DR Manmohan Singh, who passed away at 92 last week, will be remembered in contrarian ways. As finance minister and as prime minister, he condemned ‘left wing extremism’ as the biggest internal security threat to India. The sahukar-backed right wing agreed.

Consequently, too many leftist intellectuals and academics are in jail over unfounded claims that they posed a threat to Indian democracy. By the time it was Singh’s turn to hand over the baton to Narendra Modi, which he grudged but refused to see as a logical outcome of his economic policies, Singh was warning that Hindutva posed the real threat to India.

In the end, it was too late to heed the corrected warning. The threat to Indian democracy was either posed by the left or by the right. It couldn’t be coming from both, unless they had ganged up as they did self-servingly against Indira Gandhi’s brief recourse to emergency.

Dr Singh is thus hailed as India’s economic Prometheus, after the Greek legend who defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity.

Praise is showered on him for opening India’s economy, which strove to unleash the complex nation’s hidden energies. In some versions of the Greek myth, Prometheus is also credited with the creation of humanity from clay, a description the ever-self-effacing former PM would probably frown on.

Manmohan Singh’s policies shored up business captains who ganged up to promote Narendra Modi as prime minister.

Many respected him for his cultural roots and not for his politics. Of his three........

© Dawn