The United Progressive Alliance's Common Minimum Programme (CMP) is more an exercise in balance than a vision statement of governance

As symbols go, having Manmohan Singh, academic, economist, former Governor of Reserve Bank of India, and a man still in his political adolescence despite being 71 years old is a pretty significant one. Industry sees it as a visible manifestation of the commitment of the new government, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), to free-market economics. Singh, goes the logic, is after all the man who played mid-wife to economic reform in the early 1990s when he was Finance Minister in the then Congress government. The middle class, the growing number of the educated salaried that defines public opinion but not electoral success, sees Singh as "one of us". A popular website is replete with hagiographical contributions from people who knew Singh in one of his earlier avatars. And at least one newspaper has grabbed, with both hands, the opportunity for wordplay presented by the fact that the names of the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram both abbreviate into computing terms (ms and pc, silly). In a country where the information technology industry has been the most significant success story of the past decade, that is another symbol.

In 1991, Narasimha Rao picked Singh from relative obscurity to be Finance Minister in his government. Rao, rarely given credit for India's decision to go the open-market way, a product of disastrous pr management and his penchant for overdrawn Buddha-like silences, was convinced Singh would do the right thing by the economy. He did. Between 1991 and 1996, Singh presented five budgets- he was the first Indian Finance Minister to present five successive budgets-that set the tone for most economic reforms that followed later in the decade. The Indian economy itself grew at an average rate of 5.3 per cent in these five years, nothing to justify the rapture with which some chief executives welcomed Singh's ascension to the country's top elected post (the economy grew at an average rate of 5.5 per cent between 1999 and 2004).

Circa 2004, Singh is politician first, economist later. His government is a coalition of 15 parties, and dependant on the support of the Communist Party of India, CPI, and Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI (M). With Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who refused the pm's post, Singh will have to manage the coalition and keep the communist parties happy. The United Progressive Alliance's Common Minimum Programme (CMP) is more an exercise in balance than a vision statement of governance. Its economic message is a garbled mix of free-market imperatives and welfare-state ideals (See The CMP in MBA Speak... on page 46). At a micro level, it is worryingly silent about the source of funds that will fuel some of the last.

Singh's repeated insistence that "reforms will continue" but "with a human face" seems to indicate a preference for the warmth of platitude over the cold calculus of economics. In the short term at least, that could translate into a return to a regime of subsidies, tariff protection, free handouts even economic isolationism. Leave alone the impossible mechanics of getting politicos of every conceivable economic hue from the deepest red to the brightest green to buy into necessary economic reforms, even the new government's intent to reform (and by extension, Singh's), then, is suspect.

The weakness of the free-market model that the Congress pioneered in the early 1990s, and which the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) adopted as its own over the past five years is one related to time. It takes time for the benefits to disperse geographically and across economic-classes, especially when the model has to undo the damage of half of a century of socialism, and especially when political parties-this includes Bharatiya Janata Party, the key constituent of the NDA-stand to gain more from tokenisms than from real reforms (think agriculture, labour, and power). In a democracy where the electorate gets a chance to voice its opinion every five years, a vote for change isn't surprising, not when the core election issue is one of economic development as it was in Elections 2004. BJP, alas, realised this a bit too late. If the CMP is any indication, the UPA has taken the easy way out of the reformer's dilemma. For the record, the hard way would have involved selling the change-process to the masses. Then, that spells political suicide.

Manmohan Singh is probably just the kind of Prime Minister the country needs. He is educated, cultured, and honest. The country's reaction to his rise to the pm's post also indicates that Singh is many things to many people: champion of the downtrodden, free-market messiah and proponent of developmental economics. The risk he and the country run is that in being many things to many people he ends up being nobody to no one. The economic cost of that is inconceivable.