As India's financiers ponder the ripple effects of the premiership of Manmohan Singh, the spectre of sectarian strife looms large in the sub-continent, writes J Sri Raman from Chennai India got a new prime minister on Saturday 22 May. Is the country going to get a new economy now? The question is natural, because the 13th prime minister of India is Manmohan Singh. If many see the main significance of the change in New Delhi as economic rather than political, it is because Singh is seen first as an economist and then as a politician. Singh is closely identified with economic "reforms" or the policy of economic "liberalisation" and "globalisation". So closely, indeed, that in India's political lexicon, "Manmohanomics" has become a synonym of such "reforms". This has been so ever since 1991 when Singh rose to prominence as India's finance minister under then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. Revealing an unsuspected readiness to take risks, Singh piloted a major break with India's traditional economic policy. He did so after making a mark earlier as a Nehruvian economist, or one subscribing to the policies and philosophy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the architect of a large public sector and a state-regulated economy. This, however, does not presage a precipitous return to "Manmohanomics" on the morrow of the prime minister's swearing-in at the head of a 68-member Council of Ministers. Such a return would seem to be ruled out for two major reasons: the electoral verdict and post-election developments. Analysts of all political affiliations agreed that the real verdict of the voters in the elections to the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of India's parliament) was on economic issues. It was a vote against the economic policies and performance of the outgoing government of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by Atal Behari Vajpayee and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The vote was, above all, against the BJP- NDA's "India Shining" campaign; an extravagant ad blitzkrieg mounted at the taxpayers' expense, with television commercials being screened as official publicity for governmental programmes. The common people rejected the claim that Vajpayee's "reforms" had brightened their lives. Post-election events have made the task of the prime minister tougher. He has come to power as the most acceptable substitute for the president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, the leading campaigner against the "India Shining" claims, and as head of a coalition dependent on the support of the left that is considered anti-reform. Just how tough is the task? For a quantitative answer, pundits point to "Black Monday" (17 May) on the country's bourses. The Sensex -- India's stock exchange index -- had started slipping soon after the completion of vote-counting on 13 May evening and the emergence of the Congress as the single largest party, contrary to the evidence of all exit polls. The fall gained momentum after the left leaders' verbal muscle flexing over economic policy issues. Panic set in, particularly after the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), A B Bardhan, called for a total end to the policy of "disinvestment", or privatisation, of public sector undertakings. Worse was to follow. All hell broke loose after the president of India on 17 May called Gandhi to discuss the formation of a new government. A ferocious and fundamentalist-sounding campaign was instantly launched against a "foreigner" -- like the Italian-born Congress chief -- becoming the premier, though Gandhi is an Indian citizen and has functioned as the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha for four and a half years. The campaign was punctuated by Black Monday, when the Sensex crashed by a record 800-plus points. The campaign and the crash led to what the media has described as "a stunning sacrifice" by Gandhi. On 18 May, she told a shell-shocked Congress that she had decided to decline the number one post of the world's second most populous country. The next day, she persuaded tearful Congress MPs to accept Singh as prime minister. The Sensex went up again -- only to drop once more as Singh talked of "reforms with a human face" (interpreted as a promise to retain pro-labour safeguards and subsidies for the poor) and announced a discontinuation of the "disinvestment" of the public sector Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), initiated by his predecessors. The subsequent drafting of a Common Minimum Programme (CMP) for the Congress and its allies -- which commits the government to a policy of "selective" privatisation and "disinvestment" -- has kept under check corporate enthusiasm over Singh's return to the charge of official economic "reforms". Politically, the significance of Singh's ascent to power lies in the fact that he is the first leader from a minority community to rise to this height. His choice for the top executive post has been jubilantly welcomed by his own community of Sikhs. Their moment of glory, however, is a matter of grave provocation for practitioners of minority-bashing politics. The larger challenge before Singh will be the offensive an out of power BJP and its friends can be expected to unleash on other minorities -- Muslims and Christians. The latter may come in for special treatment, as the BJP and its camp are harping in their current grassroots agitprop on the Catholic identity of Gandhi -- and hinting darkly at a Catholic conspiracy to deny power to the majority Hindus.
