Probability of UPA-III is low. Conditional probability of MMS as PM, assuming UPA-III, was also low. After the press conference, a rarity for PM, we formally know this conditional probability is zero. To use MMS clichés, only time will tell how historians judge him. However, had he opted not to remain PM in 2009, history would have been kinder. Despite whiffs of global slowdown being felt, economy was in better shape. There was glory of the nuclear deal, even if resultant power outcome was uncertain. The taint of corruption, and this isn’t just about family and friends, was fainter and hadn’t surfaced in entirety. (The argument that corruption didn’t show up in 2009 electoral outcomes won’t wash, though MMS has stated this more than once.) Trappings of power get to the best of us and few time exit when the going is good.
Under UPA-II, MMS presided over massacre of the economy and was an irrelevant PM (witness undermining of PM and PMO and collective decision-making in Cabinet) in a government widelyperceived to be the most corrupt ever. PPP came to be interpreted as perpetual policy paralysis. When government and PM use indicators to highlight the economic track record, it is invariably an average for entire UPA, subsuming UPA-I and UPA-II, and downplaying deceleration under UPA-II.
Why has UPA-II fared badly? The MMS lament lists malign global environment, coalition politics, recalcitrant opposition, unkind civil society and media. Anything but mea culpa and pointing a finger towards government. If government warrants none of blame under UPA-II, by the same token, it merits none of credit under UPA-I either. Any objective moving finger will write about executive collapse and fiscal profligacy. While definitions of reforms vary, as can their prioritization, there were few under UPA-I too. (Indirect tax reforms and roads were a legacy and MGNREGS/RTI aren’t quite reform.)
The economy chugged along, because circumstances were favourable. One doesn’t have to be a rated (under or over) economist to figure out toll such entitlement-based expenditure has on growth and inflation, with a lag, and with an unfavorable external world providing an unkind cut. As head of government, why didn’t PM put his foot down? After all, he was branded as harbinger of the idea whose time had come in 1991. There is only one answer. The 1991 branding was wrong. He wasn’t the head in 1991. Nor has he been the head since 2004. Both in 1991 and since 2004, he has been a risk-averse civil servant, hands rather than the head, doing what he has been asked to do, and hedging against transfers. Thus, an economy’s assets turned into liabilities.
Even in instances where the head wouldn’t have objected, the hands didn’t move. Oddly, an economist did nothing to leave his imprint in the economic domain and concentrated on foreign policy, int erpreted as US and Pakistan. (Natal chords from Pakistan still tug at his heart.) Not just with these two, but elsewhere too, foreign policy is in a mess. Relationships with a neighbor got stuck because PM couldn’t speak to a CM. Posterity’s historians will tell us whether this was because of some kind of Oslo or Stockholm Syndrome.
In the present, economics should have been a forte, but became weaker. Foreign policy was always a frailty, but became weaker still. If a person who was respected in 2009 became an object of ridicule in 2013/2014, MMS himself bears much of the blame. This isn’t only due to policy failures, but also because he, cocooned in 7 RCR, rarely communicated to the country, when all was not “theek hai”. He didn’t take the country into confidence and it shouldn’t be surprising that the country has no confidence in him. That is an omission that commissioned historians can’t rectify.
