He took me around Cambridge, made me familiar with the essential locations and comfortable in the new environment. We were not together for long. He soon graduated and returned to Chandigarh to resume his teaching assignment. But I missed him. For he was different from the bright, elite Britons who formed the majority of our fellow students.
He grew up in a thatched cottage in Gah, a village in west Punjab, which had neither water nor power. His mother died soon after he was born and was brought up by his grandparents. It had a primary school that taught only up to the 4th standard. After that, he had to go to a school in Chakwal, 20 miles away. Then he went and joined his father in Peshawar, who traded in dry fruit.
When riots broke out in 1947, his father took him and escaped to India. He set up a shop in Haldwani. Mohan — as he was then called — often had to work in the shop. Before they migrated, he had sat for matriculation in Peshawar. He never got the results, and had to retake the exam in India. He graduated, and then got a teaching position in Chandigarh.
He married Gursharan Kaur, and then went to do his PhD in Oxford. I often visited them from Cambridge. It was a close, cordial, hospitable family. They educated their daughters well. Then we lost touch. But in the late 1980s, when I had settled down in Delhi, we started meeting again, usually for lunch. He was the economist most closely involved in policy – after IG Patel – and we always had plenty to talk about. He was a very upright man. I once asked him after lunch as he got into his official car if it could later drop me at the National Council of Applied Economic Research. ‘I would rather it did not,’ he said.
Then one day in 1991, he called and asked me to see him. When we met, he asked me to join him in the finance ministry. I was surprised, for I had written many columns criticising the government.
India had experienced a decade of great external good fortune. Japan ran enormous payments surpluses, and its money found a way to Indian government banks, which lent it out indiscreetly. They faced liquidity problems when their borrowers could not repay loans. The banks ran to their maternal government, which went and borrowed from IMF.
With every additional loan, IMF set tighter conditions; the government ignored them, possibly because it could not muster enough support in Parliament. Finally, IMF was fed up. It refused to give any more loans. The Chandra Shekhar government fell, and Congress came to power with PV Narasimha Rao as PM. He contacted IMF for another loan, and IMF refused. He called again, and again.
To cut a long story short, IMF asked for an FM it could trust, and Manmohan Singh was appointed. He invited me to join, and the chief economic Advisor resigned, with Manmohan resolving the crisis.
Once it was over, differences emerged. I was brimming with ideas about decontrol, liberalization, and restoration of national competitiveness. Manmohan would not translate them into policy, presumably because he disagreed, or faced opposition in Congress. I returned to my work as a journalist, while he rose up the ladder of power to become PM.
During his tenure, the economy did extremely well. But the electorate does not read economic surveys before deciding whom to vote for. BJP came to power in 2014, and continues to rule. Manmohan Singh joined the coterie of opposition leaders, and faded out of the public sphere.
Manmohan was a brilliant student, standing first in most, if not all, exams he took. He was scrupulously honest. He was a great speaker — when he wanted to be — although as a politician he learnt to make inoffensive speeches.
After his budget speech in 1993, Atal Bihari Vajpayee told him, ‘You were so good, you may convince even me some day.’ He often gave monotonous speeches when he thought that his official or political position called for them. Many people judge him by them. But they represented what I would call theatrical performance.
Manmohan Singh seldom showed how brilliant he was. And he was a wonderful friend. That is what I will miss most.
The writer was chief consultant in the finance ministry in 1991-93 under FM Manmohan Singh