On rights-based legislation, tribal betrayals, the nuclear deal, and what statesmanship actually means—versus what we pretend it means.

I was six years old when Manmohan Singh presented his first Union Budget in July 1991. I have no memory of it, obviously—I was more concerned with summer holidays than balance of payments crises. But I grew up in a household where economic policy was dinner-table conversation, where the shift from the license raj to liberalisation was discussed with the same intensity other families reserved for cricket scores. By the time I understood what 1991 meant, Singh had become Prime Minister, and the questions his career raised—about growth and equity, markets and redistribution, technocratic excellence and political constraint—would eventually lead me to a PhD in development economics.

He died a year ago today, on December 26, 2024. The tributes were predictable: the BJP praised his "simplicity" while erasing his substance; Congress claimed him as their own while ignoring how often they had constrained him; commentators reduced a six-decade career to either "silent PM" or "architect of liberalization." None of this captured the man—or more importantly, the contradictions his tenure forces us to confront.

This essay is an attempt at an honest assessment. Singh's legacy includes landmark rights legislation that outlasted his government, tribal displacement enabled by his government, a nuclear deal that traded strategic autonomy for uncertain benefits, and a model of personal integrity that coexisted with governmental corruption. Understanding how all of this can be true simultaneously is essential—not only for evaluating a single politician, but also for grappling with what development actually requires.

The Cambridge-Oxford Formation

What made Manmohan Singh distinctive among Indian policymakers was his intellectual formation. At Cambridge in the mid-1950s, he studied under Joan Robinson, the left-Keynesian who insisted that state intervention was essential for combining development with social equity. Robinson's assessment of her student proved prescient: he had "a perfect head for theory but keeps his feet on the ground," she wrote, noting his "determined resistance to bunkum of all kinds."

His Oxford DPhil thesis on India's export performance directly challenged the export pessimism that justified India's inward-looking industrialisation. Where the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis provided intellectual cover for protectionism, Singh's empirical work demonstrated that India's own policies—not sluggish foreign demand—explained its trade failures. The irony was complete when Singh later worked at UNCTAD under Raúl Prebisch himself.

This background matters because it shaped how Singh approached the 1991 crisis. The famous Victor Hugo quotation from his budget speech—"no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come"—is remembered.

Less noted is his insistence that "markets can only serve those who are part of the market system" and that India could not "accept social misery and inequity as unavoidable in the process of creation of wealth."

The 1991 budget increased food subsidies and reduced kerosene prices, even as it implemented structural adjustment. Singh announced a National Renewal Fund to ensure "the cost of technical change and modernisation does not devolve on the workers." He invoked Gandhi's trusteeship philosophy in the same speech that opened India to globalisation. This was not rhetorical positioning—it reflected a genuine intellectual conviction that liberalisation without redistribution would hollow out democracy.

"I was born in a poor family in a chronically drought prone village," Singh told Parliament. "I shall never forget that ultimately all economic processes are meant to serve the interests of our people."

The Rights Architecture

The UPA era produced legislation that development economists will study for decades to come. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), Right to Information Act (2005), Forest Rights Act (2006), Right to Education Act (2009), National Food Security Act (2013), and Land Acquisition Act (2013) collectively transformed Indian welfare from discretionary programs to legally enforceable entitlements.

MGNREGA embodied sophisticated development economics. The demand-driven design—requiring work to be provided within 15 days of application, with unemployment allowance as a penalty—created self-selection that avoided the exclusion errors of BPL targeting. Jean Drèze, who helped draft the legislation, designed it around the insight that universal access through work requirements would be more effective than targeted transfers requiring contested poverty identification.

The Forest Rights Act acknowledged "historical injustice" to tribal communities in its preamble—unprecedented recognition that colonial and post-independence forest policies had labelled traditional dwellers as encroachers. The Act recognised both individual and community forest rights, empowered gram sabhas as the primary authorities, and established a framework that would later grant tribal communities veto power over mining on their lands.

The National Food Security Act moved toward near-universal coverage—75% of rural and 50% of urban populations—with legally enforceable entitlements to subsidised grain. The shift from targeted to quasi-universal reflected the development economics insight that universal programs generate political sustainability and reduce exclusion errors.

P. Chidambaram made the durability argument: "In the 7 years of the NDA government, the government has not dared to undo these legislations. On the contrary, in times of acute distress, the Employment Guarantee Act and the Food Security Act are the laws that have played a major role in mitigating the sufferings of the people."

The rights-based framing created political lock-in that pure welfare programs had never achieved. This was Singh's legislative legacy—laws designed to outlast governments, including his own.

The Tribal Betrayal

And yet. The starkest indictment of the Singh government comes from examining what happened to the same tribal communities that those laws were supposed to protect.

Operation Green Hunt, launched in late 2009, deployed over 80,000 paramilitary forces in tribal areas—precisely the regions where the Forest Rights Act was supposed to be empowering gram sabhas. By 2013, approximately 84,000 CRPF personnel were deployed in the "Red Corridor." Human Rights Watch documented extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, and forced displacement. The National Human Rights Commission recorded mass gang rape incidents by security forces in Bastar.

The Salwa Judum—a state-sponsored vigilante militia in Chhattisgarh—burned over 600 villages and displaced more than 300,000 people before the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 2011. The Court's judgment identified the root cause as "policies of rapid exploitation of resources by the private sector without credible commitments to equitable distribution of benefits."

Singh's own statements reveal the contradiction. In November 2009, he acknowledged "systematic exploitation and social and economic abuse" of tribal communities, stating "more could be done; more should be done"—while simultaneously launching the counter-insurgency offensive. Earlier that year, he told Parliament that if left-wing extremism continued to flourish in mineral-rich areas, "the climate for investment would certainly be affected."

The Vedanta Niyamgiri case illustrates both the failure and eventual vindication of the rights framework. Environmental clearance for mining on Dongria Kondh sacred lands was initially granted in 2004. Only after Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh withdrew clearance in 2010-2011, and the Supreme Court's 2013 judgment recognised gram sabha consent as mandatory, did all 12 affected gram sabhas vote unanimously against mining.

The progressive legislation worked—but only after a decade of legal battles, international campaigns, and sustained tribal resistance. UPA-era forest clearances diverted over 700,000 hectares of forest land. Adivasis constitute 8% of India's population but 40-50% of all displaced persons.

This was not hypocrisy in the simple sense. Singh genuinely believed in tribal rights. It was a structural failure in which the imperatives of mineral extraction and counter-insurgency overwhelmed the rights framework his government had established. The gap between rights on paper and rights in practice defines the tribal experience of the UPA decade.

The Nuclear Deal

The Indo-US Nuclear Deal provoked the sharpest political crisis of Singh's tenure, forcing a July 2008 confidence vote after the Left parties withdrew support. The Left critique, often dismissed as an ideological reflex, contained substantive points that deserve serious engagement rather than caricature.

The deal ended India's 34-year nuclear isolation, granting access to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and enabling uranium imports for power plants. In exchange, India placed 14 of 22 thermal reactors under permanent IAEA safeguards and committed to a voluntary moratorium on testing. The 123 Agreement omitted the word "test"—but the enabling Hyde Act explicitly required termination of cooperation if India tested again. This created a de facto constraint on India's strategic autonomy, a constraint that the agreement's text deliberately obscured.

Prakash Karat's core argument was structural, not reflexively anti-American: "The real thing was America was saying, 'We will give you this nuclear deal... But the quid pro quo is that you come into a military and defence agreement with us.'" The 2005 New Framework for US-India Defence Relationship preceded the nuclear deal—the sequencing was not coincidental. As Philip Zelikow of the State Department acknowledged, its goal was "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century... We understand fully the implications, including military implications."

The Left identified specific problems:

The fuel supply assurances were political, not legal. President Bush himself confirmed the US could not "legally compel US firms to sell a given product to New Delhi." The assurances existed in letters and statements, not in treaty language that would bind future administrations. India's energy security, supposedly the rationale for the deal, rested on promises rather than guarantees.

The Iranian vote demonstrated immediate foreign policy costs. India voted against Iran at the September 2005 IAEA Board meeting—precisely what the Left warned would happen. This was a country with which India had civilizational ties, energy dependencies, and no strategic conflict. The vote signalled alignment with US priorities over independent foreign policy assessment.

The promised energy benefits never materialised. No US-designed reactor has been constructed in India as of 2025. Westinghouse's bankruptcy delayed the Kovvada project indefinitely. The nuclear liability law that India passed to protect its citizens from Bhopal-style corporate immunity became a barrier to American investment—but the Left had argued all along that the liability provisions in the 123 Agreement were inadequate. France and Russia, not the US, became India's actual nuclear partners.

The strategic alignment deepened exactly as predicted. LEMOA (2016), COMCASA (2018), and BECA (2020) followed over the next decade—logistics sharing, communications interoperability, and geospatial intelligence access. The Quad formalised from dialogue to military exercises. The US became India's second-largest arms supplier. Whether this alignment serves India's interests is debatable; that it occurred is not.

Singh staked his government's survival on this deal. When the Left withdrew support, he could have let it go—the UPA had other legislative achievements to defend. Instead, he chose a confidence vote that he might have lost. The cash-for-votes scandal that followed—BJP MPs waving ₹30 million in cash in Parliament, WikiLeaks cables revealing allegations of systematic bribery, expelled MPs claiming they were paid to abstain—represented exactly the corruption of the democratic process that the Left had warned concentrated executive pursuit of a single foreign policy objective would produce.

Singh won the vote, 275 to 256. The deal went through. India joined the global nuclear order on American terms. Whether this was visionary statesmanship or a sovereignty trade-off that future generations will regret remains genuinely contested. What is not contested is that Singh prioritised this agreement over his coalition, over his party's left flank, over the parliamentary process itself. The economist who understood redistribution chose to align strategically with the world's dominant power. The contradictions in his legacy begin here.

Secularism as Substance

Singh's secularism was rooted in Indian civilizational concepts rather than Western constitutional formalism. At a 2007 interfaith conclave, he distinguished tolerance from harmony: "There can be tolerance of an unequal, but there can be harmony only among equals."

The "Muslims have first claim on resources" quote—systematically misrepresented in subsequent political campaigns—requires full context. At the December 2006 National Development Council meeting, Singh listed "programmes for the upliftment of SC/STs, other backward classes, minorities and women and children" as priority areas, stating "they must have the first claim on resources." The PMO called selective quotation "a deliberate and mischievous misinterpretation."

The Sachar Committee Report, submitted weeks earlier, had documented Muslim educational and economic marginalisation—literacy rates of 59.1% versus the national average of 64.8%, only 4.5% representation in Indian Railways. Singh cited data, not offering preferential treatment.

His 2005 parliamentary apology for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots—"I bow my head in shame that such a thing took place"—was described by US diplomats as "a singular act of political courage." He was the first Sikh Prime Minister addressing a massacre that had personally affected him; his own home in Delhi came under mob attack, saved only by his Hindu son-in-law claiming it as his own.

Yet the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots—62 dead, over 50,000 Muslims displaced—drew criticism that his response was inadequate. The UP state government bore primary responsibility, but Singh's approach of convening committees seemed passive against the worst communal violence in UP in decades.

The Mask Called Vajpayee

Singh's contested legacy becomes particularly revealing when contrasted with the hagiography constructed around Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee is remembered as a moderate statesman, a poet-politician who represented a gentler Hinduism. This image requires systematic amnesia about his actual record.

Consider Kandahar. The IC-814 hijacking in December 1999 ended with Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh personally escorting three terrorists—including Maulana Masood Azhar—to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Azhar founded Jaish-e-Mohammed within months. JeM conducted the 2001 Parliament attack, contributed to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and executed the 2019 Pulwama bombing that killed 40 CRPF personnel. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, another released terrorist, kidnapped and murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl.

The catastrophic security consequences of this capitulation are rarely discussed when Vajpayee is praised for toughness on terror.

Consider Gujarat 2002. The "raj dharma" statement is remembered; the second half is systematically omitted: "I am sure Narendra Modi is also following Rajdharma." More damning was Vajpayee's April 2002 speech at the BJP National Executive in Goa: "Wherever Muslims live, they don't like to live in co-existence with others... they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats."

No sitting prime minister of India—not even Modi—has so brazenly and publicly attacked an entire religious community.

Multiple sources confirm Vajpayee wanted to dismiss Modi but backed down when Advani threatened to resign, and the RSS openly supported Modi. Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha later confirmed that, before the Goa meeting, "Atal ji had made up his mind that the Gujarat government would be dismissed if Modi refused to resign." Vajpayee was stymied by the RSS-Advani alliance.

The RSS relationship was lifelong and unwavering. Vajpayee joined the RSS at age 20, became a pracharak, and started his career at RSS publications. When the Janata Party required members to sever RSS links in 1979, Vajpayee and all BJS members resigned rather than break with the organisation. His statement—"Once a swayamsevak, always a swayamsevak"—reflected reality.

The Liberhan Commission found that Vajpayee, Advani, and Joshi were "party to the decisions of the Sangh Parivaar" regarding the demolition of the Babri Masjid. KN Govindacharya's description of Vajpayee as a "mukhota" (mask)—the acceptable face of the BJP—was more accurate than the statesman narrative.

What Statesmanship Actually Means

Against Vajpayee's constructed mythology, what did Singh actually embody?

Personal integrity was unquestioned. He drove a Maruti 800, had no son or son-in-law in business, and immediately returned borrowed money after losing the 1999 election. The CBI in the coal scam investigation concluded there was "no prosecutable evidence" against Singh personally—he had been "kept in the dark" by officials. Barack Obama described him as "wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest."

Crisis management demonstrated restraint over spectacle. After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Singh chose diplomatic isolation of Pakistan over military retaliation. Within 14 days, India secured a Chinese agreement to declare Hafiz Saeed a global terrorist under UN sanctions. The approach was criticized as pacific—but produced concrete results that military strikes might not have achieved.

Parliamentary conduct maintained dignity. When attacked with pointed Urdu couplets, Singh responded with poetic grace. His 2005 apology for 1984 represented moral clarity rare in Indian politics. He was the last Prime Minister to hold regular press conferences with unscripted questions.

Yet statesmanship requires the ability to wield power effectively. The Sanjaya Baru revelations about dual power centres with Sonia Gandhi, the inability to control ministerial corruption despite personal probity, the failure to communicate achievements—these represent failures of political assertion. Singh's famous couplet—"Hazaron jawabon se acchi hai meri khamoshi" (Better than a thousand answers is my silence)—was philosophically elegant but politically inadequate.

The results argument remains substantial: average GDP growth of approximately 8%, 270 million lifted from multidimensional poverty, landmark social legislation, nuclear isolation ended, and India shielded from the global financial crisis. The legislative architecture outlasted his government and constrained successors. Modi's February 2024 parliamentary tribute acknowledged Singh "will be remembered for his contributions."

A Year Later

I think about what Joan Robinson saw in her young student from Punjab—the good head for theory, the feet on the ground, the resistance to bunkum. That economist never left Singh, even when political constraints overwhelmed policy vision, even when counter-insurgency displaced the communities his laws were supposed to protect, even when silence became interpreted as weakness rather than dignity.

The contrast with Vajpayee is instructive not because Singh was better—though on several metrics he was—but because it reveals what we choose to remember. Vajpayee's capitulation at Kandahar produced terrorists who killed hundreds of Indians. His inaction during Gujarat 2002 enabled Modi's political survival. His RSS membership was lifelong and unwavering. Yet he is remembered as a moderate statesman.

Singh's restraint following the Mumbai attacks is criticised as a weakness. His rights legislation is attributed to Sonia Gandhi. His personal integrity is dismissed as irrelevant to governmental outcomes. His tribal betrayals—and they were betrayals—are cited as proof that the legislation was mere tokenism.

Neither caricature captures reality.

Manmohan Singh understood what development economics teaches: that growth without equity is unsustainable; that markets cannot serve those outside them; and that rights frameworks create political lock-in that discretionary welfare never achieves. He built institutions to address these insights—MGNREGA, RTI, FRA, NFSA—while remaining constrained by coalition compulsions, state capacity limitations, and the extractive imperatives of his own government.

He was an economist who understood the problem. That his solutions were incomplete, his power contested, his legacy contradictory—this makes him human, not diminished. The question for those of us who study development is not whether Singh was a saint or a failure. It is whether the institutions he created will ultimately deliver what he understood was needed.

A year on, the answer remains unwritten.

Further reading:

1. Manmohan Singh, 1991 Budget Speech (Ministry of Finance)—the primary document, worth reading in full

2. Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (Penguin, 2014)—insider account, controversial but essential

3. Vinay Sitapati, Half Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India (Penguin, 2016)—for context on the 1991 reforms and Singh's role as implementer rather than architect

4. Sachar Committee Report (2006)—the data behind the "first claim on resources" speech

5. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (Princeton, 2013)—the intellectual framework behind UPA's rights-based legislation

6. Nandini Sundar, The Burning Forest: India's War in Bastar (Juggernaut, 2016)—essential documentation of Operation Green Hunt and its consequences

7. Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (Orient BlackSwan, 2010)—on Vedanta, Niyamgiri, and the political economy of tribal displacement

8. Christophe Jaffrelot, "The fading mirage of a 'liberal' Vajpayee" (Himal Southasian)—critical reassessment of the Vajpayee mythology

9. Liberhan Commission Report (2009)—on the Babri Masjid demolition and the roles of Vajpayee, Advani, and the Sangh Parivar

10. Prakash Karat, "The Indo-US Nuclear Deal: A Critique" (CPI(M))—the Left's case in their own words

11. Ashley Tellis, Atoms for War? U.S.-Indian Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and India's Nuclear Arsenal (Carnegie Endowment, 2006)—American strategic rationale for the deal