Manmohan Singh is the biggest success in PM's office!

Statistics can often be stranger than fiction.

• How shall we define ‘political success’? By the fact of ‘re-election to the office’.
• The ‘biggest’ political success can be defined as re-election to office by the ‘largest increase in mandate’.

If a politician gets re-elected with the largest increase in his mandate, that should, incontrovertibly, allow him to claim the mantle of 'being the most successful'.

Who can claim to be India’s most successful prime minister?

1. Jawaharlal Nehru - Although he got re-elected more than once, he did not appreciably increase his (already awesome) mandate over his respective previous tenures.
2. Indira Gandhi - She got re-elected after she cut short her tenure in 1971, but added only 36% (from 259 in 1967 to 352 seats) to her previous mandate.
3. Atal Bihari Vajpayee - He got re-elected in 1999, but the BJP’s numbers in parliament hardly budged.
4. Manmohan Singh - He got re-elected in 2009 by increasing his previous mandate of 2004 by a gravity-defying 45% (from 141 to 206 seats).

Manmohan Singh, widely described as India’s weakest prime minister, but who, on cold quantitative statistics, can justifiably claim to be the biggest success in that office! 

The spectacular Lok Sabha polls of 2009

• Congress swept urban areas. (7 out of 7 in Delhi and 5 out the 5 it contested in Mumbai)
• With 21 seats, Congress was the second-largest party in Uttar Pradesh after SP(23) and ahead of BSP(20) and more than double of BJP’s tally of 10. 
• Both the contending alliances, UPA and BJP, had declared prime ministerial candidates – Manmohan Singh and LK Advani .
• The communists collapsed from 59 seats to 24.
• Obvious analyses for the Congress’ amazing re-election in 2009 was (i) the three continuous years of 9% -plus GDP growth, (ii) farm loan waiver just before the voting and (iii) people simply loved Manmohan Singh’s act of political defiance over the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal. They saw in him a status quo defying politician who could herald change on a massive scale.
• Very few understood, or cared, about the nuclear nuance. What they latched on to was Singh’s ability to stand up to blackmail in the pursuit of modernity and change.
• In July 2008 left coalition partners saw red over the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Agreement, and withdrew support in parliament, pushing the government into a minority. He sought a vote of confidence in parliament for his minority government. Some deft political management saw the Congress get new allies on board supported the government. When the vote was counted Singh had won 275-256. His beaming face and exultant V wave became Singh’s political signature for the 2009 polls; across the country, he was feted as ‘Singh is King’.
• Congress misread its mandate and harked back to the stasis of garibi hatao (poverty) politics, handing a neat walk-over to Narendra Modi in 2014, who instinctively understood the political message of 2009 better than the victors themselves.

We will vote you in, provided you can deliver real and discontinuous change to us. We were promised this in 2009, and again in 2014. But we were let down by both Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. So for 2019, please go to your drawing boards and figure it out!

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