Had Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi not stepped in, while addressing a conference of his party’s student wing recently, with scathing remarks on the hold of the Hindutva fountainhead RSS over the Modi government and in the same breath opened an altogether different front pertaining to the government’s economic policies, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was at risk of being portrayed as playing under-the-table games with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Since Dr Singh is not given to rushing to the media to correct every distorted impression about him in circulation, it is likely that his visit to Mr Modi — although at the latter’s invitation — would have been villainously portrayed as the former Prime Minister courting his successor with the ulterior purpose of finding favour with the latter in the hope that the connect would help him wriggle out of allegations of wilful wrongdoing in the matter of spectrum allocations during the UPA regime, which have just been made by former Trai chief Pradip Baijal.
Mr Gandhi’s intervention sought to convey the impression that the Prime Minister, short on economic expertise, had urged his predecessor to give him a “lesson” on economic management and Dr Singh obliged. This was said in the wider context of the government’s failures, including letting the RSS run the show, as Mr Gandhi put it, and created the sense that the Congress as a party — especially its upper echelons, which includes Dr Singh — shared the deep criticism of the Modi government that he was making. This helped change the Singh-Modi narrative sought to be given currency.
Just the day prior, Dr Singh himself had criticised the government’s economic policies, making several key points — that the “Make in India” programme was only a re-named version of the UPA’s new manufacturing policy; that welfare was being rolled back under Mr Modi; and that over a 10-year period the UPA had produced an unprecedented average rate of economic growth of more than eight per cent.
The former Prime Minister also injected some politics when he said that by harping on “corruption”, the government was seeking to side-step crucial issues of governance. The force of the stinging criticism was sought to be undercut by the public portrayal of Dr Singh as a supplicant before Mr Modi, whose visit to the Prime Minister’s residence was also made to subtly project the subliminal message that Dr Singh was in fact distancing himself from the Congress, especially party chief Sonia Gandhi, whom Mr Modi had roundly criticised for being an extra-constitutional centre of power during the UPA years. Rather than rely on the intervention of others to clear the air, it can do no harm if the former Prime Minister set down his experiences in office as a matter of public record, especially areas that have lent themselves to controversy.
