In the limelight, diffident about spotlight

When, not if, history is kinder to Manmohan Singh, he will emerge as the only Prime Minister who genuinely worked towards a long-term resolution to the Kashmir problem keeping Kashmiris at the centre of it. Not emotional and patronising like Nehru. Nor appeasing and devious like Narsimha Rao. Not symbolic sans substance like Atal Behari Vajpayee.

It is not widely recognised but his initiatives to resolve the Kashmir issue were next in importance only to the civil nuclear cooperation agreement he negotiated with the United Sates and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Manmohan Singh was the only Prime Minister who was intellectually convinced that Kashmiris have a case and was ideologically committed to the autonomy of the state as originally provided for in the Constitution and even beyond.

Just before taking over as the Prime Minister in May 2004, he told Jonathan Power, a journalist, that “Short of secession, short of re-drawing boundaries, the Indian establishment can live with anything”. A decade later, towards the fag end of his tenure in September 2013, he told his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif “Mian Saheb, no Indian Prime Minister can sign away Kashmir, and nor can I. Subject to that, the sky is the limit”.

It takes moral courage and intellectual integrity to not only hold but articulate such views. His moral compass was way better than any other politician in that position. More than the good of just Kashmir, he saw in this approach the greater good of India.

The passing away of a public figure at 92 who has accomplished as much as Dr Singh did is neither an occasion to mourn nor even to memorialise. Indeed, he chose not to write his memoirs because, as he once said, it would be too painful. To write or read or both? He chose not to reveal.

It might be befitting to just try and understand how his framework of politics and public policy can be used to address the impending and new issues facing the country and the world at large. His effort was always to address the contradictions thereby paving the way for a solution to emerge; organically, systemically and non-disruptively. In my limited interactions with him, I felt he always asked the right questions more than having all the answers. A predefined solution to complex issues is always problematic laced as it is with personal preferences and ideological prejudices.

He didn’t inspire by words. He influenced through his work. He didn’t invoke awe. He evoked respect. That was Manmohan Singh, the person. He didn’t change the course of India’s history by disrupting. He altered it by ideating. Remember him quoting Victor Hugo in his first budget? That was him, the professional. To have survived in all the positions that he held, he could not but have been politically savvy, if not downright shrewd. He didn’t play politics to be in power. He participated in politics for an out-of-fashion public purpose. That was Dr Singh, the politician.

To be honest, for me as a student of economics in the 1980s, Professor Manmohan Singh was not a big name. I don’t recall ever reading or referencing any academic paper by him. One held many of his Delhi School colleagues and contemporaries like K N Raj, Amartya Sen, or Sukhamoy Chakravarty in greater esteem as economists. Maybe it is not a fair comparison as he was not a pure play academic but an economic policy administrator. He is only one who held every single position of any consequence in economic policy making: Finance Minister, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, and Chief Economic Advisor. It was only after he transformed the Indian economy that he became a name to reckon.

I first met Dr Singh in1986 at the Centre for Development Studies when he was heading the Planning Commission. There to meet K N Raj, he enquired about “a Kashmiri boy working on macroeconomic stagnation”. I was an ICSSR research scholar there. Later I got to know that Prof Yoginder Alagh, a member of the Planning Commission, who was my external examiner had mentioned my dissertation to him.

A few years later, in 1991, working with the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister, a note on the automatic monetisation of the budget deficit which I had written caught the FM’s eye, and he remembered me from the CDS days. Amazing memory, he had. After I had moved out of government in 1994, I wrote a series of critical articles, “Manmohan v/s Manmohan” comparing Report of South Commission he had authored with the completely opposite policies he had been pursuing as FM. I was summoned not to be reprimanded but complimented for having read the report reflecting a wry sense of humour!

He was instrumental in engaging me in economic policy making of Kashmir, which I had never really thought of. As the leader of the opposition, he got involved in Kashmir politics in 2003 while stitching up the Congress-PDP alliance and drafting the Common Minimum Program. Soon after Mufti sahib was sworn in as the Chief Minister, Dr Singh reached out to me through my friend and his colleague, Jairam Ramesh. Dr Singh took me along to an Iftaar party hosted in New Delhi by Mufti sahib and introduced me to him and Muzaffar Baig, neither of whom I knew. On his recommendation, Mufti sahib appointed me as the Economic Advisor to the J&K Government.

A year after he became the Prime Minister, in 2005, he set up a High-Powered Committee on the Long-term Development of J&K with his trusted fellow economist C Rangarajan as the Chairman. His office called to inform me that the PM had nominated me as a member. Immediately after the Committee submitted its recommendations, he constituted five working groups on J&K for seeking to create conditions of permanent peace in the troubled state. Round Table Conferences followed with the PM himself attending one in Srinagar. By April 2007 he almost built a consensus on the need to implement the recommendations of the Working Groups.

While this was happening under the aegis of the Government of India, he initiated Track II in 2006 through his erudite friend A G Noorani whose views on the on the constitutional position of J&K in the Indian Union, he respected. It resulted in the evolution and articulation of the four-point Manmohan-Musharraf formula.

The bilateral engagement continues focusing on increased ‘people-to people’ interaction and greater economic interaction between the two neighbours. The first step to make borders irrelevant for the Kashmiri people on both sides were taken with trade relations and movement for the Kashmiri people on both sides of LoC. Seems almost fictional now!

As Prime Minister, he saw that India’s exceptional economic growth and openness had created vast opportunities to be a global major on the foundations of its democratic, liberal, plural and secular credentials. His envisioned role for the country, he believed was being held back because of Kashmir. His Kashmir policy was thus driven in the enlightened self-interest of India. But that was not to be. The collective conscience of the majority came in the way.

The author is Contributing Editor Greater Kashmir