Manmohan Singh Quotes

I have made mistakes—mighty big ones at that. Not the kind that would cause a national fiscal deficit a-la Manmohan Singh or ruin some unassuming person’s life, but the kind that makes you go into face palm mode and want to die every time you are reminded of them.

No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.

I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.’ Manmohan Singh, FICCI annual general meeting 8 January 2007

Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!

A loser is one who has "given up on his dreams",so long as you are trying, you haven't lost yet!

One of his favourite couplets, by the poet Muzaffar Razmi, which he quoted on more than one occasion, in Parliament and to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, was: ‘Ye jabr bhi dekha hai, taareeq ki nazron ne / Lamhon ne khata ki thi, sadiyon ne saza payi’ (Much injustice / has been seen in the saga of history / When for a mistake made in a moment we are punished for centuries).

The Indian peasant is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.

He is, even at his worst, a cut above the competition, be it from within the ruling Congress party, or would-be prime ministers in other parties.

Sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish.

Most trainers are either into fluffy motivational stuff or have the communication skills of Manmohan Singh

Politics is about power and patronage, and ministerial positions are won not just on the basis of competence but also in recognition of a politician’s political clout or loyalty to the leader.

Although Manmohan Singh, the helmsman, got the credit, it was Rao who took the tough and aggressive decisions and provided the energy and political support. He was shrewd and knew how to deal with dissent. The manner in which he pushed through the industrial policy in the cabinet is an example. At the same time, the reforms would not have happened without Manmohan Singh. To the extent that there was one, he created the road map. In a brilliant move, he set up a set of committees—bank reform under Narsimhan, tax reform under Chelliah, and insurance reform under Malhotra—and they provided crucial intellectual sustenance and legitimacy for reform measures in these areas. It needed Manmohan Singh to come and change the nation’s mind-set to growth. But Manmohan Singh is a reticent man and cautious by nature. On his own, without Rao’s constant support, he would not have done it. The new trade policy would not have come about as speedily without Chidambaram. Varma was a terror as the head of the steering committee and he provided the momentum for the implementation of the reforms for two years. He knew the system well, and he played it in favor of the reforms. Varma’s crucial contributions, I believe, have not been understood or appreciated. In the end, all three—Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, and Varma—derived their strength from Narasimha Rao.

In private, Sonia often addressed Dr Singh as Manmohan,

I am aware of the risks, but for India’s sake, I am willing to take those risks.

in the Congress party known for planting stories against the PM in the media were

Ye jabr bhi dekha hai, taareeq ki nazron ne / Lamhon ne khata ki thi, sadiyon ne saza payi

The CAG chose to indict Manmohan Singh by starting its study of coal mine allocations from 2004, the year he took over. Why? Because that is when the government first mused that coal block auctions might be a good idea. So Dr Singh gets indicted—for having the right idea in the first place. Talk about perverse incentives. He should have just kept quiet—not something that’s often said about Manmohan Singh.

On 10 September 2008, Raghuram Rajan, noted economist and honorary advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, delivered a speech at the Bombay Chamber of Commerce where he spoke about how most of India's billionaires did not derive their wealth from IT or software but from land, natural resources, and government contracts or licences. He spoke of India being second only to Russia in terms of wealth concentration (the number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP). To show how extraordinary this number was he quoted the case of Brazil which had only 18 billionaires despite a greater GDP than India. Or Germany, which had three times India's GDP and a per capita income 40 times India's but had the same number of billionaires. 'If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?' he wondered.

At a meeting of business leaders from India and Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, the secretary general of the ASEAN, Ong Keng Yong, introduced Dr Singh as ‘the world’s most highly qualified head of government’. A standing ovation followed.

And it is only in its early stage. All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

Diplomats Jayant Prasad and S. Jaishankar, both of whom had intimate knowledge of the nuclear deal, helped me prepare a booklet, ‘Facts about India’s Initiative for Seeking International Cooperation in Civil Nuclear Energy’, that was then translated into all Indian languages and published by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) of the ministry of information and broadcasting.

Dr Singh’s general attitude towards corruption in public life, which he adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others. In other words, he was himself incorruptible, and also ensured that no one in his immediate family ever did anything wrong, but he did not feel answerable for the misdemeanours of his colleagues and subordinates. In this instance, he felt even less because he was not the political authority that had appointed them to these ministerial positions. In practice, this meant that he turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of his ministers. He expected the Congress party leadership to deal with the black sheep in his government, just as he expected the allies to deal with their black sheep. While his conscience was always clear with respect to his own conduct, he believed everyone had to deal with their own conscience.

During his visit to India in December 2010, the soft-spoken Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao seems to have succeeded in convincing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the border dispute between the two countries belongs to the past, won’t be easy to resolve, and requires patience. Instead of using whatever diplomatic language was necessary to call this statement pure poppycock, the even more soft-spoken Dr Singh appears to have succumbed completely. When Mr Jiabao was asked whether he would advise Pakistan to stop terrorist activity, he made it clear that he would not. ‘That’s for the two of you to resolve,’ he bluntly said. Our prime minister obviously tried to flatter his guest in the hope of getting some response which he could sell to the Indian people when he declared that ‘the world will listen when India and China will speak with one voice’. The response he received to this piece of flattery was, ‘Our relationship is greater than the sum of its parts.’ To me the statement is an attractive piece of diplomatic craftsmanship meaning nothing. Without any countervailing advantage, the visit yielded a trade pact which will take the bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2015, a complete economic sell-out in a year when the trade deficit was already approximately $20 billion.

IN MANY RESPECTS, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals. The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people—leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class. As a chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who’d won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt. Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.

When I would suggest a minister’s name for a better portfolio or an elevation in rank he would, every now and then, say what he felt about the person. Sometimes, he would just make a face that conveyed disapproval. Over time, I realized that there were few members of his council of ministers that he truly valued as administrative assets. His constant refrain was that there was a paucity of administrative talent in the Congress and among the allies.

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi — at the time party general secretary — smiled down at voters from billboards ahead of the general election in 2009, theirs was the picture of a Happy Family. Dr. Singh’s decisiveness in pushing through the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear deal and his deft stewardship of the economy made him the first choice of the middle class, established and aspirational, ensuring he was the party’s prime ministerial candidate again.

The days when the Planning Commission was composed entirely of subject experts were long gone. Various political and social quotas had now to be filled. North, south, scheduled caste, woman, minority. In the era of coalitions, every constituent political party wanted to name a member. For the PM, himself a former deputy chairman, the Planning Commission had become the place where he could park a trusted aide.

I submit to you for your consideration the idea that the most enduring engagement of a people with the world is in the realm of ideas and the idea we must engage the world through is the “idea of India”—the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.The idea that even as nations may clash, cultures and civilizations can coexist.

The Manmohan Singh government has won for India the keys to unshackle its nuclear programme from the unfair restrictions it has been subjected to for the past 33 years.

Ostensibly, the most important governance reform was supposed to be the Right to Information (RTI) Act that aimed to impose greater accountability on the government. It was an NAC initiative. Several senior and retired civil servants cautioned Dr Singh against the RTI, worrying that rather than expose corruption and sloth in government, it would sap initiative and encourage officers to pass the buck. The jury is still out on whether or not RTI was a wise move and what its impact on governance has been. Has it made the government more transparent and accountable or has it made civil servants risk averse and unwilling to take difficult decisions? In UPA-1, when there was considerable euphoria over the RTI Act, few would have imagined that analysts would hold the RTI Act responsible for at least some of the so-called ‘policy paralysis’ that UPA-2 came to be charged with.

On one such occasion, when Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik, then an ally of the BJP, called on him and sought a financial package for Orissa on the same lines as what was given to Bihar, a state ruled at the time by a UPA ally, Dr Singh delivered an uncharacteristic snub, saying, ‘Does money grow on trees?

ordinance. During UPA-1, it had been forced to defend the PM even when it did not agree with his actions, to ensure the

Dr Singh’s Independence Day speech would always be written in Urdu,

A person do not smile to see the children he is nothing in the life whatever he has anything.

Dr Singh’s general attitude towards corruption in public life, which he adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others.

In UPA-1 public opinion did not turn against the PM for this moral ambivalence on his part, because

Chidambaram, Jayalalithaa’s bete noire, to quit the Congress and join the Tamil Maanila Congress. Against this background, the 2004 alliance with the Congress could not have been negotiated by Sonia. It was left to Dr Singh to do that, and I was always surprised that political analysts paid little attention to these capabilities of the PM.

The 2 September 2010 issue of prestigious British magazine, The Economist, published on page 29 an article with a large photograph of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Below the picture was the caption ‘India’s Disappointing Government’. The word ‘disappointing’ is an understatement. The epithet ‘criminal’ would have been appropriate.

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

The nation had to wait for the NDA Government led by the BJP to frame the Right to Information Act. It was only in 2002, when the BJP government was in power that the Freedom of Information Act was introduced in Parliament and passed. It became the Freedom of Information Act, 2002 (5 of 2003). Two years later when the UPA government came to power, it churlishly decided to deprive the BJP of any credit, which was, in all honesty, due to it. They repealed the Freedom of Information Act and substituted it with the Right to Information Act which became fully operational on 13 October 2005. The repeal of the earlier Act was effected by Section 31 of the new Act. It was by no means an improvement on the earlier one. If the Congress government, led by Dr Manmohan Singh, wanted a better drafted law, they could have got it by amending the law, which is the usual behaviour expected of any successor government. Instead they took credit for this legislation, neither acknowledging the foundation of the Act in the judgments of Justice Mathew and other learned judges of the Supreme Court, nor the sincere efforts of the NDA government to bring it about.

was standard practice in the Vajpayee PMO for some journalists to get such limousines when travelling abroad with the PM. I was told that Vajpayee’s son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had befriended many senior editors, had taken personal interest in ensuring that the PMO’s favoured journalists were well looked after. I brought to an end all such privileges and incurred the wrath of some professional peers.

Public office offers the opportunity for private education at public expense.

think the time has come for us to have at least a fifty-year rule, if not a thirty-year rule, that allows scholars and researchers free access to declassified official papers.

The Congress party is not yet ready to take this step.’ The implication of his remark was that any declassification of official papers based on a thirty-year rule would begin to throw more light on Nehru’s and Indira’s time in office.

Obama’s instant reply was that among existing world leaders he admired Dr Singh of India the most.

Once the economy began to falter and the government became wobbly, India and its PM lost their sheen,

General Saheb, you are a soldier and much younger,’ replied Dr Singh to Musharraf, ‘but you must allow for my age. I can only walk step by step.

After proclaiming the 123 Agreement ‘sound and honourable’, he followed up with an editorial a few days later, toeing Karat’s line and advising the government to put the deal on hold. AndYechury, who had privately agreed that the PM had done what he had promised to, publicly criticized him.

I have only completed what you began,’ Dr Singh said, breaking the silence. Vajpayee smiled, nodded his head again, got into the car and drove away.

She has let me down,’ he said to both in the separate meetings he had with them, in a voice tinged more with sadness than anger.

It is very important for us to move forward to end this nuclear apartheid that the world has sought to impose on India.’ Manmohan Singh to IFS probationers 11 June 2008

the Democrats, all three agreed, would find it very difficult to support the nuclear deal. Interestingly, Kerry and Biden were Democrats and Hagel was then a Republican.

The three senior American leaders were only confirming what Dr Singh always knew, that if there was any chance of India getting the nuclear deal, it was only because President Bush wanted to do this for India.

Helping a democracy like India become stronger would enable it to deal both with the threat of Islamic radicalism and the rise of China. The US had a stake in this outcome.

After the Kerry visit, it would seem, he finally came on board, endorsing the deal as being in India’s national interest. I encouraged Karan Thapar to interview him and make this public.

Jawaharlal Nehru told the Constituent Assembly in December 1947: Talking about foreign policies, the House must remember that these are not just empty struggles on a chessboard. Behind them lie all manner of things. Ultimately, foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy,

the world wants India to do well . . . our challenges are at home’—

Kalecki called the non-aligned countries ‘the proverbial clever calves that suck two cows’. The

By linking India’s geo-political interests with its economic interests Dr Singh defined the new ‘geo-economics’ of Indian grand strategy.

Improved relations with the US were the key to better relations with China, Pakistan and much of the rest of the world. This simple fact, one that Subrahmanyam ingrained in Dr Singh, escaped most of Dr Singh’s critics.

Whenever a TV channel or newsmagazine conducted an opinion poll and showed that his popularity, while rising, was a few notches below that of Sonia, he would feel relieved. ‘Good,’ he would say, with a mischievous smile. That defined the limit to his projection and brand-building.

The same trait of self-effacement was seen as a virtue in UPA-1 and a weakness in UPA-2.

usual response, whenever I suggested we should respond to such comments, would be, ‘Let my actions speak for me.

Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS.

On several occasions I could sense his irritation with Congress party propagandists who claimed credit for the MGNREGA in the name of Sonia and later Rahul, but would never give Raghuvansh Prasad credit for his stellar work on it.

Let them take all the credit. I don’t need it. I am only doing my work. You just write my speeches for me. I do not want any media projection.’ He then

The biggest ever expansion of government- funded scholarships in India has happened during Dr Singh’s tenure.

new scheme of merit-cum-means scholarships was introduced for post-matric students, with twenty million students benefitting by the end of UPA-1.

Initially, I saw his subservience as an aspect of his shy and self-effacing personality, but over time I felt, like many, that this might be his strategy for political survival.

he showed the country that an ordinary, honest Indian, an aam aadmi, to use the current buzzword in politics, could become prime minister through sheer hard work and professional commitment.

So I, like millions of his middle-class supporters, feel tragically cheated that he has allowed himself to become an object of such ridicule in his second term in office, in

As UPA-2 began to unravel, another Mahabharata comparison came to suggest itself to some of Dr Singh’s critics. They likened him to the blind king Dhritharashtra, unhappily presiding over a strife- torn kingdom. I never accepted this view of a man who had earned himself the slogan ‘Singh is King’.

Moreover, promising loyalty to hereditary succession is a monarchical attribute, not a democratic one. That was Dr Singh’s fatal error of judgement.

2009, it was Dr Singh’s tenure during UPA-1 that helped the party secure 206 seats—nine more than the 197 seats that Rajiv Gandhi managed to deliver in 1989, after five years in office.

Singh’s five years of 9 per cent growth, his standing up to the Left on the nuclear deal in defence of the national interest, and the BJP voters’ disappointment with Advani’s lacklustre leadership had helped win the urban voter over.

For the first time after 1962, a sitting prime minister who had served a full five-year term was being re-elected with an improved majority.

After the elections, Dr Singh did try to be more assertive, taking a view on who would be in his Cabinet and who would not, and resisting the induction of the DMK’s A. Raja and T.R. Baalu, for their unsavoury reputations

The nuclear deal was the crowning glory of Manmohan Singh’s first term. As Narasimha Rao’s finance minister, he had made history by opening up the economy. Now, he had made history once again, by giving India a new status as a world power.

dampened his spirit. Dr Singh never really recovered from that initial deflation of his authority and it came to affect multiple areas of governance. Even though the economy performed well in the early part of UPA-2,

The practice till then, and in all parliamentary democracies, was that the leader of the party’s parliamentary party became the head of government. In May 2004, the Congress had Sonia as chairperson of the parliamentary party, Pranab Mukherjee as leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, and Manmohan Singh as the leader in the Rajya Sabha. Sonia then nominated Singh as the party’s choice to head the government. Thus, Manmohan Singh became the first nominated, rather than elected, prime minister. It

commenting on why those once in power write memoirs, ‘is a substitute for the authority they once commanded by virtue of their position but now miss.

is natural for a political leader to be either admired or hated, but a politician should never become an object of ridicule.

Why, I was asked, was UPA-1 more successful than UPA-2? Why had the PM’s image taken such a beating? What

Madam, it is best to leave when everyone asks you why rather than when!

will argue, in the coming chapters, that the Manmohan Singh of UPA-1 was not the ‘puppet PM’ that he came to be seen as in UPA-2.

Manmohan Singh put it pithily in his budget speech of July 1991 when he spoke of ‘the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world’. This, he believed, was an idea whose time had come. Power no longer lay in the barrel of the gun, but in a nation’s economic capability.

He held me back when I sought to project him during my time as his media adviser, saying, ‘I want my work to speak for me.’ Perhaps Dr Singh was nervous about projecting himself

Not only do I not know all sides of the truth, I do not even know how many sides the truth has.

His constant refrain was that there was a paucity of administrative talent in the Congress and among the allies.

In UPA-1, when there was considerable euphoria over the RTI Act, few would have imagined that analysts would hold the RTI Act responsible for at least some of the so-called ‘policy

At the heart of the governance reform failure lay the weakening of the PMO. Dr Singh’s deliberately low-profile style was compounded by the relative inexperience of Principal Secretary Nair, who lacked the confidence of some of his distinguished predecessors,

the BJP remained in denial about its defeat and was refusing to extend to the new PM the basic courtesy of letting him speak in Parliament. Finally,

Nair’s risk-averse personality only compounded Dr Singh’s careful approach and contributed to a further dilution of the PM’s authority.

once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM,

Dr Singh took his job seriously. He rose early and, after a morning walk, exercise and a light breakfast, usually walked down from 3 RCR to 7 RCR between quarter to nine and nine o’clock. For those who had worked in the Vajpayee PMO, this was all very new. Vajpayee had slowed down towards the end of his term and

early to rise and late to sleep’ schedule had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, his habit of tuning in to the BBC early in the morning helped the Government of India respond with alacrity to the tsunami in December 2004. Long before any disaster management, national security or intelligence agency woke up to alert government agencies, the PM was up and heard the news of the tsunami.

Even while he modestly called himself an ‘accidental prime minister’ he did not doubt that he could do the job, and do it better than the other senior leaders around Sonia.

You are being foolish,’ Prebisch admonished Manmohan, but then added thoughtfully, ‘Sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish.

It was a line I heard Dr Singh repeat many years later in his modest office in

to drop the idea of pursuing the civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the United States,