Manmohan Singh

China doesn't want to see America as an enemy, nor is America India's enemy.

Three successive Indian prime ministers, that is Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi over nearly a 30-year period have hailed India-US ties as a natural strategic partnership.

Modi has said so more often than Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee together.

What blood feud mindset fires this anti-Americanism at any cost? That will need a much smarter mind than mine to write a book.

All I can say is that Modi government has no such fixations or needs.

So anyway, uh, while there, uh, one of those retiring, almost retiring, uh, officer told me about these, uh, hundreds of thousands of files, as you said, lying, uh, not cataloged, not organized, et cetera.

Uh, and it's, uh, very interesting because, uh, under Dr. Manmohan Singh, um, the government w- we, we thought that India is witnessing this, uh, irreversible wave of transparency, which began with the Right to Information Act, uh, in two thousand and five.

And, uh, and to me, it looked all part of that transparency wave.

Uh, who knew that it can be easily reversed? Uh, so anyway, so from there, I began searching, and, uh, initially, it, it was quixotic, uh, and idiotic search, uh, without any aim.

So here are the five such operations that we've seen in our generation.

1991, Government of India, Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh government, they launched India Development Bonds.

India Development Bonds brought in $1.6 billion dollars.

That was 0.6% of India's GDP.

So, if there is a complete breakdown of trust, then we have much deeper issues than convincing each other on GDP numbers.

So, I am really shocked because we never, as I wrote on it on social media, during Manmohan Singh's time, we never discussed these basics.

We always disagreed with his policies.

There were issues like we wanted better indicators, like there was only WPI, then there was no CPI, then WPI, just...

And it's gross.

And I want to take you back.

You know, Harsh made a beautiful point on X, where he said, you know, Dr. Manmohan Singh ke baare mein humne kabhi aise feeling nahi raki thi because he was our prime minister and you have to respect sometimes when I look at this is because like I remember it was I think two years

ago in my book discussion on Gnostic somebody had said something about Dr. Manmohan Singh and I corrected that person at that moment then and there I said he might be whatever he is my prime minister and we have to have some civility I would not vote for him.

Certainly the reforms in China, they happened sooner, they were more radical, they were sustained.

India started to liberalise its economy very weakly under Mrs Gandhi initially and then under Manmohan Singh.

But it unleashed something like 10% growth.

And India, being democratic or semi-democratic, the bigger constraints.

I'll give an example.

Manmohan Singh.

Whether you like him or not, he actually wanted to do something good for our country.

He had great knowledge.

Hmm.

It was Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao.

Now, if you look carefully, uh, basically it, uh, it talks about certain frameworks, certain mechanisms.

China itself had somewhere walked back-