As principles peter out

In other words, the effect could be simply that people tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently.

In the last few weeks, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been dumped by the Western media that once put a halo around his trademark blue turban. They promoted him as India’s economic wizard, and are now calling him incompetent. Time magazine says he is an “underachiever”.

Even PM Singh’s current detractors, principally the Bharatiya Janata Party, have described him as the right finance minister in the wrong party. In an interview with Singh, however, in the wake of the then raging Harshad Mehta securities scam, I had somewhat bluntly asked the finance minister if he would take responsibility or resign. He frowned his famous frown in response.

The Western news agency I worked with was livid at my “irrelevant” question. It seems now, from the recent comments by Standard & Poor’s and subsequently Time magazine’s critique of Singh’s current tenure, that I had the (dubious?) distinction of being ahead of the denouement by at least 20 years.

Standard & Poor’s (whose 1990 downgrade of India’s rating heralded Singh’s advent) recently critiqued him as an unelected prime minister. This is unfortunately true.

It is equally true that Singh, who has never been a member of the Lok Sabha, was also only a nominated finance minister, and yet he was much lionised in Western capitals for being that.

Now into his eighth year as prime minister, a period during which he evicted the left’s support and embraced the West more closely, Dr Singh, a former teacher of economics, stands accused by his former admirers of not doing enough for his market reforms.

Was he then the sergeant who got promoted beyond his competence to general? Standard & Poor’s, which lowered India’s rating outlook to “negative” from “stable” in April, implied India might be better off under someone else’s watch. Was it jockeying for Narendra Modi, villain for India’s liberals but knight in shining armour for the country’s politically powerful business community? The hint is too obvious to ignore.

“The paramount political power rests with Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi, who holds no Cabinet position, while the government is led by an unelected Prime Minister Singh, who lacks a political base of his own,” S&P lamented.

The uncharacteristic Western critique of the architect of India’s economic reforms is of course hypocritical as well as misleading. A fact seldom mentioned by the ubiquitous foreign correspondents in Singh’s journey to the top is that his reforms were made possible by two unflattering events.

To begin with, they would never have taken off had the government in which Singh was finance minister not used bribery to win a crucial vote of confidence. MPs who took money to vote for the reforms were eventually jailed. It was a brazen subversion of parliamentary democracy but remains hardly discussed by the media.

The second unfortunate fact came in the form of the finance minister’s election to the Upper House from Assam as a resident of the remote north-eastern state. Many are still not convinced that Singh was a full resident of the state as required (before the Supreme Court lowered the hurdle).

Why is the criticism of Prime Minister Singh hypocritical? For one, it ignores the wider and more germane questioning of the effects of the reforms and the course they took to the detriment of a majority of Indians. Tens of thousands of farmers have committed suicide, and UN human development indices equate populous Indians states with sub-Saharan Africa.

In his first budget speech in July 1991, Singh stressed his reforms would not encourage the “mindless and heartless consumerism we have borrowed from the affluent societies of the West”.

He explained his objection to the consumerist phenomenon was two-fold. First, India could not afford it. “In a society where we lack drinking water, education, health, shelter and other basic necessities, it would be tragic if our productive resources were to be devoted largely to the satisfaction of the needs of a small minority.

“The country’s need for water – for drinking and for irrigation – rural roads, good urban infrastructure and massive investments in primary education and basic health services for the poor are so great as to effectively preclude encouragement to consumerist behaviour imitative of advanced industrial societies. Our approach to development has to combine efficiency with austerity.”

Now, austerity is not something the West would prescribe as a virtue until its own economies would begin to go down on their knees. If anything Singh too has presided over a mushrooming of motorcars (Delhi has more cars than Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai put together) and cellphones as a cure for India’s backwardness.

A minister in the Singh cabinet describes this as an ideological drift in the Congress party that needs to be addressed urgently. It is not clear to what ideology he is referring.

The last time when his prime minister was short of numbers against a left-led move to block his “strategic” embrace of the US he appealed in adulation to his predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee to bail him out, which the BJP grandee did.

All that the Congress and its bumbling general can perhaps do now is to promote another sergeant to take charge. Ideology has long ceased to be of relevance.