When India shining under Atal Bihari Vajpayee came under total eclipse with the shock defeat of BJP in 2004 Lok Sabha polls, it was a great celebration for Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi as President of All India Congress Committee (AICC). Despite legal hurdles and adverse national sentiment, Sonia stood waiting at the threshold to enter the Prime Minister’s Office.

But the Congress heading the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) with Communist support had to make a choice as per Sonia’s “inner voice” and choose someone from Congress or the Communist Party as PM.

When Communists refused the offer made to Jyoti Basu, it was left to the Congress to have the pick. Many were the names bandied about and that was when Dr. Manmohan Singh’s name was announced by Sonia Gandhi to the utter surprise of India and the world.

Deprived of PM’s Office, Sonia was sulking, but not to worry. The National Advisory Council (NAC) was set up by the first UPA Government in 2004 to advice the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was branded as an ‘Accidental Prime Minister’ by the media and the political pundits.

And who was the Chairperson of NAC? Sonia Gandhi. In short, Dr. Manmohan Singh became the de jure Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi became the de facto Prime Minister. No wonder, Rahul Gandhi had the guts and arrogance to tear to smithereens a copy of the   Central Government Ordinance issued by the UPA Government. Dr. Manmohan Singh as PM was so helpless he even  offered to quit in favour of Rahul Gandhi.

However, the suave, gentle and refined Dr. Manmohan Singh stayed on being pursued to remain in Office. Indeed an innocent man, may not even swat a fly nor utter a word that would hurt others. Yet he blundered once when he said the minorities alone will have the first right over our nation’s resources. This was considered a statement in consonance with the vote-bank policy of Congress.

He seemed to have compromised on many national policies in line with NAC Chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s   wishes. Some of them, no doubt, were very good in the national interest like the policy of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to keep away the middlemen, Aadhaar Card, Employment Guarantee Act, MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), Right To Information (RTI) Act to seek transparency in administration.

However, the greatest achievement of Dr. Manmohan Singh was in getting the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement signed despite many hurdles. He was uncompromising. Some reports said that he was even ready to quit Office. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s advice  put at rest all doubts in this regard. Strangely, though BJP had laid the foundation for this deal, under UPA it criticised the deal and asked for its renegotiation!

I had personally met Dr. Manmohan Singh once when he had come to University of Mysore, I think for Convocation address in 1992. Prof. M. Madaiah  (now late) was the Vice-Chancellor. I met him at VC’s Bungalow where a dinner was hosted for him. I was introduced to him by Prof. Madaiah. He was looking very frail, was standing by the wall. He smiled, shook hands and exchanged few pleasantries. He seemed to me to be a man of few words and very soft-spoken. Later he joined Congress and contested a Lok Sabha election.

Author and journalist Khushwant Singh had written about his foray into politics wherein he mentioned of Dr. Manmohan Singh borrowing money from the former. Dr. Singh lost the election. Time passed and one day Dr. Singh went to Khushwant Singh’s house and paid back the money he had borrowed. That was Dr. Manmohan Singh, Mr. Clean. Unfortunately, this epithet of Mr. Clean was originally given to Rajiv Gandhi by the media but after Bofors Scandal this honour faded away from public memory.

However, during his second term as PM, corruption reached its acme though he himself remained pure from the stigma of venality. He seemed helpless before the corrupt among the alliance partners, including Congress. Dr. Manmohan Singh, though was not corrupt, his government was and Prime Minister Narendra Modi once mocked him saying, “Dr. Sahab is the only person who knows the art of bathing in a bathroom with a raincoat on.”

In retrospect, one is left wondering how good the governance of our country would have been under Dr. Manmohan Singh, a Scholar-Statesman, if only there was no NAC (India) headed by Sonia Gandhi, who practically functioned as the de facto PM, even calling for files to peruse and decide.

Towards the end of his 10-year term, the government began to fall apart and he was unable to hold. Naturally the government fell in 2014 and Narendra Modi came in to hold it.

Dr. Manmohan Singh passed away yesterday and we would like to judge him, history would surely judge him, his   legacy. According to him, history would be much kinder to him than the media.

The credit for liberating India from the ‘Licence-Permit’ Raj, from the vice-like grip of ‘socialists pattern of society’ and freeing it from such servile economic subjugation, being a Democracy, should go to two persons. One is P.V. Narasimha Rao, Congress Prime Minister and Dr. Manmohan Singh, Congress Prime Minister. If the former was PM by default, the latter was an accidental Prime Minister. Also an innocent Prime Minister among all the Prime Ministers of India. Now we have a paradoxical Prime Minister in Narendra Modi, according to Shashi Tharoor.

And this paradoxical PM is making the majority of this country RELEVANT for country’s resources and progress unlike his two predecessors in whom the majority of this country remained dangerously irrelevant.

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