India now has a President who is a Muslim and a Prime Minister who is a Sikh, both of whom are members of India's minority communities. A true tribute to democracy and democratic principles.
Sikh Who Saved India's Economy Is Named Premier
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: May 20, 2004
NEW DELHI, May 19 - Manmohan Singh, the gentlemanly Oxford-educated economist who saved India from economic collapse in 1991 and began the liberalization of its economy, has been appointed the country's next prime minister, ending a week of high political drama.
Mr. Singh said Wednesday night that the country's president had asked him to form the next government. At his side stood Sonia Gandhi, who a day earlier had stunned the country by announcing she would not become prime minister as expected.
Mrs. Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, reiterated that decision on Wednesday, despite pleas and protests from party members. Parliament members from her Indian National Congress then selected Mr. Singh, who was finance minister from 1991 to 1996. He will be sworn in within a few days.
In many ways, Mr. Singh, the architect of the restructuring of the Indian economy after four decades of quasi-socialism, is an apt choice to lead India now, when it is fast rising as a global economic power.
It faces the challenge of reforming further in order to ensure higher growth rates, but also delivering the benefits of reform beyond the growing middle class. That is the message being taken from the election results, when the largely pro-reform government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party was rejected by voters.
"We will give to the world and to our people a model of economic reforms," Mr. Singh said Wednesday night, but with a "human element." The new government, he said, would "create new opportunities for the poor and the downtrodden to participate in development."
A Sikh who has made a powder-blue turban his trademark, Mr. Singh will be India's first non-Hindu prime minister. In a turn of events seemingly tailor-made to demonstrate India's diversity and capacity for coexistence, Mrs. Gandhi, raised a Roman Catholic, is making way for a Sikh prime minister who will be sworn in by a Muslim president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
In 1984, Mrs. Gandhi's mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, was killed by her Sikh bodyguards after she tried to violently suppress a separatist movement in Punjab State. Anti-Sikh riots followed in Delhi and other cities, leaving about 1,500 dead. Wednesday night, jubilant Sikhs celebrated outside Mr. Singh's house in New Delhi.
Mr. Singh, who is 71, is widely described as honest, intelligent and thoughtful. Perhaps the only bad word anyone has to say about him is that he is not a better politician.
"He's miserable at it," said Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist and a friend of Mr. Singh's since their days together at Cambridge. Mr. Singh ran for Parliament in 1999 from south Delhi, and lost.
Ordinarily, that would doom him to fail in a job that is a largely political office, especially in the coalition government he will lead, and it still might. In a December interview in his office at Parliament's upper house, where he was leader of the opposition, Mr. Singh rued the decline in Indian governance due to the broadening of its political class beyond the middle class.
He has repeatedly expressed concern about "competitive populism" - politicians' instinct to promise goodies like free electrical power regardless of the ability to pay for them - and its effect on fiscal discipline and the country's economic health.
Now he will lead a cabinet containing some of those same populists, as well as Communist parties that have vowed to slow some reforms. During his stint as finance minister, he was accused of looking the other way during a host of corruption scandals, although his own integrity has not been questioned.
But in an arrangement unusual for the Congress Party, where one leader has typically dominated, Mrs. Gandhi will remain in charge of the party, leaving Mr. Singh freer to focus on governance. "He will be a technocrat, basically," Mr. Bhagwati said.
Still, Mr. Singh has learned, after more than a decade of stops and starts with reforms, that in a democracy, political compulsions must inevitably shape economic policy.
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