Dr Singh's other reform

Manmohan Singh's success lay in making a decisive and historic shift towards the West. It was also audacious, in my book even more so than the 1991 reform, given how little support it had within the Congress and the UPA

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

Millions of words are being written and spoken about Dr Manmohan Singh in these couple of days, most of these will focus on the reforms he introduced in 1991. We can understand how his life is often seen monochromatically by his admirers - including those who don't vote for the Congress and probably never have.

That's very unkind to him in many ways. One, it limits him and his legacy to something he had done almost a decade and a half before he became the Prime Minister of India.

Second, it gives him sole credit for the reform, even though it was P V Narasimha Rao, then the Prime Minister, who carried the political risk for what was done in 1991. That reform is, therefore, as much to Rao's credit as it is to Singh's.

And third, because it limits his legacy to this jugalbandhi and denies him the place he deserves in our history for the other substantive contributions he made as Prime Minister.

These range from strategic and foreign affairs to politics.

When Singh became Prime Minister in the summer of 2004, much of the discussion was about what kind of economic agenda the UPA was going to follow. Was he going to pick up the thread from where he and Rao had left it in 1996, or would he return to the ideology of his party and its largest parliamentary ally, the Left Front? Even the most astute watchers of North and South Blocks were not prepared for the more substantive and historic changes to come in foreign and strategic policy.

This was especially so given the Congress's chronic suspicion of the US and the West and its persistent nostalgia for the Non-Aligned Movement and Third-Worldism. If you had told someone on the morning of July 24, 1991, that by the afternoon, Rao would junk Jawaharlal Nehru's 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution with one speech from the industry minister preceding the Budget (Rao held the industry portfolio), you'd have been asked to get your head examined.