(Yashwant Sinha is a BJP Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of External Affairs.)The two recent book bombs, one by the former media advisor to the Prime Minister Sanjaya Baru and the second by the former coal secretary PC Parakh, have only confirmed once again what we all knew to be the truth for the last ten years; that Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister only in name and the real authority was exercised by Sonia Gandhi. I do not believe that Manmohan Singh was not an accidental Prime Minister. He was carefully and deliberately chosen for the post by Sonia Gandhi for his academic record, his learning, his wisdom, his integrity and finally for his superb quality of submissiveness. It was a gamble that paid off beautifully for her. History is replete with examples of how puppets have turned against their creators and ultimately destroyed them. Sonia Gandhi had judged and rightly that this was one trait which Manmohan Singh did not have.
Some of us who knew Manmohan Singh well had correctly assessed the situation way back in 2004 itself. I had compared Manmohan Singh to a character in Mahabharat which had led to a furore because Manmohan Singh was then regarded as a knight in shinning armour and my description did not fit his popular image. But like the character in Mahabharat, Manmohan Singh was nothing more than a front - a front from behind which Sonia Gandhi and her ministers could commit all the wrongs and get away because they had the impregnable shield of his integrity. It has taken ten long years and a series of scandals to pierce this shield and expose Manmohan Singh and his government.
In 2004, when Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister of India, we were told by his spin doctors that he had already fixed the economy of India as finance minister and as prime minister his job will be to fix the foreign policy of India. True to the words of his spin doctors Manmohan Singh set about doing just that. He received Musharraf in 2004 and was persuaded to forget all about the historic agreement reached by Vajpayee with Musharraf in Islamabad on January 6, 2004. He went to the US in July 2005 and concluded the famous Indo-US nuclear deal. Through this deal, he surrendered the nuclear weapons option that India had kept alive from Indira Gandhi to Atal Bihar Vajpayee. He accepted conditionalities which were more onerous than in the NPT or the CTBT. Naturally, all the right thinking people in India were up in arms against this deal. Manmohan Singh was adamant. It was rumoured that he had even threatened to resign if the Congress party did not support the deal. He staked the existence of his government on this deal, moved a motion of confidence in Lok Sabha in July 2008 and scored a pyrrhic victory. Three things stood out in this whole episode. The first was the extremely unethical manner in which the majority was secured in Lok Sabha. MPs were freely bought by the Congress party with the full knowledge and approval of the Prime Minister. The Parliamentary and judicial process was subverted to hide the truth and protect the guilty. The second is that nothing has come out of this deal as some of us had predicted. Not a single megawatt of additional electricity has been produced as a result of this deal but the conditionalities still bind India. The third and the worst part of the episode is that instead of earning the gratitude of the US, Manmohan Singh has actually ended up squandering it as some of the recent US actions in the trade and the diplomatic field would prove.
As his term ends next month, Manmohan Singh stands out as a tragic and lonely figure. As he is pilloried by one and all his defenders have deserted him but for his paid employees and his immediate family. At the end of his ten year tenure, the longest for any Prime Minister since Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the economy is in tatters and foreign policy is a shambles. His great legacy is biting the dust. The question which will remain for historians to answer is why did Manmohan Singh accept this humiliation? Why has he carried on as a defeated, discredited general of the Gandhi family until the bitter end?
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