Day 50 : Book Excerpt : The Accidental Prime Minister

When I walked across Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg and into the UGC office that day, I expected to meet an officious and self-important bureaucrat, another VIP belonging to the Delhi ‘durbar’. However, the first thing that struck me when I came face-to-face with Manmohan Singh was his gentle politeness. He greeted me warmly, got up from his chair and suggested we sit on a sofa, and offered me a cup of tea. I switched on my tape recorder and began asking my questions. A few minutes into the interview, the tape recorder stopped working. Feeling a little rattled, I tried shaking it, took the batteries out and put them back in, but nothing helped. Dr Singh was patient, but gently warned me that he had a meeting to go to and was travelling over the next few days. He suggested we try finishing the interview.
While I was contemplating writing down his answers in longhand, it occurred to me that it would take very little time to summon Mr Anand, the stenotypist from ET, who duly arrived and wrote down Dr Singh’s replies in shorthand. At the end of the interview, Dr Singh suggested I show him the typed draft before it went into print. Since Dr Singh was travelling, I managed to show him a draft only a week later. This he promptly returned with several changes made with a ballpoint pen, in a handwriting that was neat, legible and compact. Requesting Mr Anand to incorporate his changes and forward the file to my colleague who was handling the production of the special pages, I left Delhi on work.
Early in the morning of 5 March the ET special edition arrived at my doorstep. But even before I could open it, the phone rang. It was Manmohan Singh on the line. His tone was even, but his displeasure was sharply evident. ‘You did not make all the corrections I asked you to,’ he said. ‘I had added an entire paragraph that I do not find published. It was an important point I was making. This is highly irresponsible. I didn’t expect you to be so careless.’
He put the phone down even as I kept saying, ‘Sorry, Sir, I haven’t seen the paper yet.’
That was the first of the two admonishments I have received from Dr Singh. The second was to come sixteen long years later, when he chastised me for crediting him with an important decision that the Congress party was eager to claim was Rahul Gandhi’s idea.
The mistake turned out to be the kind of embarrassing mix-up that does occasionally happen in newspapers. While Mr Anand had done his job properly, the person making the page had accidentally downloaded and placed on the page, the earlier, uncorrected version of the interview. I was curious, now, to discover the contents of that additional paragraph that Dr Singh had scribbled on to the draft, and had been so upset to find missing in the printed version. It turned out to be about his recent visit to South Korea and the important lessons India ought to learn from South Korea’s model of development. He had pointed out that South Korea had invested in education and had an open economy, and India ought to do the same.
It was only years later that I fully understood why Dr Singh had been so upset at this omission. He was signalling the relevance of his own views, views that he had articulated decades ago in his doctoral thesis, on the importance of foreign trade and greater openness to the world economy in India’s own development. No Indian policymaker had till then held South Korea up as a role model. In fact, in the mid- 1980s, Professor Raj had had a high-profile spat with Bela Balassa, the Hungarian economist at the World Bank, in which he disparaged the so-called lessons to be learnt from the East Asian growth experience which Balassa was advocating. Indian-trained economists like myself were taught to pooh-pooh the relevance of the Korean experience for India on the grounds that the strategies followed by small-sized economies that had tied their fortunes to American power were not relevant for a large, independent nation like India. In February 1991, weeks before he was unexpectedly summoned to become India’s finance minister, Dr Singh was once again drawing attention to his own views about trade and development.
Indeed, Dr Singh was always more open-minded than his critics have painted him to be. Contrary to the mischievous remarks of some of them that he had been converted to economic liberalization after becoming finance minister, the fact is that he had always been an advocate of trade liberalization and a critic of export pessimism. (This is the now-discredited theory that India had little to supply to the world economy and therefore ought to reduce its demands on it.) As he told me in this March 1991 interview:

    I was a critic of the export pessimism of the fifties, although I must say that there was some change in thinking after the foreign exchange crisis in 1957. If you recall, it was the Second Plan which made the assumption relating to exports not being an option. At the time, textiles and engineering goods were the leading industries and we must remember that in 1945 India was a leading textiles exporter. But we lost ground because we failed to modernize.
   
    On the other hand, countries like South Korea which came to the field only in the fifties were able to modernize and emerge as leading textiles exporters. We missed the sixties boom in trade because we believed that there was no scope for labour-intensive techniques in the world market. We failed to recognize the scope for technological change and to evolve a trade policy suited to that purpose. There is inadequate recognition in our country that on a per capita basis, India is not well endowed with natural resources and that we have to be a major trading nation to fill this gap.

~~The Accidental Prime Minister -by- Sanjaya Baru