Economist Manmohan had a non-economist attitude: Baijal

NEW DELHI: Manmohan Singh may have been universally acknowledged as the ‘economist prime minister’ but former Trai chairman Pradip Baijal said Singh appeared to be a person with a “non-economist attitude” and had a “harmful political attitude towards the economy”. He also termed UPA’s second term as a period of “crony capitalism”.
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TOI was the first to report on Baijal’s book on Tuesday.
Talking about disinvestment in his self-published book ‘The Complete Story of Indian Reforms: 2G, Power, and Private Enterprise – A Practitioner’s Dairy’, Baijal wrote that when Singh was chairman of the parliamentary sub-committee on disinvestment, “he cross-examined me once in 2002 (during NDA government), and was very negative regarding the privatization which had been completed”.
He said he asked the reason for Singh’s unhappiness even when “I was only pursuing the liberalization policies laid down by him (Singh) as finance minister post-1991”.
“I was totally amazed at the non-economist attitude of an economist prime minister, and also of his harmful political attitude towards the economy,” Baijal, who was also disinvestment secretary, wrote.
“Luckily, those who started enquiries to defame the excellent work done did not do their due diligence. Fortunately, the CAG, which demolished many actions of the UPA-2 government later, did not find anything wrong in any case of disinvestment, except for giving some suggestions to improve the process,” he added.
In a detailed analysis of disinvestment policy and privatization, which he claimed helped India in terms of growth, Baijal writes, “Privatization process led to huge revenues – the total proceeds from privatization in India were higher than those from privatization of a large number of public sector units in China or Russia.”

He said “crony capitalism raised its ugly head” during UPA-2 due to the “evaporation of the government as an integrated institution to a confused coalition hierarchy, where the right hand did not know what the left was doing”.
Again referring to Manmohan Singh, Baijal said, “It is also surprising that those who represented the best of Indian reformers in the post-1991 years catalyzed the worst phase of crony capitalism after 2009.”
Baijal accused the Congress of keeping proposals to make key changes in Prevention of Corruption Act in “deep freeze” during its tenure, alleging it was mainly done so that it could be used as an “instrument of torture against civil servants” at the hands of CBI. “This is precisely what happened in the cases of P C Parakh and Harish C Gupta (former secretaries in the coal ministry, being probed in coal scam). The secretaries were picked up as responsible for the scams, while the minister (coal), the prime minister (Singh in this case), were not. The PM’s (Singh) name has only now been included, courtesy the court,” Baijal wrote.