200 days on, missing Dr Singh

History will judge me, Manmohan Singh said in his last comments as Prime Minister. It was 200 days on Thursday since he relinquished office.

I am not surprised how some of his erstwhile critics are already missing him though they may not regard his party with similar respect.

For all his sins of omission and commission, which include serious financial scandals, there was something pleasantly dignified about Dr Singh.

President Barack Obama approached him as an intellectual guru. The Japanese emperor honoured him with the highest civilian award for a foreigner. Dr Singh didn’t tom-tom it.

He embodied India’s cultural sinews in his genteel person, and though a religious man, he didn’t find it necessary to underscore the heritage by gifting religious scriptures to all and sundry.

There was something wholesome he brought to India’s highest political office with markedly agreeable atmospherics. I recall reading his wife Gursharan Kaur’s comments where she spoke generously of Sonia Gandhi.

Why? Because the Congress president had remembered that the Prime Minister’s wife was searching in vain for Sheila Dhar’s Ragan Josh.

The out-of-print book is an anecdotal masterpiece on India’s illustrious musicians, their quirks and their bad day out.

Personal insights about stalwarts like Begum Akhtar, Bhimsen Joshi, Vilayat Khan, Rais Khan among others are a treat for Indian music lovers. Sonia Gandhi remembered to find her a copy.

What could be more lovely than prime ministerial spouses exchanging books on music. And what did Shakespeare say through Julius Caesar about people like Cassius with no ear for music?

“He doesn’t like plays the way you do, Antony. He doesn’t listen to music. He rarely smiles, and when he does smile, he does so in a self-mocking way, as if he scorns himself for smiling at all. Men like him will never be comfortable while someone ranks higher than themselves, and therefore they’re very dangerous.”

Though I have never met them, I feel proud for India that in the not-too-distant past its Prime Minister had three very talented and dignified daughters a writer, a human rights lawyer who has fought for migrants’ rights in the United States, and a much-respected professor of Indian history. They never imposed themselves as the Prime Minister’s relatives and, I am told, they lead very low key and intellectually contented lives.

If quiet dignity marked his personal life, a genial countenance made him an ideal representative of Gandhi’s and Nehru’s India. In the bigger picture, relations with Pakistan and China were difficult, sometimes prickly, but they were never allowed to become cavalier.

There was no tu-tu mai-mai, an ugly blame game. Mumbai terror was a huge setback, in some ways more provocative than the attack on Parliament during his predecessor’s tenure.

To Dr Singh’s credit he managed to deal with the crisis without mobilising the armed forces. He used diplomatic tact instead, and leaned on global goodwill to put Pakistan under scrutiny as a source of cross-border trouble to its neighbours.

It wasn’t an easy decision to not send the military to the borders given the mob-like chorus for revenge from an increasingly xenophobic media. Indian voters to their credit rewarded Dr Singh’s sagacity with a second term.

When the Chinese rattled their sabres, he stared them down. When Pakistan-based militants allegedly beheaded Indian soldiers, he didn’t say he would get 10 of theirs. He just spoke to their Prime Minister as a civilised neighbour would.

There was little or no risk of nuclear suicide during his 10 year rule, compared with two close calls in the six years headed by his immediate predecessor.

Unlike in recent days there was no public discourse from the highest office or talk of punitive cross border strikes. If the powder was kept dry it was not announced from the pulpit.

At home, prospects of large scale riots or religiously inspired genocide were mostly unthinkable under Dr Singh’s watch although cynical Congress Party satraps and the communal Opposition never stopped trying to create electorally handy polarisation.

Dr Singh knew his economics though he abused it by offering untenable prescriptions, which mostly militated against his self-proclaimed icon Jawaharlal Nehru’s equitable vision for India.

He allowed himself to be advised by some very accomplished social and environmental activists in the form of the National Advisory Council, which was headed by Sonia Gandhi.

It was clean, visionary, often ambitious-in-scope but always secular advice from respected academics and assorted hands on social workers. No obscurantist maverick, much less religio-fascist ideologues of a rapidly multiplying variety were allowed close to the apex situation room.

And yet Dr Singh’s legacy carries unacceptable blemishes. He created hope among the minorities with a diligent report on their hapless living conditions, but failed to follow up with worthwhile structural reforms to bring them into the mainstream.

This ended up creating room for mistrust between communities without an iota of good being done to anyone.

He declared India’s most deprived, exploited and economically marginalised tribespeople as the nation’s most serious internal security challenge.

What the tribal communities wanted was so doable: “Remove the baniya (usurer) contractor politician nexus,” they said.

Instead of addressing them even-handedly, Dr Singh chose the militarist path to tackle the self styled Maoists, making it easy for his successors to exploit the potentially right wing sentiment he generated.

I never thought that Dr Singh would be missed so soon after his tenure of two long innings. Josh Malihabadi’s searing lines may explain:
“Ab bue gul na baad e saba maangte hain log
Wo haps hai ki loo ki dua maangte hain log”.
(The scent of flowers, the morning breeze seemed farfetched though nice/In this suffocating stillness a blast of searing heat would suffice). The stifling stillness here is communal fascism. The white heat harks back to Dr Singh’s neo-liberal economic reforms. The latter at least gave a fighting chance to Indian democracy to make amends.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi

By arrangement with Dawn