• Home
• /
• World

India’s academic leader faces severest test

The 78-year-old bespectacled economist trained at Cambridge and Oxford, widely admired for being honest, unpretentious and intelligent, is more and more being portrayed as the clueless captain of a wallowing ship.

His seven-year-old coalition government is beset by corruption scandals, internal bickering and soaring inflation. His septuagenarian foreign minister mistakenly read another country’s speech at the United Nation recently. His bombastic home minister has become a leading voice of the cabinet.

The soft-spoken Singh, a career bureaucrat whose signature blue turban identifies him as a Sikh — a religion that borrows principles from India’s dominant religions, Hinduism and Islam — is fundamentally a reconciler, a skilled mediator among India’s many mutinous political figures. The trouble for him is that he often seems drowned out in the white noise of India’s raucous democracy.

Yet for all that, India’s economy is forecast to grow near 9 percent in fiscal 2012 (April/March), around the same blistering pace of this year, and continuing the long boom that is revolutionising this once impoverished nation of 1.2 billion people.

And with few credible challengers in his ruling Congress Party, Singh is expected to stagger on until the next parliamentary elections in 2014.

“Elections are three years away, and the state elections in three to four months time are all ones Congress will do fairly well in so there is no political pressure to get their act together right now,” said Sanjay Baru, editor of newspaper the Business Standard and Singh’s media adviser from 2004 to 2008.

“There is no immediate threat to the government as the economy is doing relatively well.”

So what India has seen over the past two years will likely continue: a lot of political noise with little or none of the economic reform needed to bring in more foreign capital and tackle infrastructure bottlenecks.

Singh himself added to decibel levels on Wednesday with unusually defensive remarks to the media.

“Whatever some people may say, that we are a lame duck government, that I am a lame duck prime minister, we take our job very seriously, we are here to govern, and to govern effectively, tackle the problems as they arise and get this country moving forward,” he said.

Avuncular Figure

A certain complacency has settled around Congress and the government. As Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal told Reuters recently: “This is a growing market. Why should they (foreign investors) not come here?”

He has a point: India could do nothing and still get heaps of foreign interest just because its numbers are so compelling — that stunning growth rate, a young demographic, an ever-swelling consumer base.

In India, Singh, who is frail after twice undergoing heart surgery, is increasingly seen as a symbolic and avuncular figure, opening conferences, making soporific speeches. But abroad he has been described as “the leader other leaders love”, the architect of India’s economic miracle.

While liberalising a state-dominated economy when he was finance minister in 1991 remains the high point in his career, as prime minister he has presided over more prosaic reforms, such as opening up the country’s $150 billion nuclear power market and freeing petrol and fertiliser pricing.

He also launched the coalition government’s most ambitious project, a rural jobs scheme that has helped greatly expand demand and the consumer base in the countryside, where most people live. Like Singh himself, the project is unspectacular yet transformational.

Some think, however, he has lost his magic.

“He occupies the position of prime minister but his political authority and ability to call the shots and give clear direction is almost gone, hence the continued drift,” said political analyst Swapan Dasgupta, former editor of India Today.

This was also the rap against him two years ago. Nevertheless, he led Congress back to power in the 2009 general election because voters embraced his reputation for honesty in a political climate tainted by corruption, and gave him credit for steering Asia’s third-largest economy through the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Now he is getting smeared by the scandal over the sale of telecoms licences at rock-bottom prices. His former telecommunications minister was sacked and arrested, and the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of censuring Singh for failing to act sooner.

At the media roundtable, Singh was clearly trying to come across as strong, feisty and determined, but at times appeared shaken, fuzzy on the facts and out of the loop. “Although complaints were coming from all sides, some from companies not benefitting (from the telecoms spectrum allocation) ... I was not in a position to make up my mind that anything seriously was wrong,” he said.

The televised roundtable may do little to improve his sagging ratings.

In a Times of India survey on Sunday, 83 percent of respondents said corruption was at an all-time high and three out of five blamed politicians for it. Less than a third believed the government was serious about the problem of corruption and almost all of those polled said graft scandals had tarnished the government’s image.

No Plan B

Talk about his imminent resignation has mounted in recent months, although Congress will most likely stick with him until the party poobahs can come up with a plan B.

The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wastes no opportunity to blame Singh for endemic corruption, and they are gaining in opinion polls. But their lack of organisation, and a failure to tout a prospective leadership candidate mean that, for now, Singh faces no strong challenger.

“I don’t see a major crisis, the big issue will be whether the government will be effective. In the long term it is not that bleak for Congress. BJP has not made a big impact despite all this,” Baru said.

“What is the fundamental difference for Manmohan Singh in the first and the second term? I think he has probably taken the view that his time is over and allow a transition to happen.”

Singh’s remarks at a leadership summit in November were telling. “It is often said these are testing times. In fact I cannot help feeling that we in India are living always through testing times. Indeed as Prime Minister I sometimes feel like a high school student going from one test to another,” he said.

The grey-bearded father of three daughters has worked for international organisations, including the United Nations, making him a less insular prime minister than many of his predecessors.

But Singh, who comes from a poor Sikh family from a part of Punjab now in Pakistan, has never won an election himself and sits in the mostly nominated upper house of parliament.

Singh was named prime minister in 2004 after the Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi — the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was assassinated in 1991 — took power in landslide elections. He was the first non-Hindu to hold the position.

Sibal, who was brought in to get to the bottom of what is potentially India’s biggest corruption scandal, objected to the notion that Singh was to blame for graft, or was ineffective.

“You have to allow ministers the responsibility to take decisions and to implement them fairly and reasonably, you do not expect the prime minister to be looking over your shoulder,” Sibal said.

“He is doing 500 things on one day. How many ministers will he look at, 72 ministers? Whose shoulder will he look over?”