Good for you, Dr Singh

A confession first: I wasn’t a great admirer of Dr Manmohan Singh, Mark 2 (in his first avatar as the country’s finance minister, he was a completely different person). He did precisely nothing for the economy in terms of reforms and if growth picked up during his tenure, it was largely driven by the global upsurge. Indeed, he constantly tried to paper over the fault lines in the government and was quite content to allow the most brazen of corruption to flourish under his stewardship – and yet claim moral superiority. So, to start with, my expectations of Dr Singh Mark 3 are somewhat on the low side.

Which is why it comes as a really, really pleasant surprise to see Dr Singh stand up and tell the DMK to go take a walk. Of course, it’s always possible, even likely, that Dr Singh, or Sonia Gandhi, will come around and will make some concessions to the DMK, but it’s a positive sign.

There can be little doubt that Dr Singh’s last tenure was marred with charges of corruption and rampant favouritism. While this applied to many ministers/ministries, there were three or four that stood out quite distinctively. There was Praful Patel in the aviation ministry who was pretty much able to hand out as much largesse as he wanted to airport developers; there were the DMK lot led by A Raja (Raja alone, in one deal, gave away $10 bn, or Rs 50,000 crore, to a handful of favoured firms while Dr Singh consoled himself saying nothing could stop an idea whose time had come!); and there was Murli Deora who bent over backwards to help Reliance Industries. Since Deora is a Congressman, and a very loyal one at that, it’s fair to say there is nothing he did that was not sanctioned by either Dr Singh or by Sonia Gandhi.

So, if Dr Singh is even remotely interested in providing a less-blemished government this time around, Sonia Gandhi has to allow him some room for manoeuvre. This is precisely what she has done, at least so far.

What if they patch up, and the DMK gets its pound, several pounds, of flesh? And, we should make it clear, this has little to do with the actual ministers – it is no one’s case that Raja was not doing what his party chief in Chennai wanted. So, it may be an Azhagiri or a Kanimozhi who becomes the telecom minister, the net result will probably be the same. If the DMK gets its choice of ministries, and telecom is seen as the bellwether one here, it will signal that Dr Singh’s ready to play the compromise game to the fullest.

But even if the DMK is given the ministries it wants, this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing it did the last time around. Last time, the DMK could do pretty much as it chose, so could Praful Patel. This time, with 200+ seats of its own, and another 100 pledged in letters of support with the President, Dr Singh can afford to tell a DMK minister just where to get off. So, he can let the party play its little games here and there (like the type the BJP alleged Raja had done with the BSNL Wimax contract), but stop it when it decides to hand over $10bn at will.

The onus for this, of course, doesn’t rest solely with Dr Singh. The opposition parties need to be alert and draw attention to this. Sadly, this is just not happening. The BJP made a huge noise over a small Wimax tender but kept painfully quiet when the $10bn was being handed out. This, of course, why no one buys its Bofors or Swiss money trails anymore, though my friend Tarun Vijay has passionately argued against this in today’s ET. Tarun’s view is that the BJP had all the right ideas/concerns, but just failed to communicate this to people. Tarun’s wrong, the BJP’s only got tired ideas and no one has time for tired ideas anymore. There’s a whole generation out there who go to Wikipedia each time they hear Bofors and Quattrocchi, so who’s the BJP appealing to?

To get back to Dr Singh, the concept of a clean government is an idea whose time has come. Has the real Dr Singh’s time come?