THE judgment of history may still be uncertain but as prime ministers go, Manmohan Singh has already established his place in the annals of statistics. The Opposition will no doubt speak of the record-breaking scams he has presided over – and I will come to that later in this essay – but let us focus, for the moment, on his more benign numerical accomplishments. He is, for example, the only prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to get re-elected after serving a full five-year term. By 2014, his occupancy of the coveted South Block office, at ten years, would have been the third longest of any of our prime ministers.

He is the first prime minister formally to embrace the concept of dual power in governance, with the task of political management vested in the hands of Congress president and United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi. (Footnote: Truth to tell, Atal Bihari Vajpayee also shared power – with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – though this was never a formal, openly acknowledged arrangement.) He is also the first prime minister in recent memory to be the head of a household completely free of the taint of personal corruption. There are no scandals surrounding his children and children-in law, sons or foster son-in-law. And though there have been jaw-dropping scams, the truth is that his is the first government in ages to allow ministers, senior bureaucrats and high-ranking politicians from the ruling party to be arrested and sent to jail.

On the legislative side too, Manmohan Singh can make credible claims of success. On his watch, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was passed, as were important laws on the Right to Information, Right to Education, perhaps on Food Security and the Lokpal too. Though the last two bills on that list were more or less forced upon him and their provisions have attracted criticism from key stakeholders, they will eventually go down in the ‘major achievements’ column of the Congress’s manifesto at the time of the next general election.

Which brings me to a question a senior official who closely follows national politics recently put to me – and all those who have started asking, with increasing urgency, ‘After Manmohan, who?’: If Manmohan Singh is in good health when 2014 comes around, and Rahul Gandhi continues to remain diffident about claiming his political ‘inheritance’, how will the Congress party be able to say that Manmohan Singh is not its prime ministerial candidate in the general election? Remember what happened just before the 2009 election. Conscious about the speculation surrounding Manmohan Singh’s status, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi both made very public declarations to the effect that he would remain PM.

2014 may not be that different, especially if the party’s campaign is built around his decade-long ‘achievements’. Of course, the assumption is that the Congress and the UPA will be in a position to form the government again, a real leap of faith given the current paralysis that seems to have beset the ruling coalition. But in the absence of the Crown Prince stepping forward himself, or nominating a trusted lieutenant like Digvijay Singh, the only scenario in which a change of horses is possible is if Singh were to step aside to be replaced by someone else – preferably, from the Gandhi family’s perspective, a nightwatchman or woman – though such an arrangement would bring no electoral advantage for the Congress and could well prove damaging.

 

Whether he leads from the front in 2014 or not, it is clear that the next general election will be entirely fought on the legacy of Manmohan Singh’s first and second innings as prime minister. At the end of 2011, of course, that legacy is looking decidedly tattered and unattractive, especially when we add the possibility of an economic slowdown to the sin of corruption. This is what the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance – as well as the Left and other anti-Congress forces – are likely to focus on. The Congress dilemma is that abandoning Manmohan Singh before the election will lend credence to the Opposition’s charge that his legacy – and, by extension, that of the UPA – is toxic. Any switch, if it is to not generate negative karma, will have to be effected earlier.

 

Though one scenario being talked about is Manmohan Singh opting for Rashtrapati Bhavan when President Pratibha Patil’s term ends in 2012, it is hard to see why a man who has been prime minister would want to be pensioned off in this manner. More than anyone else in the Indian system, it is a prime minister who knows just how ceremonial the post of president is. One of Manmohan Singh’s strengths as prime minister is his apparent lack of desperation. He is not like a Lal Krishna Advani, whose hankering for power has proved his undoing, or a Pranab Mukherjee, whose hurriedly distributed CV, in the hours after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, betrayed an ambitiousness that he has not managed to live down even 25 years later. In contrast, it is precisely Manmohan Singh’s willingness to walk away from power at crucial points in his battle with the Opposition (for example, over the nuclear deal) or the Congress High Command on various issues, that has slowly turned this economist, bureaucrat and central banker into one of India’s most underrated and formidable political survivors.

As a great survivor, Manmohan Singh knows two and a half years is an incredibly long time in politics. If he can only get the UPA government to deal with the economy, put up a functioning Lokpal, ensure that some of the bigwigs involved in the 2G spectrum and Commonwealth Games scams are convicted, and use the proposed new food security law to improve the quality of life of the poorest Indians, his legacy as prime minister could well become unbeatable at the hustings.

While this rosy scenario cannot be written off at this juncture, there are two failings that Manmohan Singh has to address as prime minister if he wants to stand a reasonable chance of turning around the ruling coalition’s fortunes. The first is to restore the sanctity of institutions and to respect their independence and autonomy. The second is to end the appalling indecisiveness and confusion on crucial domestic issues such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Maoist insurgency, Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Telangana and minority policy.

 

In his interaction with a small group of editors in the summer of 2011, Manmohan Singh provided a textbook illustration of just where he has gone wrong as far as his approach towards institutions is concerned. Asked about the perception that he was presiding over a government which allowed huge scams in the telecom and other sectors to take place, and that he had acted only when his hand was forced by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Singh said the decisions which the CAG has cited as evidence of irregularities were all taken in good faith under conditions of uncertainty. ‘If out of 10 decisions that I take, seven turn out to be right ex-post, that would be considered an excellent performance,’ he said. ‘But if you have a system which is required to perform [in] 10 out of 10 cases, no system can be effective and satisfy that onerous condition.’

His second argument was to attack the bearers of bad tidings, accusing the CAG of going beyond the limits prescribed by the Constitution, and the media of being judge, jury and executioner rolled into one. This statement of the prime minister prompted a written rebuttal by the CAG, Vinod Rai, who cited not just the Constitution of India but also High Court judgments and precedent to justify the sweeping nature of the audit exercise and the imperative of informing the media about important audit findings.

 

In the same meeting, the prime minister also invoked the spectre of India becoming a police state – a situation ‘where everybody is policing everybody else’ and the entrepreneurial spirit of our businessmen is crushed – if the present atmosphere of ‘cynicism’ about government decisions continued. Finally, he sought to puncture the popular demand for a strong and effective Lokpal, saying an ombudsman of that kind was not a panacea. Instead, he suggested the government’s Unique ID programme might be the magic wand people are looking for: ‘If …[we] can give unique ID numbers to all our residents, we would have discovered a new pathway to eliminate the scope for corruption and leakages in the management and distribution of various subsidies.’

Taken together, these arguments tell us not only how far the government is from reality but also how divorced the Congress and its leaders are from the political pulse of the country. To begin with, it is doubtful whether any of the decisions which have proved this government’s undoing were taken under conditions of uncertainty. Take the 2G spectrum allocation issue. Manmohan Singh knew that the decision to auction spectrum was questionable. Like a risk-averse bureaucrat, however, he recorded his objections on paper before letting the telecom minister, A. Raja, have his way. What he forgot, of course, was that he was not a bureaucrat but a prime minister, and a top-notch economist to boot.

 

Economics teaches us that whether the government prices spectrum properly or not, the market will. Any scarce asset allocated preferentially is bound to change hands until its true value is realized. This, in essence, was what the 2G scam was all about. As an economist, Singh would surely have suspected that selling spectrum for less than its market value would generate rent-seeking behaviour by both the minister and the telecom industry. And as prime minister, he had the administrative and investigative wherewithal to nip this corruption in the bud.

Manmohan Singh now says he shouldn’t be blamed for not acting on the basis of newspaper reports. But there was a context to those reports which he knew only too well, since he had already red-flagged A. Raja’s decision to avoid an open auction. The minute the stories surfaced of the telecom ministry cherry-picking companies for the coveted licenses, alarm bells should have started ringing in his office. But he kept his counsel. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) eventually got around to raiding the telecom ministry, but made no headway whatsoever for several months. It was only when the CAG report documented in cold print the theft which had taken place, that the government realized inaction was no longer a viable political strategy. But even as the CBI moved finally to make arrests, the Congress party attacked the CAG for over-reaching itself. While Manmohan Singh did well not to repeat the folly of Kapil Sibal’s ‘zero loss’ theory, he did accuse the constitutionally-mandated auditing watchdog of overstepping its mandate.

This disrespect for the office of the CAG is of a piece with the manner in which the Manmohan Singh government tried to subvert the principle of consensus in the appointment of the Central Vigilance Commissioner, and the utter disinterestedness of the prime minister in ensuring that important institutions like the National Human Rights Commission, the National Women’s Commission, among others, are staffed by credible individuals concerned about the subject area of their charge instead of as an outpost for rest, recreation and perks.

 

The prime minister could afford to be dismissive about corruption in his meeting with editors because the reality of the Anna tide had not hit, and the resonance that the ‘Lokpal’ question would strike a chord with millions of people across the country, was not anticipated. But he is fortunate that Anna happened halfway through his current term rather than closer to the end. There is ample time for effecting a course correction, but this means that the Congress has to give up its habit of seeking tactical political victories, the cumulative effect of which invariably carries less potency than the strategic blunders it ends up committing as a result.

The zero loss logic, the attack on the CAG, the disastrous handling of Anna Hazare and his team, the reduction of politics to the use of ‘cards’, will all prove disastrous when the next general election comes around. The intellectual in Manmohan Singh knows this, the bureaucrat in him doesn’t. The body of his work as prime minister is a product of the struggle between these two personalities. No matter which aspect gains dominance at any given time, there is no denying the fact that he is driven by ideas, by an agenda larger than himself. One may agree or disagree with his agenda, but this quality of his still sets him apart from the rest.