Not his own master Manmohan was constrained because he was appointed by Sonia Gandhi

REVIEW
Modesty Is A Slow Killer
This model piece of non-fiction narrates a tragedy of our timeshow the brilliant Manmohan Singh fell from grace
and stumbled his way through a tough term as PM
GURCHARAN DAS
HTTP://WWW.OUTLOOKINDIA.COM/ARTICLE.ASPX?290414
The Accidental Prime Minister is the story of a tragedy. This is not
entirely an insignificant achievement in a country where tragic narrative
does not come naturally. A rare example was Jaya, an early rendering
of the Mahabharatas central story, whose narrator was another
Sanjaya from two thousand years ago. Manmohan Singhs rise and fall
has all the ingredients of a classic tragedy: a good person falls through
a series of irredeemable reversals, whose cause is a mistake, a tragic
flaw which lies in human frailty.
Manmohans rise will inspire generations of Indian children. Till the age
of twelve, he lived in a dusty village without electricity, running water,
access to a hospital or a road; he walked miles to school and studied
under the dim light of a kerosene lamp; but by twenty-two, he was at
Cambridge, from where he went on to do a PhD at Oxford; eventually,
he rose to become finance minister and prime minister. Then, he fell,
presiding over an ineffectual and corrupt government that became
paralysedinflation rose, growth fell, bringing incalculable misery. He
was repeatedly humiliated but he clung to power, and thereby
diminished the office of the prime minister. This is Barus tale.
It is heart-rending to see a good, intelligent and humble man fall from those heights; it induces in the
reader great pity and, eventually, catharsis. Manmohans tragic flaw was his shy, self-effacing and
habitually unassertivealmost timidnature. He was thrown into a job that required considerable
determination and assertion in order to translate thought into action. There was also an external flawas
it sometimes is in ancient Greek tragedy when the hero must battle fate. In this case, it lay in two centres

The Accidental Prime Minister:
The Making and Unmaking Of
Manmohan Singh
By By Sanjaya Baru
Viking Penguin | Pages: 301 | Rs.
599
of power. Manmohan owed his job to Sonia Gandhi; he was not his own master; he could not freely
appoint his own ministers, not even his own staff in the PMO. This led to paralysis in the government.
The enduring legacy of Sanjaya Barus book will not only be in a skilful telling of an Indian tragedy. The
Accidental Prime Minister will in fact become a model for aspiring writers of long narrative non-fiction. The
last book I read with comparable energy and narrative power was B.K. Nehrus over-long Nice Guys
Finish Second. I sometimes meet retired civil servants and businessmen who want to immortalise
themselves with a book, and they ask for a good model. Now they have one. I had enjoyed Barus
newspaper columns over the years, but I never imagined he had it in him to write a sustained, compelling
political narrative.
Narrative non-fiction is essentially a marriage of the arts of storytelling and journalism, an attempt to
make drama out of the observable world of real people, places and events. The secret is that a book must
reveal and do so in a compelling voice. Nabokov, no surprise, said that narrative is often confused with
plot, but theyre not the same thing. If I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died, thats not
narrative; thats plot. But, if I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of a broken heart, thats
narrative. This is Barus achievementno mean feat, indeed!
Sanjaya Baru is also a sound economist, albeit of the Keynesian variety. So, I was disappointed that he
did not go deeper into an issue that is uppermost in many minds. Why did the dream team of reformers
not reform? The slow and steady pace of reform since 1991 virtually came to a halt after 2004. Even
dawdling reforms add up and they added up to make India the second fastest growing economy in the
world during the UPA tenure. There are lag effects in economics and the high growth during UPA-I was
not merely because the global economy was strong but because Manmohan inherited a good legacy from
Vajpayee. The roots of several of UPA-IIs problems were the result of the sins of profligacy committed
during UPA-I. It is too easy to blame the lack of reform on the extraordinary influence of the Left in the
first period and the National Advisory Council in the second. At least the low hanging fruit, as Raghuram
Rajan puts it, could have been plucked, if there had been a will. In the past desperate year, P. Chidam-
baram has shown what could have been done. (But PC was finance minister in UPA-I, why did he not do
it then?)
An even bigger omission of Barus is not to have explained the false trade-
off between growth and equity during UPA rule. After its victory in 2004, the
Congress concluded that Indias free market reforms werent helping the
poor and so it changed the focus to spending on welfare under the
seductive slogan of inclusive growth. Instead of building roads, UPAs
energy turned to guarantee 100 days of employment to the poor, giving
cheap energy, waiving loans to farmers, etc. Approvals for new projects
came to a virtual halt, mostly on environmental grounds. As a result,
investors lost confidence. Inflation rose, partly because spending was not
backed by production. In UPA-II, investment came to a halt, growth
plummeted, millions lost jobs, and hopes were dashed for millions of young
people.
Baru would attribute this to the problem of two power centres. But Manmohan Singh was our great
reformer and he understood the power of growth in his bones. How could he have allowed the
government to take its eyes off the ball of growth? Why did he allow the momentum in infrastructure to
slow down? Every country needs to protect its environment, but none stops hundreds of projects in the
process. Was it due to the prime ministers tragic flaw: he was too shy and preferred not to assert
himself?
Manmohan must have remembered the important role of the PMs principal secretary in getting things
done. It was A.N. Varma who had helped him in 1991-1993 to execute the reforms when Narasimha Rao
was prime minister. He had deftly used the mechanism of the famous Thursday meetings of a steering
committee of secretaries to push for a new reform each week. Brajesh Mishra was an even more




Baru doesn't say
why the UPA dream
team didn't reform,
does not explain the
false trade-off
between growth and
equity.





important anchor for Vajpayee. Both Verma and Mishra were risk-takers. Why did Manmohan accept T.K.
Nair, who was risk-averse with leftist leanings to boot? According to Baru, such key appointments were
thrust upon the PM by Sonia Gandhi and he had no choice. This was a critical factor in the PMs failure.
Instead of helping him, T.K. Nair added to the obstacles that the prime minister faced in implementing
reforms, according to Sanjaya Baru.
There might have been a very different scenario. An assertive prime minister, for example, would have
seen Indias 134th rank in World Banks Doing Business report as a call to action. He would have sought
ways to eliminate the nearly 70 clearances (yes 70, according to the Planning Commissions new
manufacturing policy!) for starting a business, and fuse them into a single window clearance as achieved
by our competitor nations. Admittedly, the action in India is in the states, but a determined leader at the
Centre, with control over purse-strings, can do wonders. Instead, our notorious red tape continues to
create the impression that India is perhaps the most hostile country for doing honest business. Add to this
our inspector raj, which continues to bring incessant misery to the small entrepreneur. The worst
offenders are the central revenue departments: tax, excise and customs.
A final lesson from Barus book. We make the common mistake in overvaluing the importance of
intelligence in our leaders when history has proven time and again that it is determination and attitude
that matters more. We make the same mistake when it comes to recruiting business leaders. A candidate
with high academic credentials impresses us unduly. By the time we realise our mistake, it is too late. The
damage is done. In an individuals case, it is only a personal failure. But when a prime minister falters, it is
a national tragedy.