When Manmohan turned menacing

Manmohan Singh initiated a radical change in India's strategic doctrine against China by raising an attack corps

- R. PRASANNAN

Manmohan Singh came to power in 2004, carrying his credentials as an economist and an economic administrator. But his first crisis was not in the field of economy, nor at home—it was on the lawless sands of Mesopotamia, and it called for deft and delicate diplomacy. Indeed, his predecessor A.B. Vajpayee had already made it clear that India wouldn't commit troops to Iraq, a land that Americans had occupied searching for bombs, poison gas plants and war-germ labs. Not finding any, they hanged its ruler, Saddam Hussein, started issuing oil contracts, and were now facing flak from the world and fire from insurgents.

Manmohan had reiterated the Vajpayee line—no troops to Iraq, even to keep peace. That was characteristic of him—no overnight overturning of predecessors' policies, no denigrating of his predecessors even if he thought they had been wrong, and never making surprise announcements (except once, which we will come to later). As if guided by a sense of gurutva, of not speaking ill of elders, he never said a word against his predecessors. Rather, he believed in building on the strengths of their policies, as he had done in the case of his economic reforms more than a decade earlier. Never denigrating the Nehruvian public sector model, he had built upon its strengths to initiate, build and groom a mature private sector economy in the 1990s.

The same was true of his foreign policy in the 2000s. Never finding fault with Nehruvian non-alignment, Indira's Soviet leaning, Rajiv's muscular militarism, Rao's look-east, Gujral's benign brotherliness to neighbours or Vajpayee's atom-armed engagement of the west, he counted all those as blessings and would build upon the strengths of all.