An Alien Prime Minister!

Christ is a temporal mark- After and Before Christ. For the politics in India, Manmohan Singh serves as a  reference – After Him and Before Him. Christ, his christian followers believe, was crucified. The politics Manmohan Singh represented and conducted, was also crucified. His personality, his demeanour, his ideals – all this is a misfit in the new age India. Long before his departure on Thursday this week, India suffered a bereavement of a greater magnitude – death of the political leadership Manmohan Singh represented. Looking back he appears like a creature from a different planet who once was the Prime Minister of a country called India – a human prime minister. Never an accidental Prime Minister. It was good luck for India that this economist gentleman was eyed by a prescient Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, to become the finance minister of India. He came, he saw and he liberated the Indian economy. What he also witnessed in his later years, was the devastation of Indian politics.

Manmohan Singh was many things rolled in one. An academic who taught his subject at the highest level. A banker who served as the chairman of RBI. An economist who brought in radical reforms. A prime minister who made a coalition work for 10 long years, and navigated his country in such crucial matters as the Indo-US nuclear deal. Name a sector of governance, economy, politics and diplomacy where he didn't leave an imprint. Another thing he never spoke about it. His was a person full of substance, never full of himself. He was a human being who wouldn't scare fellow humans. So all humans of the world, it is time to mourn. That is the reason why someone like Anwar Ibrahim, from a far off land, Malaysia, is so saddened by his demise. If anyone has to take a peek into the person the Singh was, read the condolence message Anwar Ibrahim posted on X. Like him there must be hundreds, nay thousands, of hearts he must have touched.

A superficial knowledge of states and governments tell us that it is the system that matters in the end. No matter who rules, no matter who is in the chair, it is the national interest and the state policy that finally holds the key. But that is not the entire truth. The person at the top informs everything down under. India just observed 100th anniversary of A B Vajpayee. Wasn't there something in the man that we had a different political atmosphere? He belonged to an ideological politics that was different from Manmohan's. But he shared the grace and magnanimity in his person with Manmohan Singh. That is why he was, and is, praised by people across party and ideological divides.

Manmohan Singh was gentle and calm, graceful and profound, honest and efficient; the strength of his personality was in his humility. Unfortunately, these traits are no longer in demand. The times have changed. The choices have changed. Now is the time for leaders who can inflict fear in others, who can cast a spell of madness on a rabble, who can raise rhetoric to Himalayan heights, who can bring skies down and turn the earth upside down. Manmohan Singh, by his very disposition brought ease and calm; on the contrary. In the din of today's politics, who can match the reserves of calm the frail body of Manmohan Singh carried. He had a glacial personality, today's politics needs volcanic eruption.

Now that the man is no more, we see everyone in India, and beyond, praise him. But it still pains to think of the occasions when the Indian media made deprecating remarks about him, and the political opponents added to the toxicity. A man of great character was subjected to the smallness of politics that India spewed after he was no longer in the seat.

In his maiden budget speech in 1991, Singh quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” He had rightly sensed it then. He brought the Indian economy on the global map. That was the time Manmohan Singh was brought into the politics of India. When his political party lost power, the time for some really ghastly ideas came. Victor Hugo's quote was applicable then, and is applicable now. Unfortunately, it looks like Indian politics and the Indian society are bursting with ideas that change the very image of an ideal man. Manmohan Singh, even Vajpayee, don't fit that image. The tragic in the times after Manmohan Singh is that Manmohan Singh is no longer an image of an ideal statesman. How could he live more?