Of my many memories of Manmohan Singh, the most precious is the time I spent at his house with him and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, in September 2019. This visit coincided with the celebrations of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak.
As a part of these celebrations, Delhi’s Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan arranged a series of lectures. I was invited to deliver a talk on Guru Nanak and ecology when Mohinder Singh, the director of the organisation, arranged for me to meet Manmohan Singh (hereafter referred to as Singh), its president.
Before I could thank him for the appointment at short notice, Singh thanked me for accepting the Sadan’s lecture invitation. His generosity touched me. He enquired about Oxford and shared memories of his time there. Singh had completed his D.Phil thesis on exports and foreign trade in India at Nuffield College.
Singh’s thesis could be considered the theoretical foundation of the liberalisation of the Indian economy that he was invited to lead as the finance minister during the prime ministership of P.V. Narasimha Rao.
Singh remembered his teachers and some economists from Oxford and Cambridge. In particular, he remembered the late Ajit Singh of Cambridge University. This was a tricky moment. Ajit Singh was a leading light of the Cambridge School who was critical of the IMF-World Bank approach to economic policy in the developing world. It was precisely this approach which had been followed in the economic liberalisation in India. I skirted around the discussion by praising Ajit Singh’s pioneering contribution on global mergers and acquisitions.
In several discussions with Ajit Singh, we had both agreed that although the historical moment of the July 1991 balance of payments crisis in India – during which Singh made his economic policy contribution – created the impression that he was a proponent of market liberalisation, Singh was, in fact, a heterodox economist. He understood the limitations of the market economy and engaged with socialist, Keynesian and institutional economists.
This broader heterodox frame of thinking goes beyond the narrow market-oriented frame. It is visible in the introduction of innovative welfare schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) as a job programme for the rural poor. This was a remarkable egalitarian programme violating the cold logic of market functioning.
The often-projected narrative of Singh as the architect of the liberalisation of the Indian economy does injustice to the more expansive vision that guided many of the egalitarian dimensions of his thinking and policy orientation. He was aware that liberalisation had increased inequalities and that state intervention was necessary to reduce those inequalities.
Inevitably, my conversation with Singh steered towards Indian politics and the direction it had taken since 2014. When I expressed that the entire opposition must act unitedly against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s destructive Hindutva politics, Singh said that the Indian electoral system was proving to be a major roadblock towards such an alliance.
His view was that the electoral system required enormous expenditure from candidates, prompting many to resort to dubious funding sources. The state’s intelligence agencies maintained files on the financial operations of key leaders, and the ruling party did not need to do much to undermine the opposition’s efforts. It merely required the agencies to reveal the files documenting a leader’s questionable financial dealings, silencing them in the process. The significance of this insight, coming from someone who served as the country’s prime minister for a decade (2004–2014), cannot be overstated in understanding the murky world of India’s governance.
He said that the most damaging aspect of the BJP government was its undermining of the professional independence of institutions that govern a society and the state. In particular, he was apprehensive of the Modi government’s treatment of data collection institutions.
Before leaving, I requested that he write his memoirs which would serve as a historical contribution. I was pleased when his wife said I was the second person after her to make this request. Singh pointed towards the bookshelf in the room with many volumes of his speeches in the parliament and said that those were his memoirs. I countered that while those documents were valuable, memoirs can go beyond those parliamentary contributions. He replied that if he were to write his memoirs, he would have to write the truth; if he wrote the truth, it would hurt many.
It is unfortunate that any possibility of that truth, however hurtful it may be for anyone, has gone away with his death.
I met him again a year later at an academic conference. Though our conversation was brief, he was still in fine spirits. I kept up my correspondence with him by email, but his replies increasingly became short.
As time passes, the memory of India having a Prime Minister for a decade with high intellectual calibre, an unblemished public life, and a genuine commitment to the welfare of the people – especially the underprivileged – will become increasingly precious.
Pritam Singh is a professor emeritus at Oxford Brookes Business School, UK.
