From being the Sardar (leader) of reforms which resulted in India becoming the second-fastest growing economy in the world to being blamed for India’s ills today, Manmohan Singh has come a full circle. To be fair to the Indian Prime Minister, he is a victim of overzealous media managers of the Congress party and his political puppeteers. They first painted him as the Man without whom India could not have liberalised in the 1990s, and now want him to be the fall guy as the General Elections 2014 come near and the economy continues to flounder.
So what has led to the present mess? Some people may say that it is because of the corruption scandals. But as the Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand elections have show, corruption in not very high on the voters’ list. The real cause for Manmohan Singh’s transformation from an asset to a liability for the Congress party can be best summed up in Bill Clinton’s election slogan: It’s the economy stupid!
The new financial year, which began on April 1, 2013, started on the wrong foot and has been full of bad news on the economy thereafter. In April, the eight industry core sector, aka IIP, had crawled up a mere 2.6 percent. Then last Friday, government data showed that the economy had notched 4.8 percent growth in the January-March quarter, a tad more than the 15-month low of 4.7 percent in the previous quarter. For the fiscal 2012-13, the growth rate had been a 10-year low of 5 percent. The Indian government’s economic survey expects a growth of between 6.1 percent and 6.7 percent for the fiscal 2013-14 (FY14), while the RBI pegs it at 5.7%. But the Bank of America Merill Lynch (BofA-ML) on Monday once again cut India’s GDP growth projection to 5.8 percent for FY14 and 6.8 percent for 2014-15.
The HSBC manufacturing PMI (purchasing managers’ index) for India released on Monday was at a 50-month low in May. To add to the woes, the main cause of the fall in PMI was the fall in production for the first time since March 2009. Though export orders rose at the fastest pace since January, the domestic demand stayed weak. A reading of the fine print adds weight to the rising voices warning that the economy may not have hit the bottom yet.
According to some commentators, if you factor in population growth, India’s per capita income rose by around 3 percent in FY13, which signals a return to the Hindu rate of growth of 3-4 percent. The so-called Hindu rate was a collateral damage of the socialist policies that the Indian government religiously followed till the 1980s. It seems that the socialist-tinged policies moulded by the National Advisory Council (NAC) have unwittingly crippled the economy. Sonia Gandhi and her spin doctors have realised this and now want Manmohan Singh to be the sacrificial lamb.
Aruna Roy, a social and political activist, recently quit the NAC claiming that the Prime Minister does not listen to either NAC or Sonia Gandhi. Her stand was not rubbished by Sonia.
Roy seems to have forgotten that Manmohan Singh was a career bureaucrat who was a hit as the finance minister because he obediently executed the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s policies.
Manmohan Singh was the brawn, Narasimha Rao was the brain. As the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh has been merely implementing strategies devised by Sonia Gandhi and NAC. So why blame him for delivering according to the plan? People like Mulayam Singh are also being used by the Congress party think-tank to run down Singh. The nation and the electorate have a right to question Singh’s credibility as the Prime Minister because he put the country second on his loyalty list not the Gandhis and their camp followers. Sonia Gandhi has enjoyed power without accountability for too long while Manmohan Singh is being crucified though he is bereft of any real authority. It is time those wielding real power learnt to face the music for their deeds.
