In my last Sunday’s article about Rahul Gandhi I quoted the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga, who classified the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as the Roman Julio Claudians. I pick up from the comparison a group name - Triumvirate - which exactly fits the present group of the three most powerful Indians. This appellation is derived from Latin to describe a political regime dominated by three powerful individuals.

As you know, there were two triumvirates in Rome; the earlier one composed of Pompey, Julius Ceasar and Marcus Licinius Crassus. Soon after the assassination of Julius Ceasar, Ceasars’s adopted son, Octavian, Mark Antony – closest to Ceasar - and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus formed the second triumvirate. Octavian soon enough crowned himself Emperor Augustus after the defeat in battle of Mark Antony, supposedly besotted by Cleopatra.

We have three powerful persons in India today. They are, I need not spell their names but I will, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi. I wrote about this young man last week and named him India’s destiny. This week my reading and thoughts have been focused on Manmohan Singh – the first prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected as Prime Minister after serving a full first term.

Manmohan Singh

Now that’s where the contradiction lies. This man was never elected by standing for election. No hustings for him. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha or Upper House in 1991, 2001 and 2007. He did not win a Lokh Sabha seat. But he has been a force in India – outwardly mild and even reticent to take centre stage and often passing the mike to others at political meetings. He is modest, no two words about that and has been dubbed the weakest leader in India’s history. But he is in control with no rhetoric and less show and dash.

He appears to be mild and humble and does nothing deliberately to change the image and perception. In fact listening to him when TV news has focused on him speaking to newsmen or at both foreign and local forums, I have been impatient. I’ve wondered why he speaks so softly, so slowly, so deliberately with very little oratorical skills and less input on histrionics.

But the man is great. Even taken singly, minus the other two of the triumvirate, he is heads and shoulders above very many leaders of the subcontinent, and the South Asian Region; Asia too in fact. Where does his strength lie? Mostly in his honesty. His reputation for honesty is unparalleled in a country where a fourth of the legislature faces criminal charges or investigations. Corruption is rife. Not even a whiff of scandal like Bofors sullied him. Hence his ability to face men and matters. An article about him says: "His refusal to trumpet his achievements or play political games has endeared him to the public and given him a reputation for impartiality, which has allowed him to build consensus and should help him to implement his agenda."

The prime minister has another huge advantage, unmatched by most. He is an Oxford and Cambridge educated economist who was governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-85), served as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India (1985-87); been a successful finance minister under Prime Minster Narasimha Rao (1991-96). He has been widely credited for drastic economic reform turning the economy around to be open and market oriented, when he was finance minister.

He is also the first non-Hindu Prime Minister of India.

He was born to Gumuth Singh and Amrit Kaur in Gah, Punjab (now Pakistan) on 26 September 1932. He lost his mother when very young and was brought up by his paternal grandmother. He was a very hardworking student; as a boy studying by candlelight, permanently weakening his eyes.

During partition his family moved to Amritsar. He graduated from the Punjab University in Chandigarh in economics: BA in 1952 and MA in 1959. He earned an economics Tripos from Cambridge and completed his PhD from Oxford University. The University of Allahabad conferred a doctorate on him. He worked for UNCTAD from 1966-69 and then in the 1970s taught at the Delhi University, from where he moved to the Reserve Bank of India. He married Gursharan Kaur in 1958 and the couple have three daughters, all academics. He has had a history of heart disease, undergoing coronary bypass surgery in 1990, angioplasty in 2004 and in January 2009 another heart bypass operation.

The Indian Three

To return to the triumvirate; do they function well? Is one of them overall boss? Is the mild Singh a puppet of the head of Congress, Sonia Gandhi, who personally and almost singly-handedly wrapped the mantle of premiership across his shoulders? The answer to all these is NO. They work in tandem complementing each other. As of now Sonia Gandhi controls Congress; Singh is leader of the legislature and Rahul is busy working with the ordinary people of India, the poor and the young.

They have embarked on three major innovative steps. One is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS); the second the Right to Information (RTI); and the third being the sale of state owned enterprises - one move being deregulation of the oil industry.

The RTI is most interesting to such as me. This is how the Newsweek article on Singh explained matters in its issue of June 15. "In a country where even the trash in a government wastebasket is frequently considered classified information, the RTI is groundbreaking. Under the law, ordinary people can, for the first time, get a look at the books of the local ration shops, say, or at government departments – and see what corrupt officials have been skimming off the top, delivering to fictitious beneficiaries or just plain stealing. And because the information must be made available within 30 days or the official in charge will face immediate punishment, whistleblowers get results from RTI cases much faster than they would from India’s progressive but-slow-as-molasses legal system. "

This brings to mind two recent occurrences in Sri Lanka. One: the criminal sale of fertilizer to even persons long dead, and some officials skimming off millions as made known in MTV news recently. Another is the recent successes of public interest litigation whereby corruption of the worst order, undertaken by the highest in the land, was brought out in the open in the Supreme Court. Public interest litigation we learned from India.

I earlier quoted the question as to whether Singh was a mere puppet to Sonia, the boss. An aide to the PM has divulged that when the nuclear pact was being negotiated with the US, people were skeptical, so also Sonia Gandhi. Manmohan Singh is said to have persuaded her that it would be for the good, ending India’s isolation and making the country a much larger player in world affairs. He is reputed to have offered his resignation if she had reservations about the deal. He gets the brilliant ideas, and she approves them, of course making herself aware of all the pluses and minuses.

As analysts have reported, though the three in the triumvirate are so different from each other in age, education, religion, gender and most importantly, personality, they do have features in common which cement their compatibility. All are sensitive to the plight of the poor and prioritize giving them a better deal; so also minorities. They are minorities themselves. Sonia a Christian and foreign by birth; Singh a Sikh of the Sikh faith; and Rahul a Parsi and Kashmiri Brahmin. He is a Hindu but very interested in Buddhism. They share a loathing for fundamentalists and so their dislike of the BJP. All three are most definitely mild mannered, courteous, sensitive, even humble and show good breeding, which is innate and cannot be counterfeited.

So with this triumvirate heading India with voters having given them a resounding mandate, where else but to success and world prominence can India go, with a lessoning for sure of the weight it carries of poverty.