Following the demise of former prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on December 26 last year, there’s been an outpouring of national grief. The country’s most eminent political leaders and celebrated economists, including Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen have paid handsome tributes to him as the great liberator who as Union finance minister in the Congress government headed by prime minister PV Narasimha Rao at that time, engineered the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991. Since 1991, India’s annual rate of economic growth (GDP) has averaged 7 percent emerging from the 3.5 percent rut in which it was mired for over 50 years. As a result, an estimated 400 million citizens have been lifted above the poverty line.
Yet while Manmohan Singh (MMS) was invested with many fine personal qualities, the plain truth is that he was not the reformer-redeemer of the Indian economy. On the contrary for over 30 years, MMS was a complicit architect of the public sector led licence-permit-quota raj edifice which destroyed the modest material hopes of over 1 billion citizens of politically free but economically enslaved India.
The evidence is overwhelming. After he was inducted into the Central government as an advisor to the commerce ministry in 1969, MMS served as chief economic adviser in the ministry of finance, and was promoted to the office of finance secretary during the dark noon of the Emergency. Subsequently, he served in the Planning Commission (1980-82) and then as governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-85) and again as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (1985-87) before he was appointed Union finance minister by PV Narasimha Rao (PVNR) in 1991. The real even if belated liberaliser of the Indian economy was PVNR.
There’s a proposal to erect a memorial monument for MMS in Delhi. On the other hand, PVNR was denied a ceremonial funeral in the national capital. This proposal if implemented would be an injustice and perversion of history.
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