Lessons that MMS taught us

CONGRESSMAN Manish Tewari, writing on the other side of these pages, and fellow journalist Pradeep Magazine on social media, have these last few hours since the passing of Dr Manmohan Singh, been among those reflecting on why parts of the media adopted some of the characteristics of a Doberman Pinscher — with due apologies to Dobermans — and unusually went after the good Doctor in the last months of his prime ministership in 2014. Magazine’s very telling comment on X speaks a world.

“That terrible feeling: India will have to live with the guilt of having vilified Manmohan Singh,” he wrote.

Those of us old enough to watch this grim story unfold between 2012 and 2014 were participants in the denouement, make no mistake. We watched the house come down, piece by piece. We watched as Rahul Gandhi, in the Press Club of India in 2013, tore up an ordinance that Manmohan Singh was piloting through the House to give temporary protection to convicted politicians — this, when the BJP had accused Dr Singh of being a “puppet” of the Gandhi family. We watched as the BJP simply didn’t allow Parliament to function that winter session that followed and BJP leader Arun Jaitley defended his party’s aggressive stalling of the House. Earlier, we had watched from the press galleries how the BJP didn’t allow the PM to speak in defence of the Indo-US nuclear deal in Parliament and the House was nearly brought down in 2008 when cash was found ostensibly to steer MPs to vote one way instead of another.

Of course, the UPA had the numbers, so that vote was won — and the nuclear deal was signed with George W Bush. Most, including Prakash Karat of the CPM, simply refused to understand what the nuclear deal was really about — it was never about playing second fiddle to a foreign power, but the reassertion of global responsibility; being at ease with America would open the doors to foreign investment that India was desperately in need of, so as to reforge its own destiny.

Remember Deng’s favourite slogan, “you don’t ask whether the cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice”? The Chinaman, general secretary of the Communist Party of China, had of course, been referring to the country’s need to partner with Western nations because they had the ability to invest in China. If the Chinese understood the need to embrace its ideological enemy, why couldn’t Karat? Dr Manmohan Singh would ask that question — or at least then minister of state in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan, who had MMS’s ear, would often ask that question.

Friendship with America, MMS also knew, would worry the Chinese; it may even persuade it to deal more kindly with India. And so it came to pass, in 2005, that India and China opened talks on resolving the border dispute — China would later withdraw that offer, when it saw India withdrawing from the world, become weaker, but that would be later.

The tragedy is that Sitaram Yechury, who openly protested the CPM’s decision to link the Indo-US deal with domestic politics, was overruled by his own party. Yechury lost, Karat won and pulled the rug from under the UPA. The irony is that years later, Kerala’s Left government led by Pinarayi Vijayan, a staunch ally of Karat, would back “masala bonds” at the London Stock Exchange, through which money was raised to fund pathbreaking health and education initiatives across Kerala, which would transform the state.

Except for Kerala, the CPM would wither away in the rest of the country. MMS’s mantra of the need to move with the times would resonate across India — it would practically wipe out the Left and allow an unleashing of the “animal spirits” that would allow Indian entrepreneurs to make the geographical leap towards brave new worlds that Dr Singh may not have imagined when he and his family trudged across the Radcliffe Line into India that long-ago summer of 1947.

Dr Singh’s passing, this rainy weekend, allows us to indulge in two “imaginings”. The first, imagine if MMS had been able to pull off a border solution with the Chinese. Galwan would never have happened, the Chinese wouldn’t have sat on your border for four years and stared down at you. Peace would have broken out on the LAC.

Imagine, also, if Manmohan Singh had made that visit to his birthplace, Gah, back in 2008. Things had been going swimmingly well with Pakistan. Friendship had been in the air for some time. Musharraf had come to Delhi to watch a cricket match in 2005 and invited MMS to make the return trip; MMS had done a short tour of Siachen and described the glacier that ended at NJ9842, whose heights both India and Pakistan coveted, as a “peace park”. MMS had even gone to Kashmir for a day-long trip, to speak to all kinds of Indians there and set up eight round-tables to carry on the conversation — Vice-President Hamid Ansari would chair the one on politics.

Meanwhile, Indians and Pakistanis had already decided that the Radcliffe Line should be consigned to history — so people travelled back and forth, Pakistani singers sang for Bollywood films and real estate prices in Amritsar and Lahore shot up. Musharraf gave special permission to light up Gah with streetlights that TERI’s RK Pachauri would personally supervise. The school in which MMS studied was given a spruce-over. “Raaste jaldi hi khull javaange” was at the heart of the conversation in both towns.

The 2008 Mumbai attacks dealt a body blow to the opening up. In Pakistan, by 2009, the lawyers’ movement had taken charge and Musharraf lost power. Attempts to revive the conversation would start and stall until the eve of the 2014 polls, when a serious attempt to lay a pipeline from Amritsar to Lahore would finally founder. Narendra Modi would not pick up on the pipeline but took a leaf out of Manmohan Singh’s book when he invited all South Asia’s leaders to Delhi for his inauguration.

Both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh (not even going as far back as Nehru or Shastri or Indira) realised that the Prime Minister of India must take all the people along, even if they haven’t voted for you. That a country as diverse as India cannot be divided along communal or sectarian or ethnic lines. That peace at home is a function of peace in your neighbourhood.

Imagine if India’s political class today could implement this conjoined legacy.