主题：【文摘】Manmohan Singh 印度准总理其人其事 -- 西风陶陶

Andy Mukherjee is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.

Is Manmohan Singh Right for India's Top Job?: Andy Mukherjee

May 20 (Bloomberg) -- It was the autumn of 1970, and the Delhi School of Economics was abuzz with left-wing fervor.

Just a year earlier, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had nationalized private banks. Six years later, she would alter the country's constitution and make India a ``socialist'' republic.

A 38-year-old turbaned Sikh professor faced his students that autumn day. He was their new teacher of international economics, recently back from a three-year stint at the United Nations.

His lecture was on foreign exchange, a subject linked closely to what the Delhi School's graduate students and many of their professors saw as a Western conspiracy to punish India for not accepting the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.

Four years earlier, Gandhi had devalued the Indian rupee by 37.5 percent against the dollar after the U.S. government and the World Bank made it a condition for help in lifting the economy from the morass it had sunk into following India's 1965 war with Pakistan. The promised loans never arrived. In fact, the World Bank's assistance to India fell by two-thirds in one year.

Ifzal Ali, who attended that lecture as a student, says he vividly remembers the bespectacled professor's remarks:

```The market for currencies should be no different from the market for peanuts -- it should be left to market forces.'''

It was a startling statement, said Ali, for its stark repudiation of the prevailing socialist zeitgeist.

Now, almost 34 years later, Ali is the Manila-based chief economist at the Asian Development Bank. And his professor, Manmohan Singh, 71, today will become India's prime minister, the top official in the world's biggest democracy.

Finance Chief

In 1971, Singh moved to the foreign trade ministry. For a little more than two years starting in 1982, he was the governor of the Indian central bank.

In 1991, Singh who had no political experience was made finance minister because his expertise was needed to save the country from a balance-of-payment crisis. He ended up becoming independent India's first champion of free-market policies by cutting tariffs, opening the stock market to foreign investors and by making the rupee convertible for trade and travel.

Sigh's policies were old hat in much of Asia, which had moved much farther along on the road to benefiting from foreign trade and investments. Singh was playing catch-up.

``What does South Korea have that India doesn't?'' the Economist magazine quoted Singh as asking in a 1992 article. Yet, Korea was as an Asian Tiger. India with its billion people, languished in penury.

`Manmohanomics'

Singh's policies created an upheaval in India where an entire post-independence generation hadn't used foreign-made products, nor known of any respectable jobs outside of the government.

The media coined the term ``Manmohanomics,'' to describe the changes they saw. Entirely new industries were springing up in cities. By early 1990s, many young college graduates in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore were landing jobs with previously unheard job titles of ``system engineer,'' and ``equity analyst.'' Indian software company Infosys Technologies Ltd. sold shares to the expanding Indian middle classes in 1993.

In Singh's five-year tenure, annual foreign investments into India jumped 27 fold. Economic growth was 7.3 percent in 1996.

Singh should have become finance minister this time too. With his party boss Sonia Gandhi putting him in 7, Race Course Road, the prime minister's official residence in New Delhi, there's a danger the country won't get the best out of him.

Challenges Ahead

For one, there will always be doubt about who really is in charge: Singh or Gandhi. Second, Singh isn't a firebrand inside parliament or outside. The Sanskrit meaning of his name, ``a charmer of hearts,'' doesn't fit his stoic demeanor or unembellished speech.

Singh has always been a member of the upper house of parliament, which doesn't require candidates to face direct elections. In 1999, the only time Singh fought an election, he lost.

Third, the 1996 congressional election defeat led to a crescendo of anti-Manmohan sloganeering, as though his policies, and not the corruption scandals that ensnared the prime minister, were the reason for the party's downfall.

Excuse to Stay Poor

The situation is similar now. The dismissal of Vajpayee, who was pursuing pro-investor policies, could be a perfect excuse for the new ministers to go slow on privatization or labor law reforms. Besides, the new government will depend on the support of the communists. Any reduction in the budget deficit -- priority No. 1 -- would be a hard sell.

Singh, as prime minister, can't keep India from slipping into a populist quagmire. Unless one controls the budget (only the finance minister does), it isn't possible to rein in subsidies. On this front, Singh's own track record a decade ago was rather spotty.

As an academic, Singh may be a believer in markets -- for peanuts, as well as currencies. As prime minister, he may not get the chance to translate his wisdom into action.

That will be a tragedy.

To contact the writer of this column:

Andy Mukherjee in Singapore at [email protected].

To contact the editor responsible for this column:

Bill Ahearn at [email protected].

Last Updated: May 19, 2004 13:13 EDT