An Agent of History

A more nuanced defense of Singh, present in several Wire articles, is that he actually was never the neoliberal ideologue he was made out to be. His former media advisor argued that, whatever his views in 1991, he had dropped the “ponderous bunkum known as the trickle-down theory” by the time he became prime minister. An economic historian argued, based on interviews with Singh, that he was a middle-of-the-road pragmatist, not uninfluenced by the left-Keynesianism of Joan Robinson, with whom he studied at Cambridge.

There may be truth to these nuances. The problem with this line of reasoning, however, is that Singh himself clearly embraced being identified with the 1991 reforms. At that time, with India facing a dire balance-of-payments crisis, Singh worked with Congress prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao to dismantle India’s bureaucratic economy, the increasingly dysfunctional “License Raj,” which had come to reward corporate closeness to the government, rather than economic performance. In addition to relaxing the licensing regime, the reforms devalued the Indian rupee, ended export subsidies, reduced funding to public sector enterprises, and introduced significant cuts to welfare programs.

The subsequent years saw rapid economic growth. For India’s growing middle class, the reforms offered something more intangible too: a sense of opportunity, of openness to the world, of India as a dynamic player on the global stage. Yet this class was still a tiny section of India’s vast population, and the benefits of liberalization were unevenly distributed. Further, despite its rhetoric, neoliberalism did not end state-corporate collusion but merely displaced it to other realms, a fact that would come back to haunt Singh and his party.

This is all hindsight; at the time, Singh was a forceful proponent of the reforms. Though Singh is invariably described as soft-spoken, humble, and reticent, while introducing the Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation reforms to parliament, he produced soaring rhetoric: “As Victor Hugo once said, ‘No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ 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.”

If we take the quote literally, then Singh’s role in all this is incidental – neoliberalism would have come one way or another. In fact, this is the line taken in Vinod Jose’s stinging 2011 profile of Singh in Caravan journal. Jose argues that Singh was picked to be the face of the 1991 reforms because of his impeccable Oxbridge academic credentials and, more crucially, because — as a technocrat with little experience in politics — he was expendable if public opinion turned against them.

Yet Singh was able to leverage his association with the reforms to ever-higher political heights, first as leader of the opposition, then, unexpectedly, as prime minster. He took up the latter role at the request of Sonia Gandhi, the real locus of power in the INC, and the widow of party dynast Rajiv Gandhi. To paraphrase Karl Marx, Singh made history, but not in conditions of his own choosing.

Singh and the New India

Indeed, Singh’s life more broadly was emblematic of India’s post-independence trajectory. He was born in 1932 in a small village near Islamabad (now in Pakistan). He was fifteen years old when India gained freedom from British rule, but the joy of the moment was overshadowed by the trauma of partition. Singh and his family were themselves refugees; they eventually settled across the new border in Amritsar.

As Shankar Gopalakrishnan notes, India’s post-1947 economy, which had the approval of the largely urban Indian bourgeoisie, reflected that class’s “inability to tackle the continued power” of rural landowners who claimed to represent India’s peasantry. This led, Gopalakrishnan argues, to a distinctive feature of Indian political economy that continues to this day: the prominent role of petty commodity production, largely, though not exclusively, in India’s massive agricultural sector. This, in turn, encouraged “social structures of accumulation” — most prominently caste — in regulating the economy. As the visionary anti-caste leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar noted, post-independence India entered a life of potentially explosive contradictions, with formal equality in politics and rampant inequality in social and economic life.

This was the India in which Singh came of age. Studious and intellectually curious, Singh won scholarships to study economics at Cambridge and then Oxford; by all accounts, he read voraciously and studied a wide range of economic theories. Upon returning to India, he embarked on an academic career before entering the bureaucracy. He took on increasingly significant roles in the 1980s, as the post-independence economic model was coming apart at the seams.

Capitalists had started to chafe at the controls they had once accepted; at the same time, strong social movements pushed the state to strengthen petty commodity production. Responding to these contradictory imperatives, the state started its initially halting move toward neoliberalism while leaning on deficit financing; this led to a brief boom, followed by the bust that opened the door for the 1991 reforms.

This took place amid dramatic shifts in the international order. The Gulf War was in full swing; the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapsing. Singh’s move to shake up the Indian economy furthered the sense that there was no alternative to the emerging, US-led global order.

By the time Singh became prime minister in 2004, India had moved further down the path of neoliberalism, and further away from its Cold War–era nonalignment toward becoming a junior partner in the United States’ growing informal empire. Singh expended considerable political capital furthering the US-India partnership, outmaneuvering the Communist-led Left Front that was part of his coalition government. The Left Front withdrew from the government over Singh’s backing of the India-US nuclear accord, which symbolized India’s strategic realignment; Singh nevertheless cobbled together the votes he needed to pass it.

Singh had the political capital to spend on this issue in part because of the economic and political winds at his back; his first term saw the fastest economic growth in India’s post-independence history. Further, with the prodding of Left parties and Sonia Gandhi, Singh’s government had enacted several progressive and pro-poor policies, including an ambitious rural employment scheme that Congress touted as the largest public works program in the world, as well as laws enshrining the right to information and the right to education. It seemed that Singh had squared the circle: rapid economic growth and further liberalization of the economy, balanced with a range of progressive social and economic measures. It was enough to bring Congress back to power in 2009.

From Indian Liberalism to Hindu Nationalism

The good times did not last. Congress became embroiled in a series of scandals, and it was definitively defeated by the BJP in the following election, as Modi’s party became the new hegemon in Indian politics. Singh’s reputation as an honest politician remained untarnished, but the scandals were undoubtedly only possible in the political-economic landscape that Singh had such a central role in shaping. As the left-wing economist Prabhat Patnaik noted at the time:

It is instructive that all the big-ticket cases of “corruption” that have recently been in focus in India . . . have involved the handing over of state property to private capitalists “for a song”; and those taking decisions about such handing over, have got kickbacks. “Corruption” thus is essentially a levy on the primitive accumulation of capital, and its recent spurt is because neo-liberal regimes witness rampant primitive accumulation of capital.

It’s not that the BJP is a less corrupt party — although it projects that image — or that it does not have its own favored corporate houses (Modi’s closeness to the scandal-plagued billionaire Gautam Adani is the stuff of legend). Yet the scandals of Singh’s second term gave corporate India the excuse it needed to abandon Congress and move into alignment with the BJP. This move was aided by the mainstream media, which excoriated Singh for not being neoliberal enough, leaving reforms unfinished — in this, Singh’s former media advisor may be right that corporate India was not happy with the employment guarantees and other progressive measures enacted by Singh’s government.

Yet such complaints misunderstand the fundamental limitations of the neoliberal project in India. The political need to offer support, even if increasingly attenuated, to petty commodity producers, sets real limits on neoliberal reforms. The same constraints have tied the hands of the BJP government as well; the famously intransigent Modi was forced to withdraw his efforts to further liberalize the agricultural sector.

Despite these constraints, the BJP has become the definitive party of neoliberalism in India, taking over the mantle from the Congress. Gopalakrishnan’s analysis again provides insight into this. Neoliberalism on its own has never had mass support in India; this is part of the reason Singh’s Congress eventually foundered. Neoliberalism had to be married to the BJP’s mass base, the extensive grassroots networks established by the party’s parent organization, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This, Gopalakrishnan argues, was not merely a marriage of convenience, but of increasingly aligned visions.

Ultimately, Singh’s social liberalism and economic neoliberalism could not be welded into an electoral force; the latter found its home with the purveyors of religious reaction. Meanwhile, the BJP has consistently underfunded the Congress-introduced rural employment guarantee scheme, while pushing the “techno-patrimonialism” of limited cash transfers.

At his last press conference as prime minister, Singh uttered words that have been quoted in almost every obituary: “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the opposition in parliament.” If, to mangle a phrase, obituaries are the first draft of history, then the generally glowing set of obits in Indian and international media are proving Singh right. But it is worth returning to the prophetic conclusion of Caravan’s 2011 profile: “If the centre cannot hold, then Manmohan Singh will be seen as the man who let loose a storm but failed to bring it under control — who sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.”