Remembering Former Indian PM Manmohan Singh

Dear Editor,
Ex-Indian PM Dr Manmohan Singh has passed on (Dec 27). Those Guyanese (like Ashook Ramsaran and myself from NY) who met Singh remember him fondly; the late Yesu Persaud credited Singh for India’s economic transformation when he became Finance Minister (1991-96).
Guyana benefited tremendously during his tenure as PM (2004-14) with development assistance, loans, and scholarships. And although he never visited Guyana, Dr Singh knew a lot about Guyana and indentureship. As PM, he had Guyana and other Indian diasporic countries at heart doling out developmental aid. (He did visit Trinidad for the Commonwealth Summit in 2009 where we met briefly and spoke about diasporic issues. President Bharrat Jagdeo and Singh held fruitful talks).
As PM, Singh engaged then-President Jagdeo multiple times on boosting ties, and he found time to meet with a few of us in America and India to strengthen soft power (cultural relations). Also, Dr Singh, long before he entered politics, worked with the late Berbician economist Dr Bishnodat (Vishnu) Persaud on economic policies (advisory papers) for developing countries. Dr Clive Thomas was also among those who worked with Bishnodat. Persaud received grants and employed Singh; he respected Singh’s scholarship but did not speak of Singh in glowing terms. Singh was late in abandoning socialist ideas and embracing market reforms in India that would transform the world’s economy.
I have known Singh since the 1970s reading news articles when he was Eco Advisor to and later Chair of Planning for the Indian government. His name came up in readings while I was doing doctoral studies in Development Economics during the 1980s; he was considered a respected authority on the Indian economy with a PhD from Oxford. He was an excellent writer and a profound thinker with hardly any comparisons. He had embraced socialist economics which failed to eradicate poverty; he made a radical switch to market economics late 1980s.
In 1991, when he became Finance Minister, he convinced PM Rao to experiment with economic liberalism. State industries were denationalized. The economy took off and has experienced record positive growth ever since. All governments continued with economic liberalism until now with India having the highest growth among emerging economies over the last fifteen years.
I first met Singh in 1999 when he was running for the South Delhi seat in parliament. I was recruited by BJP-linked organizations to join the campaign against him. I was not against Singh, but I was a founding member of the Overseas Friends of BJP in NY and supported the campaign to reelect PM Vajpayee and LK Advani. Mike Persaud was with me in Delhi in August 1999. He didn’t join the campaign, but he and I queried voters in several of the seven constituencies of Delhi how they would vote. We stayed in Karol Bagh, another constituency. We both concluded that BJP would sweep all the seats and I penned an article for the media with Mike’s guidance.
I was sent daily to South Delhi to campaign from street to street and building to building as well as in the parks. I met Singh at a couple of campaign stops and wished him well. He was a gentleman. He lacked charisma and charm but had a soft, gentle voice. My candidate was Dr Vijay Kumar Malhotra, then Prof of Hindi at Delhi University. I was sent to South Delhi because it was an upper-middle-class constituency with English speakers. I campaigned among Punjabi or Sikhs, Singh’s ethnic and religious kinship, many of who voted for my guy. There was a huge concentration of Sikhs in the seat. Singh was defeated by a huge margin by Dr Malhotra. I received a lot of platitudes from Dr Malhotra and the campaign team for the victory. The Molhotra family remembered me well and invited me for dinner at their home during a visit to Delhi in 2000. We spoke several times in subsequent years.
I met Singh again at PBD in 2003 and in 2004 when he was Opposition Leader in the Rajya Sabha and in 2005 in Mumbai when he was PM and several times thereafter in NY and at PBDs. He remembered Dr Bishnodat. Ramsaran interacted with Singh half a dozen times on diaspora matters. We lobbied him and his UPA government for increased scholarships for Indo-Caribbeans. He graciously acquiesced. He also provided funding for an indentured monument that Ramsaran and I had discussed and conceived for Kolkata.

It was constructed in 2011 with the effort of Ramsaran in memory of all the indentureds.
Singh didn’t hold grudges against anyone for his defeat. And he was never elected to parliament, opting instead for a safe entrance to the Upper House.
He was not made for politics, a profession that Indian people link to corruption. Singh was an incorruptible honest politician, who did not steal a paise. But he closed his eyes to corruption. Corruption was the worst under his tenure. When asked why he didn’t crack down on corruption, he responded that the compunction of coalition politics made it impossible to act.
In other words, if he took action against the corrupt, he would lose his job. When pressed by reporters on corruption involving the Delhi Commonwealth Games, his response was he didn’t steal any money or take bribes and that the reporters should pose their questions to the ministers involved in the scandal. The voters had enough of the Singh-led government. Singh and the UPA were swept out of office in 2014 with the Congress in its worst showing in its history.
Despite that blot in his record, Manmohan Singh was widely respected by friends and foes and by those of us who read his works. Though opponents, PM Modi spoke glowingly of him.

Yours sincerely,
Vishnu Bisram