The last expert

Manmohan Singh showed that technocrats can change nations' destinies as effectively as any populist

- MIHIR S SHARMA

The India of today, with all its successes and imperfections, is more a product of Manmohan Singh than of anybody else in recent history. He was always called an "unlikely" politician; but, through its successes and failures, his career is a useful reminder to us today that technocrats can change nations' destinies as effectively as any populist.

Objectively, if Singh was an unlikely politician, one might be forgiven for thinking that he was an even more unlikely liberaliser. He had spent an entire career, after all, as an economist-bureaucrat serving the grey, ersatz socialism that was India's official ideology prior to 1991. It was only when he was almost 60 that he began his second career in politics, and came to be identified with the reform process.

Singh's Budget speeches—not just the famous one from July 1991, which he concluded dramatically by paraphrasing Victor Hugo that "the emergence of India as a major economic power" was "an idea whose time has come", but also the one eight months later in which he defended the record of reform—still make for quite inspiring reading. He thanks Jawaharlal Nehru for "his vision and insistence that the social and economic transformation of India had to take place in the framework of an open society, committed to parliamentary democracy and the rule of law"; and adds that reform will "unshackle the human spirit of creativity, idealism, adventure and enterprise that our people possess in abundant measure". That speech ended, famously, with Bismil's revolutionary "sarfaroshi ki tamanna" couplet. But the lines prefacing that give us a sense of what reformists must have felt like at that point: "Tonight, I feel like going to the theatre. Let the assassins be informed, I am prepared to meet their onslaught."