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Strictly Personal:
Manmohan & Gursharan
Strictly Personal is not only a deeply evocative biography of Daman Singh’s parents; it is, equally, an important contribution to the historiography of 20th century India. From the trauma and displacement of partition that were, in part, reflected in the nature of Dr Singh’s nomadic undergraduate education, to the college student Gursharan’s anxious preparation for a cultural program to welcome Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev to the Bhakra Dam, the life histories of former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and his wife Gursharan Kaur straddled several major moments in India’s history. Despite a chequered and influential career in policy-making and politics, it is clear that academics remained Dr Singh’s firmest anchor. Daman Singh’s investigations of his early career include letters of recommendation from Dr Singh’s tutorial files at Nuffield College Oxford, the acknowledgments of his dissertation turned first book, India’s Export Trends and the Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth and extracts from private letters written between friends and academics.
Daman Singh’s close readings of many of Manmohan’s published papers in journals such as the Indian Economic Journal and Economic and Political Weekly from the 1950s, lectures in public foray as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, and speeches in the Lok Sabha from the 1990s reveal a consistently analytical mind that was continually drawing conclusions driven by empirical findings — be these on the variegated trajectory of India’s economy or the amazing advances of economies in the neighbourhood. Analysing trends in the US foreign investment in the 1950s, Manmohan felt it was imperative for poor nations to raise capital domestically. In his doctoral dissertation, he studied six major groups of commodities — jute manufactures, tea, cotton textiles, vegetable oilseeds and oils, minerals, and tobacco and coffee — to understand the fall in value of India’s export earnings between 1951 and 1960 and their prognosis thereafter. He concluded that domestic factors — export controls, export duties, and the pressure of domestic demand — were responsible for export stagnation. In the more ‘sobering’ 60s, Dr Singh recognised the ‘long-term risks of the grand design’ and that planning was ‘in crisis’, but also that ‘changing course’ at the time was politically ‘unthinkable.’ Working thereafter for UNCTAD in New York under the stewardship of the charismatic Raul Prebisch, Dr Singh was inspired by arguments for ‘more liberal trade’ but faced with the resistance of developed countries, realised that "you cannot change the international system merely by the strength of your ideas." As a bureaucrat in the ‘stealthy’ 70s, Dr Singh learnt that both policy-making and transformation would come slowly from "within the limits of the bureaucratic structure". Civil servants who questioned policy would otherwise be "accused of criticising Jawaharlal Nehru and the establishment line of the Congress party." Now on the other side, he told an academic audience: "Economics is a very useful discipline, but I must say that there are layers of rationality other than those which are perceived in the textbooks of economists. There are compulsions which are no less real, simply because they do not figure in the textbooks of economists." ( Page 254) Dealing with trade union activists as Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr. Singh reinstated the leader of a major strike. On the question of principle he tells his biographer: "There is no matter of principle in these things. The question is – what works. In human relations a rigid bureaucratic approach can sometimes be counterproductive … I don’t believe in empty strength. Strength is something that has to be inherent in your thinking. Strength comes from a conviction that what you are doing is the right thing to do." (Pages 288-289) As Secretary-General of the South Commission in the late 1980s, Dr Singh was tasked with reconciling the divergent opinions of multiple commissioners and expert groups. The final report of the Commission, The Challenge of the South, called for increased finance for trade and, among other recommendations that bilateral official debt be fully written off. It was while in Geneva "reading, writing, reflecting" that he says he realised that the economies of East and South-east Asia had sailed past India. When the crisis of 1991 required a sharp turn in India’s economic policy, Dr Singh seemed primed for the job. Daman Singh’s reliance on debates in the Lok Sabha for this turning point in Indian politics also serves as a reminder of Singh’s adroit handling of his critics in Parliament. Set in cities as diverse as Peshawar and Geneva, New Delhi and New York, the book provides the reader with an insider’s view of several important debates that concerned independent India — on the possibilities as well as limitations of planning, foreign aid, and foreign trade for a developing economy; on the shifting relationship between the bureaucracy, various ministries, and the cabinet; on the very different worlds of policy-making, electoral politics and the academy. Daman Singh also reveals the funny and sometimes serious coming-of-age stories of three sisters and a super mom who is "invincible … [who] drove, shopped, cooked, baked, pickled and dusted … sang like an angel and told stories like a book." Peppered with delightful images such as this one of shopping for books ‘let loose among the tantalising shelves, we would stumble out in a drunken daze, clutching our purchases’, Strictly Personal is at times ‘intensely’ personal. It is not, however, ‘strictly’ personal: Daman Singh impresses with her scholarly research and dogged pursuit of answers from an occasionally laconic interviewee.
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In early 1950s
Cambridge, ‘being brown did not bother Manmohan … India had
captured the imagination of the world’ and ‘evoked respect.’
Like his peers I. G. Patel and Ashok Desai, Manmohan would credit
Cambridge University for teaching him how to ‘think logically’. In
meetings of the renowned and exclusive Marshall Society, Manmohan
first encountered the economist Joan Robinson’s critique of India’s
first two Five Year Plans. Soon back in India in accordance with the
terms of a bond he had signed, Manmohan eased into the life of a
university professor. When his interviewer-daughter suggests the
facilities at Panjab University ‘may have been wanting’ after
Cambridge, he cuts her off: "They were modest, but I never felt
the absence of anything."