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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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).

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.

Sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish.

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

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.

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

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

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.

But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a ‘power elite’, to use sociologist C.Wright Mill’s term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congress’s ‘first family’.

While he would try from time to time to improve his delivery in public speaking and TV appearances, this never came naturally to him. Even a smile before TV cameras, a basic requirement for a politician, never came easily to him and I had to often get close to him, sometimes worrying the SPG guards, standing just a step away, to whisper in his ear, ‘Smile’.

L.K. Advani wrote a personal letter to Manmohan Singh, putting forth the demand. Stories doing the rounds suggest that Manmohan Singh, the then prime minister, was not averse to it, but UPA chairman Sonia Gandhi would not agree.

For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia. They did not see loyalty to the PM as a political necessity, nor did Dr Singh seek loyalty in the way in which Sonia and her aides sought it.

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 the process devaluing the office of the prime minister. This book is an effort to offer a balanced view of Dr Singh’s personality and of his record as head of government.

When the horse you are riding becomes a tiger it is difficult to dismount.

Vajpayee did not have to look over his shoulder, Manmohan Singh did.

British India, had said, in 1925, on the eve of a period of great distress in Indian agriculture: ‘The Indian peasant is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.

An important lesson he seemed to have learnt from his predecessors was to never reveal his mind on a policy issue till it was absolutely necessary to do so.

As long as the prime minister’s image is good,’ he said to me, ‘so, too, the image of the government and the country. When the image of the PM suffers, the government’s image, and the country’s, also suffers.

As an ancient saying goes, a road is made by walking.

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

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.

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.

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

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

No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ He went on to say: ‘I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.

while working for Dr Singh, I discovered that misleadingly friendly smile was especially reserved for his critics and opponents.

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.

how much of this ‘shyness’ was a defence mechanism acquired during a difficult childhood when, after his mother’s death, he had to live with an uncle’s family

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.

As PM, he would listen to all opinions, only rarely disagreeing with anyone in meetings, so as not to discourage free expression, and then doing what he felt was needed to be done.

It would be easy to be his ‘eyes and ears’, which is what he wanted me to be when I joined the PMO. The tough part would be to be his ‘voice’.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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,

Dr Singh said to me with a smile, ‘It is time, again, to be foolish.

If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1

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 late Shri T.T. Krishnamachari – a great finance minister of this country – used to say that a finance minister who wanted to do something had to be aware that there were man-eaters on the streets of Delhi.

Comparing Manmohan to Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa – each of whom took his country on the path of liberalization – former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar declared that history would never forgive him for what he was doing to the country.

eloquent

India is not in the same position as the United States is, as the European Union is. There, the farming population is 2 to 3 per cent of their population. Any nation can subsidise indefinitely a population which is 2 to 3 per cent of the total population. But no government in India, I can assure you, whatever may be your political compulsion, can subsidise 70 per cent of the population. We have to evolve a new path in which agriculture has to provide surpluses.9

His friends then encouraged him to contest the election for the president of the students’ union. This he did, and was promptly defeated.

I realize that silence was a common response of those who survived Partition. It spoke of their inability to explain what they had been through. It was a shield against the memory of loved ones lost, of ancestral homes abandoned.

Manmohan Singh is a decent though spineless man, who never stands up for his colleagues. He asked me to meet Sonia. I refused. Where honour was involved, no compromise was possible.

Many countries, including developed market economies, justified farm subsidies on such social grounds. A debt waiver was a subsidy, and a public good.

How has India become poor? There is a conspiracy of silence when we talk about the root causes of poverty in this country. Now, all these years, in the name of planned development we have provided indiscriminate protection to Indian industry. And when you give protection to somebody, this protection is at the cost of somebody else. The rural sector, the farmers of this country have been the worst sufferers of this excessive protection that has been given to the Indian industry.

Sikh tradition frowns upon fasting, and this was something that Gursharan had never done before.

It is not simply a matter of spending more money on family planning. If our women are illiterate, you may spend as much money on family planning as you like, you will not get to a situation where the small family norm gains voluntary acceptability. For all these things we need to have a different orientation. And that is what we have been trying to do.

Unlike Lahore, Amritsar was unable to reclaim the proud position that it once commanded.

I would like to say that let us disagree, but let us not be disagreeable.

The first thing I did the next morning was to go across to RCR and ask him why Surjeet had come to call on him. He merely said, ‘Montek will be deputy chairman.’ But his smile, exuding both mischief and triumph, gave the game away. One wily Sardar had secured the support of another wily Sardar to get a third one on board.

It’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

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

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit from the new order. This lukewarmness arises partly from the fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have the experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs a great danger.

Pranab was never so transparent either in expressing his disagreement or support. After returning from an important visit to Washington DC, Pranab chose not to brief the PM for three days. He had gone to see Sonia Gandhi but had not sought an appointment with Dr Singh. On the third day, I asked Dr Singh what had transpired at Pranab’s meetings with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. ‘I don’t know,’ was his plaintive reply.

Victor Hugo: ‘No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.

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.

Political analysts and reporters who skimmed the surface only saw Dr Singh as ‘Sonia’s puppet’. Those who had a deeper knowledge of the power play within the wider coalition knew that Dr Singh had the backing of the coalition partners, some of whom were more loyal to him than to his own party leaders. Sonia chose him, no doubt, but once appointed, he became the UPA’s prime minister. Dr Singh was acutely conscious of the fact that he headed a coalition and not just a monolithic party, and made sure that he maintained the best of relations with all coalition partners.

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.