However, the summons sent to Manmohan Singh by CBI judge Bharat Parashar in a coal scam case involving the allocation of a coal block in Odisha to Hindalco is not completely unexpected even though the economist, retired bureaucrat and former prime minister is an individual known for public probity.
Why is Singh back in the eye of the coal scam storm? By all accounts, he is clearly paying the price for allegedly turning a blind eye to the sins of others when he was at the helm of the central government. During the tenure of UPA-2, the nation was hit by a string of high-profile corruption cases, including the 2G spectrum allocation irregularities, the coal scam and the Commonwealth Games scandal. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the people of the country made no bones about what they felt about the corrupt practices of the UPA ministers, but nobody, except his staunchest political opponents, ever had reason to believe that Singh himself was involved in these scams.
No wonder Congress chief Sonia Gandhi led a delegation of nearly 100 party leaders the other day to the former PM’s Motilal Nehru Marg residence in New Delhi to express solidarity with him. She went to the extent of describing the charge levelled against him as “outrageous.”
No matter what the outcome of the coal scam case is, Singh’s place in Indian political history is assured, and not simply because, during his second term at the helm in Delhi, he was roundly reviled as the “weakest prime minister” the nation has ever had. Jokes about ‘Maun’ mohan’s impregnable silence did the rounds for years and months leading up to the last elections. He may be a man of few words, an attribute that many in this noise-living country still hold against him and will probably always do, but there can be no denying that he left an indelible imprint, for better or for worse, on every job that he handled during a distinguished bureaucratic career.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Singh held key government positions — chief economic adviser, Reserve Bank governor and planning commission head. As finance minister under prime minister PV Narasimha Rao back in the 1990s, he was the architect of the major structural reforms that led to India’s economy being liberalised.
Up until that point in his career, Singh had shown no political inclinations but when India faced a severe economic crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, his induction as finance minister unleashed processes whose effects are being felt to this day.
He was obviously up against stiff political opposition in those days, but he stuck to his guns and went ahead with the economic reforms that the nation needed in order to break free from the anachronistic licence-permit raj. The mild-mannered economist displayed a degree of steel that many did not believe he possessed.
That quality came in handy again when in the last year of UPA-1, Singh signed a nuclear deal with the US despite losing the support of the leftists and endangering the stability of his government.
The next five years — the tenure of UPA-2 —were a completely different story. The government lurched from one crisis to another, as two Congress power centres — 1 Race Course and 7 Janpath – pulling in different directions and leading to a debilitating bout of policy paralysis. Sonia Gandhi had pulled Manmohan Singh out of the hat when she turned down the demand of her party MPs to take over as prime minister after the poll victory in 2004. The prime minister, who seemed to enjoy the responsibility bestowed upon him the first time around, made rather heavy weather of his second stint as PM.
Observers could see that he was not quite on top of things as several of his ministers, not to speak of the UPA chairperson, went about bypassing him. The coal scam case that has returned to haunt Singh is from this low period during which he was more a silent spectator than an active participant in the messy administrative goings-on. Even those that do not think too highly of him and his legacy would find it hard to believe that Singh deserves to be in the line of coal-fuelled legal fire. But it is now for the judicial process to decide the ex-PM’s fate.
saibalchatterjee@mydigitalfc.com
No comments:
Post a Comment