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 20^th 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.”