taken a Manmohan Singh
government to talk down business sentiment and
temper the "India story". "Eight percent growth
rates are still possible," said an economist, "but
that's a low-hanging fruit. Without more reforms
we won't reach the 10-12% rates we need to even
seriously compete with China." Then there's
everybody's favorite bogeyman - the United States.
In mid-2005, Manmohan and US President George W
Bush announced negotiations for a possible
agreement that would allow India to import
civilian nuclear technology while retaining its
military program.
This deal, a key
component of which will probably be decided upon
by the US Congress next month, amounts to a de
facto legitimization of India's bomb and ends an
embargo going back to 1974, when India conducted
its first nuclear test. Not surprisingly, the
implications of the Indo-US deal excite New
Delhi's strategic thinkers and intelligentsia -
Manmohan's natural constituency.
Yet the
deal has come at a price. As an aspiring power,
and in keeping with its self-perception as a
stabilizing force in South Asia, India has had to
set aside the adventurism that historically marked
its diplomacy: sending off a foreign minister
publicly to embrace Saddam Hussein weeks after he
invaded Kuwait, for example, or its reflexive
Third Worldism or the hostility shown to Israel by
issuing more supportive gestures to Palestinian
groups than most Muslim countries.
This
shift has been reflected in a nuanced but
consistent opposition to Iran's acquisition of
nuclear weapons. It was also apparent when
Manmohan skipped the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization's recent summit. As one Foreign
Office representative in Delhi explained, "We
didn't really need to share the stage with
[Iranian President] Mahmud Ahmadinejad ...
Besides, the SCO is part of a subtle America-China
tussle in Central Asia. India is not a big factor
in the region. So why get involved?"
Not
everybody agrees with this interpretation. The
move toward the United States actually began under
the previous government, led by the Congress'
chief rival the Bharatiya Janata Party, and to
that extent it can hardly be described as
freelancing by a non-representative prime
minister. This has coincided with a growing
distrust between the US and Muslim communities
worldwide. Muslims in India have not been immune
to this.
The cocktail of Iran, the nuclear
deal and Bush's visit to India in March was potent
enough for the left to use it to canvass for
Muslim support in state elections this summer,
when the Congress and the Marxists fought each
other. This could be repeated in Uttar Pradesh - a
large state where every fourth voter is a Muslim
and which goes to polls this winter.
Manmohan's biggest problem, however, is
that his party hasn't backed him wholeheartedly on
the America front. This could be for one of three
reasons. First, the Congress party doesn't want to
be painted as anti-Muslim by its domestic
opponents. Second, a residual anti-Americanism - a
remnant of the 1970s - is still part of Congress'
baggage.
Third, nobody wants to give
Manmohan absolute credit for a blockbuster deal.
The Congress party - and Sonia too, perhaps -
don't want him to fall flat, but they don't want
him to shine and soar, either. Such attributes
rightfully belong to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty,
which has provided three of the Congress' five
prime ministers and thinks it has a fourth in the
wings.
In this situation, mere survival
looks to Manmohan like an alluring end in itself.
This means his ability to achieve great things in
office will always be constrained. Paradoxically,
it could also mean nobody sees any real need to
replace him and that he stays on as prime minister
until his terms ends in 2009.
As the first
rule of politics goes: nothing ventured, nothing
lost. It may be Manmohan Singh's motto for the
next three years.
Ashok Malik is
a journalist based in New Delhi. He can be
contacted at malikashok@gmail.com.
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