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Mr PM, Here’s how to become Man of
Destiny
Gian Inder Singh
 On May 22, 2009,
a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, will swear in the name of God, that he will
lead the governance of the world’s largest democracy for five years,
just as he did when he was sworn in as the first ever premier of
India exactly five years ago on May 22, 2004.
Much has been
said amongst the Sikhs in the last five years about the fact of the
Prime Minister's religion. If Manmohan Singh has chosen to keep his
religion on a rather hidden from the view shelf, that is his sweet
wish. His trade mark blue turban is something he cannot help, so
willy-nilly he does wear his religion, well literally if not
metaphorically, on his, well, sleeve. Can't run away from the
metaphors, can you? Just as MMS cannot run away from his religion;
in fact, carries it on his head.
People deal with
their inner religiosity in different ways. The freedom that the
world, and his community, must accord to Manmohan Singh cannot be
any less than what is available to any of us. Just as the
expectations from Manmohan Singh could not be any less than the ones
we would have had from any one assuming the post of the Prime
Minister who is credited by his party as being decent, modest,
efficient, brilliant and hardworking.
He was accused
of being a weak prime minister; that is a charge Indian voters have
already responded. We have no wish to trudging into that territory
where fools with names sounding like Narendra Modi rush.
We are, instead,
on to a wish list that we secretly hope matches the secret list of
Manmohan Singh too. Were the Prime Minister to prove wrong his ‘Weak
PM, Weak PM’ shouting critic-brigade by talking about this secret
wish list in public, he will be doing the idea of democracy a great
service and will help restore the shattered faith of ordinary
Indians and marginalised communities.
 As MMS takes
oath, he sure will be grappling with items on top of his agenda. Too
many usual suspects seek to crowd the judgement. Zooming sensex,
banking infrastructure, rupee convertibility, international
capital’s pitfalls… Manmohan Singh will be at a loss to select which
couple of areas are going to define his legacy. No man of history
has done everything; each does a couple of things. Someone built the
railroad, some turned to banking, some reformed the judiciary, some
opened up shipping routes.
A couple of
things define the destiny. The rest is good work well done in the
course of the day.
India has failed
its people, its poor, its marginalised, its minorities, its tribals,
its women for so long and so brutally that even at his best Manmohan
Singh can do little but take only an iota of the taint away. Any
less and he will also join the ranks of those who let down the idea
of the possibility of a just society. The thought that a Sikh’s
performance may lead to heightened sense of cynicism will be
something very sad.
 So
it is better to start small. Many have tried starting big, and we
have seen their fate. The key is to keep the agenda clear of the
clutter. The big picture can, and will, yield a place in history if
Manmohan Singh wants to be a man of destiny for his community (not
his priority) and his country (rumored to be his priority).
Top on the
agenda should be shame.
It is time the
government and the worthies who are part of it in India start
feeling ashamed at the fact that a quarter of
India's
population goes to bed hungry, night after night, year after year.
In what kind of
a country can self-congratulatory tone mark all media and government
activity with figures on the growth rate virtually keeping the
politicians and the data crunchers in the Planning Commission
intoxicated when poverty figures remain at a dismal low, and in fact
paint a picture much more depressing than earlier decades.
Food grain
growers in Punjab are going hungry. Farmers are committing suicide
at the rate of one a day in Punjab and every 30 minutes in India,
and the amount of food available to a person per day has fallen
drastically.
In 1991, an
average Indian was getting 510 grams of food grain; in 2005, this
came down to 422 grams. What did you think was the drop? No, not 88
grams. It is a fall of 88 grams multiplied by 365 days multiplied by
one billion people. Can we please re-learn our math? Or did you buy
your books from the Planning Commission of India's book stall which
calculates people as statistics?
No one eats
growth rate percentages; people still eat food.
Manmohan Singh's
agenda cannot be any less than revolutionary steps to ensure that
his people must not hit the bed on a hungry stomach. His efforts at
pushing the employment guarantee scheme are great, but we need
better, newer, urban and many more versions of NREGA. And much more.
Commit resources to keep your people alive and away from
starvation.
Manmohan Singh's
rendezvous with history will not be complete without crossing
another shame hurdle: one third of
India
cannot read or write.
The figure seems
a bit more odd, a bit more shameful, if we translate it this way:
the number of Indians who cannot read or write in India today is
bigger than the number of all Indians alive on August 15, 1947.
It is much
easier to keep the illiterate hungry, and much easier to keep the
hungry illiterate. It is much easier to keep the hungry and the
illiterate welded together as a vote bank.
And it is much
easier to weld together the hungry and the illiterate when they are
a minority also.
Indian
democratic system has cracked many such codes to keep itself in
business. This way the Chalta Rahe philosophy helps the rulers
muddle through. At times one wonders at all these not so secret
formulas which keep the world’s biggest democracy running.
Also on Manmohan
Singh’s list should be something that he last told us he never knew.
When Jarnail
Singh’s shoe was flung across
India’s
face and Congress cowered to cover up by withdrawing Lok Sabha
ticket nominations from killers Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler,
Manmohan Singh had famously said he was not in the know about what
the CBI was doing to let Tytler off the hook.
Presuming that
he seriously wants us to believe him, this is his moment in life.
All he has to do is to bring the sledgehammer of justice swinging on
the heads of those who perpetrated the killings of Sikhs in 1984 on
the roads of India’s national capital and elsewhere.
Manmohan Singh
may or may not wear his religion on his sleeve, and in fact, this
has even less to do with his religion, but any more delay in
bringing justice to the victims of the genocide will be a sacrilege
of his own soul.
It is now up to
him to walk into the sunset with the assurance that he did do the
right thing, or leave behind a legacy of ‘law will take its own
course’ variety.
And justice for
1984 victims will also logically lead to justice for 2002 Gujarat
victims.
We hope that the
fact that a few minutes of the Prime Ministerial time is spent every
morning in assuming a sartorially unique identity before the mirror
when he ties his blue turban will have a bearing on how he
approaches this issue.
The Congress
Parliamentary Board has selected him, Sonia Gandhi is backing him,
and he is the man of the moment. To be the man of destiny is in his
hands.
Before he has
taken oath, it was so wonderful to hear his words: “Make Growth
Inclusive.” No one expects him to shun the neo-liberal agenda, but
we do expect him to pick up more liberal values. He has been the
product of the quirks of electoral democracy. It is now in his hands
how much democratization of the institutions can he manage. India
can call itself twenty times over a democratic country; the claim
will have any meaning when it will become a democratizing country.
He is a
believer. We have seen him bowing his head before the Supreme Being,
before Sri Guru Granth Sahib. We hope that he will do his level best
to stick to and fight for policies that go even beyond his idea of
inclusiveness. That blue turban denotes an adherence to nothing less
than Sarbat Da Bhala. It is a sure shot route to Nanak Naam Charhdi
Kala.
May he turn out
to be the Sikh that he looks.
20 May 2009
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