MUMBAI - In India's rich cultural stew of religions, languages and communities,
few are as ridiculed and respected as the Sikhs, the minority community to
which India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh belongs.
The Indian premier, who on Tuesday night is the guest of honor at the first
state dinner hosted by US President Barack Obama, reflects the contradictions
his community faces.
Before general elections this summer, political opponents had ridiculed
Manmohan - a proxy appointee by the party chief of the ruling Congress party,
Sonia Gandhi - as a puppet with no powers and as India's weakest prime
minister. Yet the mild-mannered economics professor, despite having no
political base, became
the first premier to be re-elected after completing a full-five year term since
Jawaharlal Nehru, some four decades ago.
The contradictory success of Manmohan, 77, mirrors the contradiction in jokes
about his community - Sikhs make up just 2% of India's population, but are in
perhaps 80% of the country's jokes. Humor about Sikhs may resemble "dumb
blonde" jokes in the West, but Punjab, the home state of the Sikhs, is called
the "Granary of India" and has the highest per capita income in the country.
Sikhs are referred to as "sardarjis", a word often associated with
military authority, as Sikhs have a strong presence in the armed forces. The
term is gently mocking but at the same time respectful and affectionate.
Sardarji jokes are a rupee a dozen in India - like the two sardarjis
busy fixing a big bomb in a car, and one nervously tells the other, "What do we
do if this bomb explodes now?" The other replies: "Don't worry, I have one more
bomb."
Sardarjis cheerfully take such digs in their stride.
Ninety-four-year-old Khushwant Singh, a Sikh and one of India's best-known
journalists, even publishes sardarji jokes in his famous and utterly
harmless column, "With Malice towards One and All".
The only Sikh president of India, Giani Zail Singh, inevitably suffered jokes
about his intelligence. But Manmohan has escaped the sardarji jokes
fate, even six years into leading the world's largest and most complicated
democracy.
The sardarji jokes industry was baffled not just by Manmohan's
impressive academic past, but also by his low profile, perhaps the lowest of
any Indian prime minister. He doesn't say much and only sparingly gives media
interviews. "We have to take a balanced approach," he says.
Manmohan's "balanced approach" and low-key style have earned him the respect of
world leaders, even across political divides. Former US president George W
Bush, in a private visit to India last month, ended an informal media meet in
New Delhi on October 31 by breezily announcing: "I'm off to have lunch with my
old pal Manmohan."
"Pal Manmohan" seems a common link between the previous and the current US
presidents and their chalk-and-cheese world views. Manmohan's three-day trip to
the US will be the first state visit Barack and Michelle Obama have hosted.
"The hottest ticket in the nation's capital," was how the Chicago Tribune
described the scramble in Washington for an engraved invitation to the gala
state dinner, to be held on the White House South Lawn.
Whether Obama's choice of guest for his first state dinner reflects his respect
for Manmohan, or is a sop for greater access for US goods into India's markets,
the gesture reflects greater US efforts to keep the vegetarian Indian premier
happy.
The US's efforts may not be in vain. Manmohan has managed to shift India's
foreign policy and economic goal posts as no leader before him since Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first and longest-serving prime minister (1947-1964).
Nehru's India was a non-aligned, socialist republic with largely
state-controlled industry and a tottering economy. Four decades later, the man
Nehru's granddaughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, appointed as prime minister, has
slashed government controls and freed the economy to become the third-largest
in Asia.
A study by former World Bank director Uri Dadush's Carnegie Endowment's
International Economics Program study titled "G20 in 2050", expects India to be
the world's third-largest economy by then, after China and the US. India is
expected to be the world's fastest-growing economy over the next 40 years.
Manmohan's foreign policy changes were more controversial. His staunchly pro-US
policies not only changed the country's traditional left-of-center stance, but
also coolly overlooked the fact that he, as a proxy prime minister of a
minority government, had little mandate to make major foreign policy shifts.
There are some in India, such as those bitterly opposed to the India-US
civilian nuclear deal Manmohan signed last year, who are convinced he is
supping with the devil tonight.
But if Manmohan has overstepped his limits, he is getting away with it. India
seems to trust him, largely over his corruption-free record and his steering of
the economy, which - mirroring Manmohan's career - now seems to have come full
circle.
In 1991, when Manmohan took over as finance minister, the country went into
paroxysms of embarrassment after the government pawned 67 tonnes of gold to the
Union Bank of Switzerland and the Bank of England. India's foreign exchange
reserves had then shrunk to a record low of US$600 million, barely enough for a
month of imports.
Ahead of Manmohan's current visit to the US, 18 years later, India bought 200
tonnes of gold for about $6.7 billion from the International Monetary Fund,
almost half of the 403.3 tonnes of total IMF gold holdings. India's foreign
exchange reserves are now nearly $300 billion.
The past year has seen similar great successes for Manmohan. At a cabinet
meeting on November 27 last year, while the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were
still going on, media footage of a meeting showed him looking like an abashed
schoolboy next to a grim-faced Sonia Gandhi. She had publicly bemoaned the lack
of leadership during the terrorist crisis.
While it is unclear if they will ultimately succeed, Manmohan's efforts to
contain terrorist exports from Pakistan have at least led to India not
suffering a major terrorist strike in the past year; its first relatively
peaceful year in some time.
Receiving the red-carpet treatment at the White House and being acknowledged as
a world leader is not bad for a man who studied by candlelight as a schoolboy
because his family could not afford electricity - besides being a leader from a
community that often bears the brunt of good-natured jokes. These days, it
seems as though Manmohan and his hardworking Sikh minority are quietly having
the proverbial last laugh.
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