Why Congress doesn't give Manmohan the credit he deserves

By Amulya Ganguli The Narendra Modi government's chief economic advisor, Arvind Subramanian, has said that the rate of poverty reduction from 2005-06 to 2011-12 was the fastest in the country's history. The reason, according to him, was "fast GDP growth". Rarely before has the Manmohan Singh government received such a handsome compliment on its performance. Although it has been known that an estimated 138 million people were lifted from below the poverty line when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power, Subramanian's praise is the first by someone not associated with the present government. What is worth examining, however, is why the Congress itself has been reticent about this achievement although the party's senior general secretary, Digvijay Singh, a "loose cannon" in his own words, did acknowledge once that millions of the "poorest of the poor" had been elevated into the lower middle class category because of Manmohan Singh's "right" policies. Notwithstanding this realization, the Congress has generally been silent about its own government's excellent record in the matter of poverty reduction whereas one would have thought that it would have been trumpeted by the party during and after the election campaign. The reason for this quietness cannot be unrelated to the party's first family's fear that an acknowledgment of this remarkable feat will, first, turn the former prime minister into a hero at the expense of the crown prince, Rahul Gandhi, and, secondly, that it will underline the success of the reforms process. The exaltation of the putative "regent" over the heir-apparent was evidently unacceptable to the Congress. After all, the former was only expected to keep the seat warm for the dauphin and not put up an admirable show of governance. Moreover, the fact that the poverty reduction tapered off from 2011-12 would point to the period when Congress president Sonia Gandhi's aggressive espousal of costly welfare programmes led to the government taking its foot of the accelerator of reforms, as the former finance minister, P. Chidambaram, has said.