ardar Manmohan Singh, a former prime minister of India, passed away recently. It was surprising to see the universal outpouring of condolences, given how he was mocked in India for his almost reticent silence even during his premiership. His famous words, “History will be kind to me,” were quoted ad nauseam. The quote provides a good opening for a review of his legacy.

The generation that graduated through the ’90s India is a product partially of prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao. Rao, leading a minority government, allowed the destruction of Babri Mosque, which opened the floodgates for a new Hindu Rashtra (which will take another 20 years to fruition). Rao and Manmohan Singh, serving first as finance minister in 1991 and later as PM, were credited with financial liberalisation and abolition of what is called ‘license, quota, permit raj.’ This helped create and expand a middle class that simultaneously overlapped with and was distinct from the previous middle class of babus, lawyers and teachers. This middle class found its base among finance, technology and services industries created by their liberalisation initiative.

I say partially because we had mostly done our growing up in the remnants of a socialist welfare idea of India. There was also the belief that India belonged to all, regardless of religion or caste; even class. While this hegemonic sway had begun to fray, particularly in 1980s, the pull remained unquestioned till the BJP took charge in the late 1990s. Symbolically, at least, this tiny middle class went to the same ration shops where the poor queued up to get their kerosene and rice and went to the same government hospitals for delivery of their children. Most of them graduated through government-financed and -administered educational institutions (even schools).

The 1990s India, while expanding the idea of middle class, helped shrink the idea of expansive India. This did not happen solely through the economic distance that grew between the newly-haves and the forever-have-nots but also through two entirely different routes to economic and social wellbeing. The two Indias went to different ‘offices’ for their livelihoods (with a rapid informalisation of labour); they increasingly went to different service providers for their basic services (health, education, food); and they found different means of transport to live in isolated spaces.

Millions of people moved out of poverty during these years… According to some estimates, the Indian middle class doubled in size over an eight year period from 300 million in 2004 to 600 million in 2012. These were Manmohan years.

Millions of people moved out of poverty during these years and were able to access services that the new economic regime helped create. According to some estimates, the Indian middle class doubled in size over an eight year period from 300 million in 2004 to 600 million in 2012. These were Manmohan years. At the same time, other studies pointed out the fragility of this class. A 2016 Credit Suisse report estimated that India’s middle class possessed less than a quarter of the country’s wealth; compared with China and Brazil, where the middle class held almost a third of the wealth. Not surprisingly, this middle class, which had grown out of Manmohan-led reforms, was also restless, anxious and more aggressive. Its class, caste and regional base remained skewed.

It was in this context that they aggressively latched on to the floodgates opened by the destruction of Babri Mosque, backed with the new muscular nationalism unleashed first through nuclear explosions under Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime and later cemented under Manmohan Singh through an Indo-US nuclear deal (at the cost of breaking away from Left-backed alliance). This newly minted middle class (overtly conservative in its approach) went for a ‘no quarters given’ attitude, deeply unhappy with the kind of rights-based framework initiated under Manmohan Singh (even as credit for this is often given to Sonia Gandhi and her National Advisory Council).

This belatedly-initiated framework tried to create its own version of safety valves to bridge the now unbridgeable gap between the poor and the rest. The logical outcome of this new prosperity had led also to emergence of a new business oligarchy (a global phenomenon during these years) to which the middle class hitched its wagon. And even though the rising inequality kept them on tenterhooks, they blamed the poor and not the plutocrats for their vulnerability.

The rights-based framework initiated under Manmohan Singh included fundamental rights like National Food Security Act, Right to Education Act, Forest Rights Act, Domestic Violence Act among others, riding on the critical Right to Information Act ensuring governance accountability. Even if implemented in a half-hearted way, it posed a major perceived threat to a class that had by now grown far apart from the poor. They reviled him for being too effete, not being able to check this challenge from the bottom. And when in Manmohan’s own mocking words, someone else came to the scene with evidence of being stronger (in terms of presiding over killings of thousands of Muslims), their anxiety found a relief and a logical extension in the new Hindutva regime.

This is hugely ironic given the fact that to the last end of his life Singh remained committed to the idea of an inclusive, secular India. He was the only Indian prime minster to have publicly owned his party’s responsibility in the anti-Sikh genocide and formally apologised to the community and the nation. But within a few years that nation had changed so much that it publicly celebrated the daily humiliations of all its minorities. All credit and blame for that, however, cannot be laid at Manmohan Singh’s feet.

The writer has been in the development sector for more than a decade. He currently works with an international non-governmental organisation based in Delhi. He may be reached at avinashcold@gmail.com