India's hamstrung visionary

First I came to know about Chacha Manmohan Singh as an economist through my Prof Dr. R. Arunachalam, Ph.D who was my adviser during Masters in Economics. He asked to read one of Mr Singh’s article on The Emerging New World Order. It was good read.

Recently The Economist’s Banyan carried a piece on Chacha Manmohan Singh some excerpts from that piece.

• WHILE sipping syrupy tea and watching television in a Mumbai slum, Banyan was once cheered to see the kindly face of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, appear on screen. What a gift to India he is: honest, accomplished, wise—a leader-sage. But not to everyone. “World Bank gangster!” one tea-drinker hissed.
• Mr Singh may have blundered. His ambition to reopen former trade routes across a peaceful Indian subcontinent is laudable. But this, unlike his former visions, of a more market- and America-friendly India, is widely shared: all the country’s main parties want peace with Pakistan. The dialogue began, as Mr Singh reminded parliament, under a government of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indeed, much of the BJP’s rancour over his alleged giveaway was a bid to rally itself after a disappointing election. The serious divisions in India are not over whether peace with Pakistan is desirable, but whether it is possible. And Mr Singh seems unable to bridge that gap. If the dialogue is renewed, as eventually it must be, it will therefore be bound by new limits. India would be unlikely to make any agreement with today’s feeble Pakistani civilian leaders whom Mr Singh sought to bolster in Sharm el-Sheikh. So there is little prospect, unlike under Pakistan’s former army dictator, Pervez Musharraf, of settling the countries’ border disputes, including over Kashmir.
• Now he needs to husband it better—because India has other problems that perhaps only he can solve. The biggest of these concerns climate change.
• Amid negotiations on replacing the Kyoto protocol, at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December, India is emerging as one of the main obstacles to a global agreement. Though it is the fourth-biggest carbon-emitter, it refuses to promise to curb the growth of its emissions, arguing that these are still modest per Indian. That is a strong argument, but half the world can cite it. To make India more accommodating, and align its interest with the planet’s, Mr Singh will have to effect a third transformation. This would be his greatest yet.