Manmohan Singh’s press conference on Friday — only his third as Prime Minister — was expected to provide the platform to announce a major course correction, with just five months to go before the next general election. The ruling UPA coalition is at its lowest point, battered by a slowing economy, beset by scams and scandals, and coming off humiliating defeats in Assembly elections in four states. In the event, he did nothing of the sort. To that extent, he was true to form — one neither expects nor witnesses, fireworks during his rare public interactions. The statement that he will be handing over the reins of power to a “new Prime Minister” at the end of his current term is no more than an affirmation of the compulsions of democratic politics. However, it may well force the Congress to bite the bullet on succession and anoint his potential successor a little earlier than it had planned.
He also failed to provide a convincing enough case for the governments he has headed for nearly a decade. His argument that history will judge him more kindly than the media and the Opposition may well be correct. In retrospect, the past decade has seen a decisive change in the economic landscape of the country. Six years of high growth, which helped fuel a record spending spree on social sector schemes, have seen a dramatic and real reduction in poverty. However, his blaming of global economic factors for the current slowdown would have had a truer ring had he also acknowledged the contribution of the same global factors to the period of growth which preceded the current slump. History may well point out that the global economic boom of that period, fuelled by a record supply of cheap money that found its way into emerging markets, played at least as significant a role in shifting the economy to a higher growth trajectory as any measures his government took.
As for scams, arguing that they happened during the previous regime, and that his party was returned with a record mandate subsequently, does not quite wash. After all, vindication by the people’s court is something a Narendra Modi or a Lalu Yadav may also claim, with equal justification. About fighting corruption, future historians will have to go by his statements and his actions after the scams broke. ‘Coalition dharma’ is not a convincing enough justification for lack of decisive action. The Prime Minister himself had demonstrated during the nuclear deal that decisive action by a leader can overcome such compulsions. In fact, what his second stint as Prime Minister will eventually be judged by is what he, and the government he leads, did not do. It failed to build on the cushion provided by five years of record growth to aggressively push through critical reforms, especially on subsidies. And it failed to react quickly when the global tide turned and when the growth momentum began to falter.