Manmohan Singh: Modi Should Know That He Is PM Of All Of India

- Jyoti Malhotra

For the last year-and-a-half, Dr Manmohan Singh has been watching the political scene unfold before his eyes from his rambling Lutyens’ bungalow in the heart of Delhi. The former prime minister looked on with fair dismay when the government he headed for 10 long years was unceremoniously voted out of office and the Narendra Modi-led regime took its place. And his worries have only increased seeing the manner in which it has since governed India. In between receiving friends and visitors—two in the morning and two in the evening—the former prime minister reads widely and exhaustively. When he wants to study something more deeply, he makes notes on plain paper—in his small, squiggly handwriting—and then looks for other sources that can help him understand the subject better. Congress president Sonia Gandhi drops in regularly, her son Rahul too comes sometimes. Other Congressmen come to pay their respects. He says he enjoys the intellectual stimulation that comes with meeting old friends from Cambridge and Oxford (institutions where he learned the role of politics in shaping change), or with visitors from Pakistan (former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was here recently), or Nepal (he stepped out to meet former president Ram Baran Yadav) and other parts of the world. His study at home is lined with books and papers, hallmark of a man who has deeply invested in knowledge and who believes that even if you lose all your earthly belongings—which he did, as a Partition refugee in 1947—you always carry your learning with you.Yadav) and other parts of the world. His study at home is lined with books and papers, hallmark of a man who has deeply invested in knowledge and who believes that even if you lose all your earthly belongings—which he did, as a Partition refugee in 1947—you always carry your learning with you.