Letter from myself sent to the Editor of Forbes.com today regarding their article “India at 60″ by Amartya Sen:
“Professor Amartya Sen has engaged in wishful thinking and/or rewriting history in saying: “When Manmohan Singh came to office in the early 1990s as the newly appointed finance minister, in a government led by the Congress Party, he knew these problems well enough, as someone who had been strongly involved in government administration for a long time.” In fact, before India’s reform year of 1991 Dr Singh had been a statist anti-liberal bureaucrat travelling comfortably along with the tides of the pro-USSR political and academic establishment, following every rule in the bureaucratic book and being obedient in face of arbitrary exercise of political and economic power. There is no evidence whatsoever of him having been a liberal economist before 1991, nor indeed of having originated any liberal economic idea afterwards. The Congress Party itself in May 2002 passed a resolution saying the ideas of India’s liberalisation originated with neither Singh nor his PM, Narasimha Rao. Professor Sen has known the 1991 economic reform originated due to an encounter of the late Rajiv Gandhi in September 1990 with a “perestroika for India” project I led at the University of Hawaii, which inter alia published for the first time a memorandum by Milton Friedman to the Government of India suppressed since 1955.
The 1970s and 1980s saw onset of the worst macroeconomic policies in India with ruination and politicisation of the banking system, origins of the Rs 30 trillion public debt today, and start of exponential money supply growth and inflation. Dr Singh presided over much of that; if he is to do anything positive for India now, it should be to undo such damage, unravelling Delhi’s structure of power and privilege by halting deficit finance and corruption, and enforcing clean accounting and audit methods in all government organisations and institutions.
In 1971 Dr Singh became the protégé of Indira Gandhi’s top pro-communist bureaucrat, P. N. Haksar after which his rise in the bureaucracy was meteoric. His final post before retirement was to head Julius Nyerere’s “South-South Commission” from August 1987 until November 1990. Dr Singh joined the Chandrashekhar Government on 10 December 1990 when Rajiv Gandhi was Opposition Leader, and left when new elections were announced in March 1991. The first time his name arose in contemporary Congress Party politics was on 22 March 1991 when M. K. Rasgotra challenged me to answer how Singh would respond to proposals I was drafting for a planned economic liberalisation of India by the Congress authorised by Rajiv since September 1990. Rajiv was assassinated on 21 May 1991, resulting in Rao (who had been ill and due to retire) becoming PM in June 1991. Interested readers may consult e.g. my article “The Politics of Dr Singh” published in The Sunday Statesman May 21 2006, www.thestatesman.net and republished at www.independentindian.com.“
