Ramachandra Guha: Manmohan Singh helped unshackle India’s economy – but also enabled Modi’s rise

“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” – Voltaire

Shortly before he demitted office as prime minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh said that history would judge him more generously than the media was then doing. Now, reading the outpouring of adulatory tributes to Singh after his passing, this historian is led to wonder – are these eulogies altogether merited? Was he the wise, all-knowing, and apparently flawless statesman that he is now being presented as?

There were three distinct phases to Manmohan Singh’s career: of a scholar, an economist in government and a politician. Most assessments have concentrated on the second phase, and especially on his tenure as finance minister, when he played a critical role in dismantling the license-permit-quota raj. The freeing of the Indian economy from the shackles of the state led to three decades of steady economic growth, a surge in entrepreneurship and a dent in mass poverty.

This is indeed a major achievement, for which Singh is being rightly praised, though one must not forget the support of his prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, who brought an unelected economist into the cabinet and gave him cover against hostile politicians (including some within the Congress Party)….

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