Is that true?

Sunday, March 29, 2009
Aakar Patel

The BJP says Manmohan Singh is weak and no match for their strongman Advani.

Is that true? Let us examine their qualifications.

Born in 1932, Manmohan Singh graduated in economics from Punjab University, read for his tripos (first class honours) from St John's College, Cambridge University, where he won the Wright's Prize in 1955 and the Adam Smith prize in 1956. He got his DPhil from Nuffield College, Oxford University, in 1962.

His thesis was on "India's Export Trends and Prospects for Self- Sustained Growth". By age 30, he understood that Nehru's inward- looking economic policy was misplaced.

He has worked at the United Nations, served as governor of the Reserve Bank, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and chairman of the University Grants Commission. He has taught at Punjab University and Delhi School of Economics.

In government, he reversed what we call Nehruvian socialism during his five years as finance minister between 1991 and 1996. His policy crafting gave India economic success, through a doctrine now called Manmohanomics, which he continued in his five years as prime minister from 2004 to 2009.

In 1991, the year Manmohan became finance minister, India's per capita GDP was $328, and Pakistan's was $458. In 2008, Pakistan's was $623 and India's $900. From 28 per cent behind Pakistan, India went ahead 30 per cent because of him. No Indian leader has ever been as qualified, or as effective, as Manmohan Singh.

Born in 1927, L K Advani attended D G National College, Hyderabad, Sindh, but could not get a degree. His website says he got an LLB from Bombay University's Government Law College, but does not say when, and his autobiography does not mention this degree at all.

He worked for the RSS publication Organiser till 1967, where he wrote film reviews. After a brief term in the Delhi municipal council, because of his RSS connection, Advani was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Jailed along with other opposition leaders during Indira Gandhi's emergency of 1975-77, Advani came to power as the combined opposition defeated the Congress for the first time since independence. 

Because of his journalism experience, Advani became minister for information and broadcasting in 1977. At the age of 45, this was his first job in an executive position. It was a brief experience; the government collapsed in two years.

In the 80s, Advani became a star when he campaigned on the Babri Masjid issue across India. It was demolished on December 6, 1992. He says he did not anticipate this, showing his lack of understanding of the Indian mind, and of consequences. Over 2,000 Indians were killed.

As home minister in Vajpayee's government (1999-2004), Advani got his second executive job at age 72. Did he build his tough-man image then?

No.

He surrendered to Jaish-e-Mohammad at Kandahar after the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane in December 1999, and released Masood Azhar and Omar Saeed Shaikh, who later beheaded Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl.

In March 2002, as Union home minister he could not prevent the massacres in Gujarat, in which 1,000 were killed.

If he has no record to speak of, why do his supporters call him strong?

Sadly, this image comes from his willingness to do violence to India's Muslims. His failures are his successes to his admirers.

Advani actually has very little experience in executive or policy positions. And he does not show evidence of being able to overcome this lack of experience through his intellect, or his effort.

His autobiography ("My Country, My Life") is maudlin, and peppered with mistakes. With typical hyperbole, he calls the emergency the "darkest period in Indian history" but then he reports its years wrong (pages 259, 266, 270). He spent years in villages in RSS service, but mistakes (on page 69) Guinea worm for tapeworm.

Advani's problem is that his intellectual bandwidth is limited by his ordinary education. He is not at the same level as Oxbridge's Manmohan, and Harvard's Obama.

His reading is basic and he likes it pre-digested through writers like William Shirer and Thomas Friedman.

In a lifetime in opposition, Advani has stirred the pot with drawing-room solutions to emotional problems. The sort of problems that trouble our aching nationalists. India is weak -- we must build an atom bomb! Pakistan is doing terrorism -- we must hit back! Hindu sentiment is hurt -- we must replace the Babri masjid!

Such a Manichean and innocent view of the world is touching, because it comes out of trauma (Advani was kicked out of Karachi at partition).

One of the most moving moments of his life, according to Advani, was when on a tour to the Himalayas, he asked what a passing stream was, and was told it was the Indus, Sindhu nadi, from which he gets his Sindhi identity and we get our nation's name.

He is unable to separate himself from this sentimentalism.

Though he keeps attacking India's minority-ism, his own mentality is still that of a besieged minority from Sindh.

Manmohan was also kicked out (he is from village Gah in Chakwal), but has lifted himself above our sub-continental pettiness.

Manmohan has the exposure, and the intellect, to detach himself from the insanity below. Advani cannot do this, because he has been wading in it and beating his breast, even after Indians built one of the most successful democracies in the world.

Crucially, Manmohan has deep access into pan-Indian culture because of his ability to read, in addition to Hindi and Gurmukhi, Urdu.

He educated Indians on Iqbal through his budget speeches as finance minister. I was familiar with Tarana-e-Hindi (which Indians know as Saare jahan say achcha), but I had not registered its most stirring couplet till I heard Manmohan recite it in his Punjabi lilt: Yunan-o-Misr-o-Roma, sub mitt gaye jahan say, ab tak magar hai baqi naam-o-nishaan hamara.

Advani does not have this access into his own culture because, as he wrote to his regret, he did not learn to read Sanskrit. His grandmother could read Gurmukhi, but he could not.

While he speaks Sindhi well (Benazir opened a conversation with him in Sindhi but then could not continue it), he cannot read it in Nastaliq because he went to an English-medium school, St Patrick's in Karachi.

He mistakes Persian script for Arabic (page 34).

He writes that till the age of 20 he did not even speak Hindi properly. Not particularly good qualifications for a man whose policy thrusts -- Ram temple, Uniform Civil Code, Article 370 -- are all cultural.

Politically, both Manmohan and Advani are weak, and dependent.

Manmohan is a member of Rajya Sabha (not directly elected), and serves at the pleasure of Sonia Gandhi.

Advani contests for the Lok Sabha, but from Gujarat, where he is at Modi's mercy (Advani cannot speak Gujarati). And he has spent a lifetime bending his knee to the RSS, which echoes his seething resentment of Muslims.

But while he's politically weak, Manmohan is undisputed master of policy. And because of his integrity, Sonia Gandhi has given him a freehand where it matters.

Sonia did not push for the Indo-American strategic alliance; that is all Manmohan.

Manmohan brings an economist's cold view to policy: he has the mind of the bania, rather than the warrior, whom we more readily identify with Advani. Advani loves Rajasthan, India's only martial state, and has "developed a fascination for this land of heroes and martyrs."

India does not need its leaders to be martial heroes and martyrs. We need education and healthcare and a strong economy.

India, and also Pakistan, needs a bania's self-preserving mentality because under the warrior's code, we commit suicide quite easily, like we did in 1962's avoidable war with China.

Advani doesn't want the Indo-US nuclear deal because it is surrender. 

Under it, some current and all future nuclear installations will be now classified as civilian and subject to international regulation, while others will be outside scrutiny, free to make weapons. What is wrong with this deal? India has been starved of nuclear technology for four decades, which it will now get freely. But Advani says it makes us 'strategically subservient' because the US does not treat us as 'equals'.

He sees foreign policy in terms of honour and dishonour.

Advani is clueless on economics because of his lack of education, and uninterested in it because the subject lacks heroic emotion.

If he does take power, his urge for martyrdom will be disciplined by India's bureaucracy, as Vajpayee's was before him. He will be made more realist by the limits of power, which will deflate his bombast, as he finally gets a proper education, at age 82.



The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@gmail.com