Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar

The importance of being Manmohan Singh

When sessions judges and metropolitan magistrates finally let historians get on with the task of brushing off public prurience from the crust of historical reality to get at the truth below, it is probable that the single act which historians will consider as defining the P V Narasimha Rao era would be his startlingly imaginative, innovative and totally unexpected appointment of Dr Manmohan Singh as his finance minister: and the unstinted political backing he gave his finance minister over five long years, notwithstanding the relentless efforts of Manmohan's detractors, outside the party but much more importantly within, to pull down this Johny-come-lately technocrat and put in his place a full-blooded vintage politician.

It was Rao's Congress predecessor, Rajiv Gandhi, who had exiled Manmohan to the outer reaches of the South Commission. True, it was a prestigious (and, for the relatively impecunious Manmohan, a fairly lucrative) post, and true too that Manmohan had been spared at the express behest of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the Grand Old Man of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Rising Star Mahathir Mohammad, the Malaysian prime minister, but there was no denying that in Geneva, the headquarters of the South Commission, Dili dur ast.

And when Manmohan returned to India, it was Chandra Shekhar who claimed him to his bosom, appointing him as chief economic advisor to the prime minister to help him tide over the unprecedented crisis that was overtaking the economy. Manmohan soon realised that without a real government in Delhi, it would be impossible to restore that intangible thing - confidence - which is at the root of all good economic governance.

It was at this juncture that I earned my little footnote in history. I was sent by Rajiv Gandhi to sound out Manmohan on what needed to be done. He was in his sick-bed when I arrived up unannounced. His wife kindly led me to his bedside and there ensued a brief conversation, with my having to almost put my ear against Manmohan's mouth to catch what he was attempting to say through a very sore throat.

I reported back; other contacts followed - and although Rajiv did not live to win that election, Narasimha Rao's very first act as prime minister was to rush Manmohan to his North Block office even before the formalities of swearing in and the allotment of portfolios were quite over.

Within days, one man, in the manner of Horatio on the bridge over the River Tiber or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, saved an entire nation. Confidence was restored. The rest was mostly paper-work.

It is this ability to inspire confidence that is now turning a neo-political into the Congress party trump-card for the restoration of its declining fortunes. It has taken the Congress party's most political politician to see this - and act on it. In an ethos in which the sensitised classes are turning to non-political Holy Grails, the only way of restoring legitimacy to the democratic process is to restore confidence in the democratic process.

Civil service mavericks like Seshan, Khairnar and Alphonse cannot give sustenance to the political system without themselves becoming part of the political system. And judges cannot be the answer unless we wish to replace the political process by the judicial process.

In the end, the answer must come from within. Confidence in the political system has to be restored by the political system. And in Manmohan, democracy has found a politician who can restore public confidence in the democratic system.

True, he is, at any rate relatively speaking, a political neophyte, but a neophyte who has survived the longest stretch ever in that most political of all positions next only to the prime minister's - the finance ministry. There he was badgered, no less than his predecessors were badgered, by illegitimate demands from self-centred and, therefore, short-sighted politicians. He resisted these demands. That requires not only personal probity of a high moral order but also some pretty deft political footwork.

No one doubts that deft footwork would not of itself have protected and preserved him. It was the patronage of the prime minister that kept him in office in the face of the grumbling and the growling of the hardened politicos.