Politics
Covid-19 & SL’s future
by C.A. Chandraprema
The emergence of yet another major Covid cluster in Divulapitiya is food for thought. While the entire world seemed to have lost control over the spread of Covid-19, Sri Lanka seemed to have brought it under control until this latest outbreak. Even this latest cluster though the largest by our standards, is nothing compared to what most other countries including highly developed countries with much smaller populations have been experiencing. There is little doubt that Sri Lanka will bring this cluster under control as it did the previous ones. There is no such thing as eradicating this disease which has no cure. All that one can do is to have a successful firefighting mechanism which is capable of containing any outbreaks. The Kandakadu cluster came as an unpleasant surprise just like the present one, but it was successfully contained.
At no point were we ever rid of Covid-19 completely. When the number of local patients declines, the repatriation of expatriate workers from overseas commences and every planeload brings new Covid-19 patients into the country. Hence the emergence of new clusters is something that has to be expected. Even countries like China and New Zealand which had established control over Covid-19 very early on, experienced the emergence of new clusters which they had to put a cap on. Before the emergence of the Divulapitiya cluster, people had begun relaxing to an extent that would seem to be inviting disaster. We seemed to be fiddling while the entire world burned all around us.
We were watching the news bulletins announcing new outbreaks throughout the western world and in parts of Asia which exceeded even the first wave experienced in those countries and yet going about our work as if nothing was wrong. The Divulapitiya cluster was perhaps a much needed reality check, to put the whole country on alert once again. One international personality who said, based on studies carried out, that this could be a three to four year pandemic, was Michael Moore the documentary film producer. Unless a vaccine is developed before that, this pandemic seems set to continue for quite some time more.
We are now nearing the first anniversary of the first outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan China and nowhere near developing a vaccine for the disease. One thing that can be said for certain is that the Covid-19 pandemic is going to be very different to previous outbreaks of viral dieseases like the SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak of 2003, or even the AH1N1 pandemic of 2010. Of these SARS was just a blip on the radar which affected only a few countries. AH1N1 was far more widespread – perhaps as pervasive as Covid-19 but the number of fatalities it caused was negligible by Covid-19 standards. As a disease, Covid-19 is nowhere near as fearsome as was the Ebola hemorrhagic fever which was also a viral disease with a fatality rate that could be as high as 90%. Yet with the number of Covid-19 deaths worldwide topping over a million, it cannot be ignored as a case of the ‘sniffles’ either. In actual fact most people are still unclear as to extent to which they should be concerned. If this had been a disease like Ebola, what we would be living through would effectively be the end of the world and people would have been in a state of blind panic.
Wake up call
But what we see now happening with regard to Covid-19 is whole countries and populations alternating between concern and indifference. One thing that the entire world seems to have decided on is that there will be no more complete shut downs as was imposed in March and April this year during the early stages of this pandemic. Such shutdowns were impractical and in the circumstances, only helps to suppress the spread of the disease for a while and it resurfaces the moment the shut down is lifted. The only alternative appears what countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka have been doing, isolation of cases, localized shutdowns where necessary, restrictions on gatherings, imposing face mask and hand washing regulations and contact tracing. If this cannot be done in a particular country, perhaps the only other alternative is to try to go about your day to day work and hope for the best as countries like the USA and Brazil seem to be doing.
The approach being tried by the USA and Brazil was tried out in its classic purity by Sweden which never had shutdowns or mandatory face masks or total restrictions on gatherings. At one point, even the wearing of face masks was discouraged by Sweden on the grounds that it would cause unnecessary panic. Today, Sweden which has less than half the Sri Lankan population has over 95,000 recorded cases and nearly 6,000 deaths. Swedish levels of infection and mortality would have caused the government to fall in Sri Lanka but the Swedes seem to be taking it with stoic indifference. There was much criticism of President Trump for having left hospital without being completely cured of Covid-19 and taking his mask off to address the media, but perhaps in those countries, there’s no alternative but to put on a brave face and weather the storm as best as one can.
Throughout the West there have been protests against any move to reimpose shutdowns. A phenomenon aptly termed ‘Covid-19 fatigue’ is setting in throughout the world. Indeed the same can be said about Sri Lanka. Despite the horrific stories that one hears about the rate of infections and fatalities in other countries, people are becoming less and less amenable to Covid-19 routines such as wearing face masks and washing hands. In most establishments in Sri Lanka, the sinks and soap have been replaced by hand sanitizers as most customers show little inclination to go through the hassle of washing one’s hands before entering an office or a shop. As of this moment, the entire world is actually veering in the direction of countries like Sweden, USA and Brazil except perhaps countries like Sri Lanka which have hit upon an alternative way of dealing with the problem.
Finally we may well end up dealing with Covid-19 the way the world dealt with the Spanish flu over a century ago – by basically ignoring it and allowing those who die to die and hope for the best. As a result of that attitude, the economic impact of the Spanish flu was not as severe as one would think, even though that pandemic killed millions worldwide. The attitudes that we are seeing towards death in countries like Sweden, the USA and Brazil are very different to the attitudes that prevailed in the West just a decade or two ago. In the old days, if a 98-year old person died in a hospital, his relatives would file a medical negligence suit claiming that his dearly beloved great great grandpa would still have been alive if not for someone’s negligence. Things came to such a pass that in some countries insurance companies refused to insure medical professionals against medical negligence claims and governments had to consider laws limiting the maximum payout that can be obtained from a medical negligence suit. After the end of the cold war and the emergence of a unipolar Western dominated world, the West suffered a serious loss of commonsense.
Damages could be claimed for the most ridiculous causes. This writer is aware of an instance in a western country where a man jumped out of a moving train just as it was coming to a stop at a station as we see so many passengers doing in Sri Lanka on a daily basis. One would think that if anyone is injured after jumping off a moving train without waiting a few seconds for it to come to a halt, one has to bear the consequences of one’s actions. But not in the West. In the instance mentioned, the passenger sued the railway company saying that he jumped out only because it was possible to do so. That was the West just a few years ago. In recent years this snowflake culture in the west developed to untenable levels with just a word being considered a threat and the victim needing counseling or medication to get over the stress of being called a name. But today people are dying like flies in the West and one would expect a flood of litigation bigger than the Asian tsunami of 2004, but we see nothing of the kind. The West is taking the damage from Covid-19 with third world levels of resignation. Perhaps this is nature’s way of correcting attitudes.
Face to face with reality
Covid-19 has brought home to the Western world the realities of life and how. It’s tempting to hope that this new found realization of practical limitations, of one’s own mortality and vulnerability of what is possible and impossible, will lead to a more realistic approach to the rest of the world. At one point some theorists in the West were advocating R2P (the right to protect), a doctrine formulated to enable the West to intervene even militarily in any country on the pretext of protecting its population or a part of its population from its own government. One Western leader who realized that this involvement in dozens of conflicts around the world with little or no understanding of what they were doing, was sapping the strength of the West was Donald Trump. He has been taking concrete steps to extricate the USA from interminable and unwinnable wars all around the world. The realization of limitations on the political and military front go together with a similar realization on the economic front.
Indeed it could be said that the realization of these realities predated Covid-19 – the election of Donald Trump in 2016 symbolized that trend. Covid-19 only been a kind of coup d’ grace in this whole process. The changes in the world economy now taking place due to Covid-19 actually began before Covid-19 appeared on the scene. Unbridled economic globalization was proving to be untenable. In the US, companies selling goods in the American market would relocate overseas to cut costs and increase profits and import into the USA what once used to be produced within the USA. Its not that these companies were making losses when they were producing within the USA, but they could make greater profits when they relocated to other countries with cheaper labour costs and cheaper inputs. Thus we saw globalization being driven by an international kleptrocracy that had no loyalty to any nation or anybody except the profit motive. The Americans within this kelptocracy had no regard to the fact that relocating production facilities overseas were depriving Americans of their jobs.
No regard was paid to the question as to how Americans were supposed to purchase the goods that were being imported if a good part of the population did not have an income to pay for those goods. After about two decades or more of unbridled globalization, countries like the USA were looking for a reset, which Trump provided in 2016. So even before Covid-19 appeared on the scene, a turning inwards was becoming apparent throughout the world, most conspicuously in the USA and Britain. Suddenly, ideas like Sovereignty, borders, national security, national economy had once again become fashionable. Now Covid-19 has made that trend a necessity. People have learned the hard way how disruptive over dependence on imports can be in certain situations.
Even before Covid-19 hit SL, we had certain priorities dictated not so much by economic reasons as by political ones. There was a need to generate more job opportunities locally. There was a need to cut down on imports and to produce such goods locally whenever possible so as to conserve foreign exchange. There was a need to limit our dependence on certain overseas markets. All these have been made even more necessary by the pandemic. There will be restrictions on the number of Sri Lankans who can be employed abroad as the economies of all countries shrink and the volume of world trade contracts. Quite a number of those already employed are likely to lose their jobs and return to Sri Lanka which makes it imperative that job opportunities are created locally for these people.
Making room for a reset
The decline in foreign exchange earnings will have to be met by limiting imports which also works in favour of the above mentioned objective of creating more employment by producing such goods locally. Over the past four decades or so, both political parties have had policies trending in this direction to a greater or lesser extent. The UNP of J.R.Jayewardene despite its open economy orientation still gave priority to the local production of rice through projects like the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme. They also tried to get local sugar production going by earmarking the Moneragala district for sugar cane cultivation and setting up the Pelwatte Sugar factory. The sugar produced by this new factory was sold on the local market for slightly above the world market price with the then UNP government imposing a tax on imported sugar to make Pelwatte sugar viable on the local market. The UNP of J.R.Jayewardene was a development oriented party and in the 1980s, they were sneeringly called the ‘Sanwardhanas’ because of their emphasis on economic development.
However, after the mid-1990s the UNP completely lost its development orientation and became a mouthpiece for NGOs. It came to such a pass that the UNP government stored paddy from a bumper harvest in the Mattala airport to make fun of the bumper harvest as well as the airport. It’s very unlikely that JRJ would have reacted to a bumper paddy harvest in that manner. During his time, he even participated in the traditional wap magula ceremonies, getting into the paddy field barebodied and in a sarong like the farmers. Now, due to Covid-19, and the economic and political changes that had been taking place in the world before Covid-19, we have once again come to an era where the prime need of the country is to promote local production, to create new avenues of income for the people and generate jobs locally for the youth entering the labour market every year.
For Sri Lanka, the need for an economic reset that has been made necessary by Covid-19 is actually an opportunity to make a change of course that was becoming necessary due to political circumstances. Making such a change of course when things are normal both domestically and internationally is difficult because the disruption caused generates stresses and resentment. Now however with the entire world in turmoil, and the domestic economy also thrown into disarray due to circumstances beyond the control of the government, it’s easier to change course with minimal political fallout.
Jimmy Carter & Manmohan Singh:
by Rajan Philips
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President, died on Sunday, December 29, at the ripe old age of 100 years, in Plains, a small, rural town in Georgia, where he was born and lived his pre and post political life. Three days prior and across the world, Manmohan Singh, India’s 13th Prime Minister, passed away in New Delhi. Dr. Singh was 92 years old. Carter served as President for four years from 1977 to 1981, 23 years before Manmohan Singh began his two-term tenure (2004-2014) as India’s Prime Minister.
The two leaders were in office nearly 25 years apart, and they led the world’s two largest constitutional democracies that are also culturally and historically vastly different. Yet their lives and their time in politics are remarkable for what they had in common as political leaders and what differentiated them from both their predecessors and their successors. They both had humble beginnings but went on to excel in education and professional careers before entering politics. And as political leaders, they were simple, sincere, honest and have left behind an inspiring legacy of high conduct.
Jimmy Carter was the son of a Southern Baptist peanut farmer who took over the breakeven family farm, modernized it into a profiting commercial enterprise and became a millionaire farmer. He used his new status to become active in local matters and to leap into politics calling for racial equality and tolerance predicated on his deep Christian faith. He became State Senator (1963-1967), Governor of Georgia (1971-1975), and by 1974 declared himself to be a primary candidate for Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. He was the most religious of all American presidents but always kept his religion separate from the affairs of the state.
Before taking over the family farm after his father’s death, Carter was an Electrical Engineer in the US navy and was among the early corps of officers who were trained in submarine and nuclear submarine programs. As a 28 year old Navy Lieutenant in 1952, Carter was part of a team of American nuclear reactor specialists who were despatched to Canada to deal with at the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown at the Chalk River nuclear power station in Canada. Carter and his colleagues were lowered into the reactor vessel, taking turns of 90 second duration each to limit exposure to radiation, until they dismantled the reactor.
Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 was justifiably seen as bringing closure to America’s political agony in the wake of the Watergate scandal at home and the Vietnam withdrawal that was a humbling lesson on the limits of American power abroad. Carter’s predecessors were Richard Nixon whom everyone in America wanted out of the White House, and Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon after his involuntary resignation over Watergate. Carter was succeeded four years later by Ronald Reagan, America’s one and only actor president, who did not have any of Nixon’s political smarts but had grown by default to become the poster boy for the American right, exuding Hollywood charm embellished by scripted eloquence.
In between Nixon-Ford and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter unfolded his one-term presidency. After losing to Ronald Reagan (who became the Republican candidate in his third try after failing badly against Nixon in 1968 and coming up close to Ford in 1976), in 1980, Jimmy Carter co-founded with his wife Rosalynn a new life of humanitarian and human rights activism that had lasted the full 44 years of his post-presidency. The institutions the Carters set up will continue long after them in Georgia and around the world in true testament to their conjugal partnership of faith, love, labour and service that lasted 77 years, well past the biblical milestone for individual human life.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of his post-presidential service is the near eradication of the scourge of guinea worm in many parts of the world purely through the systematic spread of clean living practices without the miracle of a vaccine. The Carter Centre has to-date monitored nearly 115 elections around the world and Mr. & Mrs. Carter have physically contributed to the building of homes for the homeless in partnership with Habitat for Humanity.
Carter as President
A commonplace observation has been that Jimmy Carter was a successful ex-president after being a not so successful president. In fact, at the time of his defeat in 1980 the Carter presidency was seen as a failure. Fortunately for him, President Carter lived long enough to see biographers and historians revisiting his presidency and presenting it in a far more favourable light in the long sweep of history and amidst contemporary exigencies.
Carter presided over many bold initiatives – on social welfare, civil rights, diversity, resources, energy, education, and pragmatic (not ideological) deregulation. On the economy, it was Carter who started the fight against inflation and signalled his intentions in July 1979 by appointing Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. Volcker was a hawkish advocate for raising interest rates, and his treatment worked as inflation that rose to 14.8% in 1980 fell to below 3% within three years. Reagan kept Volcker on the job and claimed credit for lowering the inflation.
On the external front, Carter made human rights the corner stone of his foreign policy, facilitated the Camp David Accords that cemented a lasting peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, successfully negotiated the hitherto elusive Panama Canal Treaty, and established formal diplomatic relations with China and forged a personal rapport with China’s post-Mao reformist Deng Xiaoping. His Achilles’ heel proved to be the Iran hostage crisis that began in November 1979 when Iranian militants seized the US embassy in Tehran and held as many as 60 US officials hostages for 444 days.
The immediate provocation for hostage taking was the admission of the deposed Shah of Iran to the US for medical treatment. It is known that Carter only reluctantly agreed to allow the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment, and that he (Carter) had been the target of Republican and media criticism in the US for his Administration’s reluctance to support Shah against the Iranian revolution.
On the day President Carter died, The Times of Israel published a vitriolic article by Efran Fard, recounting a whole litany of contemporary criticisms of Carter’s Iranian policy. None more critical than Ronald Reagan who called Carter’s policy “a historical stain in American history.” Some history, some reading! Yet it was Reagan who once again was enabled to declare victory by the revolutionary Iranian government that chose to free the American hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Carter left office and Reagan began his presidency.
It was the Carter Administration that had negotiated the terms for releasing the hostages with Algerian mediation. But Tehran would rather have Carter defeated in the November 1980 election and Reagan elected as President. In his unfriendly obituary article, Efran Fard rekindles old dichotomies, calling the Obama presidency vis-à-vis Iran as “Carter 2”, and the Biden presidency as “Carter 3.” He ends his piece with the wish that Carter’s death “will mark the end of these misguided policies,” and the assertion that “the world first faced the rise of Islamic radicalism during Carter’s era, and the battle against terrorism continues to this day.”
Fard’s article makes no mention of Trump who ended Obama’s ‘Carter 2’ and is now set to deal with Biden’s ‘Carter 3.’ Trump was a fierce critic of Carter during the campaign for the November election, mockingly comparing the rise of inflation under Carter then and under Biden now, as well as taking Carter to task for the Panama Canal agreement he signed. Unlike Fard, however, Trump has been gracious about Carter after his death, offering Carter his “highest respect,” and is planning to attend the state funeral for Carter that President Biden has ordered.
Before the November presidential election, President Carter has made it known that he would cast his vote for Kamala Harris in spite of his physical condition. His death during the last days of the Biden presidency gives Democrats the chance to celebrate Carter’s life and relinquish office on a high moral note. Truth be told, the positions that Trump is articulating now – on inflation, immigration, abortion, education, the environment, and foreign policy including the Panama Canal Treaty – are all echoes of the positions articulated by Ronald Reagan in his campaign against Jimmy Carter.
Reagan was certainly far less coarse and far more charming than Trump. There is nothing compassionate about Trump and he never pretends to be what he is not. And Carter did not have to pretend that he was compassionate about others. That was his nature and nurtured it to perfection to the very end. His long tenure as ex-president makes him almost impossible to be emulated by any presidential aspirant. But he will remain the lodestar of American politics, exemplifying the power of a positive example and not the example of power.
(To be continued)
(Excerpted from the autobiography of MDD Peiris, Secretary to the Prime Minister)
I shall not deal with the day to day work of the Non-Aligned Conference in plenary sessions and in committees and the substantive issues that were discussed and debated. I was not directly involved in these aspects, and there would be others more competent than I to write about such matters. My job was one of co-ordination, troubleshooting, and the prevention or resolution of any issue that could mar the proceedings of the conference.
Additionally, I had to schedule the large number of one on one meetings between the Prime Minister and Heads of State and Government, Foreign Ministers and other Heads of Delegations, and sit in at many of these. I had already referred to the able team that assisted me in these matters.
At 8 p.m. on August 16′ was the dinner hosted by the Prime Minister to the Heads of State and Government and other distinguished guests, which included the Secretary General of the UN Kurt Waldheim and Mrs. Waldheim, at the Hotel Lanka Oberoi. Some 240 guests sat for dinner, including Cabinet Ministers and Senior Officials. Given the issues involving protocol, geopolitics and other sensitivities, drawing up a table plan for such a large number of distinguished personalities was extremely complex and difficult.
This was nevertheless, attended to with great distinction by Mr. M.M. Weerasena, who functioned as Social Secretary in the Prime Minister’s office. Mr. Weerasena has had long experience of these matters in the Prime Minister’s office and did an excellent job. Manel (Abeysekera), the Chief of Protocol and I were consulted, and the Prime Minister shown the draft table plan. There was very little to alter, due to the experience and ability of Mr. Weerasena.
The Summit continued its work on the 17th and 18th of August. On the 17th, while the Plenary Sessions were going on and the Heads of State and Government delivering their addresses, a couple of senior police officers, who were part of a group covering the main hall, came to me and breathlessly said that there was a problem. Two of President Gaddafi’s security men who were outside, had suddenly barged in and entered the main hall. The officers thought they were armed.
They wanted to know what to do, and whether they were to eject them. This was no time for lengthy deliberation. Something clearly had to be done, and fast, and one had to take the consequence of that decision. I therefore told them that the Plenary session could not be disturbed. It could turn out to be a major incident, where subsequent headlines would be about the incident and not the conference.
Forcible ejection was not an option. It could be very dangerous, if they were armed. One could not contemplate a shoot-out in the hall where Heads of State and Government, Foreign Ministers and others were seated. Under these circumstances, I told them that the best thing to do was for two or three of our security people to stand by the side of each of them, fully alert and watchful until the Plenary session was over.
I also told them, that what had happened constituted a serious lapse, and that it must never happen again. They were thankful for my advice, and acted accordingly. I myself spent a very tense period of time until the Plenary session was over. Mercifully nothing happened. Our security people also learned from the experience. They seemed to be different people and were ruthlessly tough thereafter.
Both on the 17th and 18th August, I could not reach home till well past 3 a.m. The 19th was the final day of the summit, which finally ended at 1.30 a.m. Afterwards, the Prime Minister took us to the restaurant for a snack. Shirley Amerasinghe, Neville Kanekeratne, Elmo Seneviratne, Susantha de Alwis, Kathirimalainathan and others were there. All our tensions and pent up feelings were relieved in conversation which attracted lots of good humour and laughter. By this time, however, everyone was exhausted. The momentum of events had kept us going and now we legitimately felt very tired and could admit to it. But there was follow up work to be done, and among other matters, was a call by the Prime Minister on President Tito and his wife on board his ship the next day. According to her wishes, Minister Felix Dias Bandaranaike and I accompanied her. The President was in a jovial mood and happy with the progress of the Summit. We discussed the main issues addressed by the Summit and what the Prime Minister should stress, when she addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, later in September. The President and wife were also very hospitable, and regaled us with food and drink. Serious and important issues were discussed, but in a light hearted tone and manner.
Visit to the UN, Britain and Norway
1976 was a year of travel, although I did not travel with the Prime Minister every time. She decided who would go with her on each visit out of the country. For instance, I did not attend a single conference of Commonwealth Heads of State or Government, during my entire period of seven years as Secretary to the Prime Minister. For those meetings, among others, she took along the Foreign Secretary.
I also did not accompany her on her visits to some countries. On those occasions, my job was to act for the Secretary Ministry of Defence and Foreign Affairs, in addition to my own duties. The Prime Minister as the recently elected Chairman of the Non-aligned Movement, had now the duty and the responsibility of addressing the new General Assembly sessions of the United Nations in New York in September and laying before them the main issues and the conclusions of the Fifth Summit Conference of Non-aligned Heads of State and Government.
During this visit, she intended to be in Britain for a few days, where she was going to meet the British Prime Minister. There was also a short state visit to Norway on her schedule. I was part of this delegation. Mackie Ratwatte, her Private Secretary and Sunethra, her elder daughter and Coordinating Secretary were the other members. Superintendent of Police Lucky Kodituwakku left for New York earlier in order to co-ordinate security arrangements there, and Captain Lankatillake of the Army accompanied the Prime Minister, as security officer.
Mr. Leelananda de Silva was to join us in New York, where the Prime Minister also had the services of two outstanding diplomats in Ambassador Shirley Amerasinghe and Neville Kanekeratne, the first, our Permanent Representative at the UN and the second, our Ambassador to the USA. Elmo Seneviratne, a senior and experienced officer of our Foreign Service was working in our mission in New York at this time. and we were fortunate to have at our disposal his wide experience as well.
I overcame the thought it was inauspicious to write about a death as Nan’s first column for the New Year. But it is a tribute to a great man and a life lived well and successfully, turning a huge country from economic depression to prosperity. Hence, presenting an inspiring human beacon to be followed to our country, now struggling to get out of economic difficulties with new leaders at the helm, is good. May there emerge statesmen from among them (of either gender) in the year 2025 and after.
Thirteenth PM of India Manmohan Singh
was born on September 26, 1932, to a Sikh trading family in Gah in the Punjab, which area fell within what is now Pakistan. His mother died when he was very young and he was brought up by his paternal grandmother. They moved during Partition in 1947 to Haldwani. His grandfather was brutally killed which traumatized him for life and thus his refusal to invitations to visit his birthplace.
He started his education in Urdu and Punjabi in a local school and then in a government primary school where he continued studies in the Urdu medium. When he was 10, the family moved to Peshawar and he entered a high school. Even as PM he wrote his Hindi speeches in Urdu script. In 1948 the family relocated to Amritsar where Singh attended Hindu College and later the Punjabi University reading economics for his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in 1952 and ‘54. Joining St John’s College, University of Cambridge, he earned his Economics Tripos in 1957. In 1962 he earned his DPhil from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. The same university awarded him an honorary degree in 2005.
Career
Singh worked for the United Nations during 1966 to 1969. A friend of mine said he knew Singh very well and noted he was a thorough gentleman. He also said that Singh admired and worked with Gamani Corea. He was then hired as an advisor in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and thus served the government of India during the 1970s and 80s holding the prestigious posts of Chief Economic Advisor, Governor of the Reserve Bank (1982-8) and head of the Planning Commission (1985-87) ; these posts under Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi, Moraji Desai and Rajiv Gandhi.
In 1991 as India faced a severe economic crisis, the newly elected PM, P V Narasimha Rao, co-opted the apolitical Manmohan Singh to the Cabinet as finance minister. He introduced many reforms and liberalized India’s economy, albeit against protest and sharp criticism. He turned India around and became an internationally recognized economist. However, Congress fared poorly in the 1996 election and Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Janata Party became PM, 1998-2004. Manmohan Singh however, was now fully in politics, and was elected leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha.
In 2004, the Congress Party leading the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power. Its chairperson, Sonia Gandhi declined the prime ministry and the office went to Singh. Many progressive steps, mainly to help the rural poor, were taken; so also the Right to Information Act was passed. In 2008, opposition to a historic civil nuclear agreement with the US nearly caused the collapse of Singh’s government. A year later BRICS, probably the brainchild of Manmohan Singh, was established with India as a founding member. India’s economy grew rapidly.
In the 2009 election the UPA won more seats and Manmohan Singh was again PM, the only PM alongside Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected consecutively for a second five-year term. . He opted out when his term ended in 2014. Corruption had sprouted and he would have none of it. He was never a member of the Lok Sabha, but served in the Rajya Sabha for 33 years representing the state of Assam from 1991 to 2019 and Rajasthan from 2019 to 2024.
He is cited as Indian politician, economist, academic and bureaucrat who was the fourth longest serving PM after Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi; and the first Sikh to hold the post. The message conveyed during the state funeral given him on December 27 was that he was popular and greatly revered in India and recognized internationally as an economist and statesman. He leaves his wife and three daughters and their families.
The eldest daughter Upinder is history professor and Dean of a Faculty at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana; also author and winner of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences. Second, Daman, author, wrote a biography of her parents. The third Amrit is a well-known HR lawyer and Professor at Stanford Law School. The funeral pyre was set ablaze by Upinder Singh, Sikh rules not recognizing gender bias.
Dr Singh on colonialism
My friend mentioned earlier, retired Ceylonese government servant and then having worked for the UN, told me that Manmohan Singh had made an address in Oxford University touching on colonialism. Sashi Tharoor, invited by the Oxford Union as commentator at a debate on British colonialism, made scathing accusations against the British Raj and pronounced that colonialism was all evil. I listened to it and did not agree. My friend and I see more good than bad in British colonialism in Ceylon, admittedly much milder than what the British Raj did in India. Thus my search for Dr Singh’s address. What I retrieved was his acceptance speech when Oxford Union awarded him an honorary doctorate on July 8, 2005.
Excerpts from Dr Singh’s address at Oxford University
“There is no doubt that our grievance against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700 (Europe at 23.3%) to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘The brightest jewel in the British Crown’ was the poorest country in the world…” but he pointed out that despite the economic impact of colonial rule “the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, was relaxed, and I may even say, benign.”
To substantiate this he quotes the Mahatma who was in Britain for the Round Table Conference in 1931. When asked whether he would cut off from the Empire, he replied: “From the Empire completely, from the British nation not at all, for I want India to gain and not grieve. It must be a partnership on equal terms.” Nehru too had been of like opinion. He urged the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1949 to vote for India’s membership in the Commonwealth. “I wanted the world to see that India did not lack faith in herself and that India was prepared to co-operate even with those with whom she had been fighting. We have to wash out the past with all its evil”
Dr Singh listed the positive side of colonialism thus: “What impelled Mahatma to take such a positive view of Britain and the British people even as he challenged the Empire and colonial rule, was undoubtedly his recognition of the element of fair play that characterized so much of the ways of the British in India.”
He continued with his own opinion. “Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration and they have served our country exceedingly well. … Our Constitution remains a testimony to the enduring interplay between what is essentially Indian and what is very British in our intellectual heritage…. The ideas of India as enshrined in our Constitution… has deep roots in India’s ancient culture and civilization. However, it is undeniable that the founding fathers of our Republic were also greatly influenced by the ideas associated with the age of enlightenment in Europe. The idea of India as an inclusive and plural society draws on both these traditions. … Both Britain and India have learnt from each other and have much to teach the world. This is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Indo-British encounter.
“It used to be said the sun never sets on the British Empire. I am afraid we were partly responsible for sending that adage out of fashion! But if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English speaking people, of which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component. Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language and the modern school system. That is of course if you leave out cricket!” He mentions that English of India is different in pronunciation and syntax from British English “but nevertheless, English has been enriched by Indian creativity as well, and we have given you back R K Narayan and Salman Rushdie. Today, English in India is seen as just another Indian language.”
Dr Singh ended his all encompassing address on a nostalgic and humane note: “I always come back to the city of dreaming spires and of lost causes as a student. Mr Chancellor, I am here this time in all humility as the representative of a great nation and a great people. I am beholden to you and to my old university for the honour that I have received today.”
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