Manmohan Singh, Overachiever? - NYTimes.com The much-discussed cover of next week's Asian edition of Time magazine caps a season of increasingly negative coverage of India's beleaguered prime minister. On the cover, a dour photograph of Manmohan Singh appears with a headline: "The Underachiever." At India Ink, we've been wondering if the cover makes exactly the wrong accusation. Is Mr. Singh's biggest flaw actually the opposite - is he an "overachiever?" Rather than under-performing as prime minister, relative to his abilities, has he been promoted beyond those abilities? A theme of the recent criticism of Mr. Singh has involved a re-assessment of his tenure as finance minister during the reforms of 1991 and beyond, which ignited the Indian economic miracle. Here's my op-ed piece on the topic a year ago in the Financial Express, an Indian business daily. While Mr. Singh was originally seen as the architect of the reforms, recent commentary has suggested that the real credit should go to the prime minister at the time, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who gave Mr. Singh the political backing he needed to make the reforms succeed. The most trenchant advocate of this revisionist view is Arvind Panagariya, a professor of international affairs and Indian political economy at Columbia University. The key difference between then and now is that, in the current government, Mr. Singh's reformist instincts (if indeed he has them) are held in check by the more popular and redistributive instincts of the head of the Indian National Congress Party, and chairwoman of the governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi. It is noteworthy that India's two major spurts of economic reform, in the early 1990s and then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were accomplished when a member of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty was not in power. The first instance was under the tenure of Mr. Rao as prime minister, and the second under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when the country was governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, currently the principal opposition. It has become evident that Mr. Singh, who was catapulted into the top job by Mrs. Gandhi, doesn't have the political savvy to exert his will on his own party's hierarchy, to say nothing of persuading recalcitrant coalition allies. How else can one explain his inability to deliver on a single major "second generation" economic reform since assuming office in 2004? To the contrary, his government's legislative agenda has been in line with Mrs. Gandhi's populist spending, harking back to the socialism of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. Under the elder Mrs. Gandhi's watch as prime minister, policies such as bank nationalization were implemented and the worst excesses of the "License-Permit Raj" choked off economic growth and ushered in an era when India was a byword for corruption and stifling bureaucracy. There's a deep structural problem at work here. In a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, it's typical for the prime minister to also be the head of the governing party. That's been the case in the past in India, and in other countries that follow a similar system, such as the United Kingdom (where it originated) and Canada. If the prime minister isn't simultaneously the party chief, as Mr. Singh is not now nor has ever been, it is tough for him or her to muster the political support to push forward a legislative or policy agenda. In effect, there are two centers of power, not one, and the result is likely to be paralysis, unless the two are moving in lockstep. The current configuration in India demonstrates precisely this danger, with the presumably reformist Mr. Singh stymied at every turn by the populism of the party leader. Mr. Singh's failure to make a successful transition from technocrat to politician should not surprise anyone. After all, he's never successfully won election to the Lok Sabha, the directly elected lower house of the Indian Parliament - in fact, he lost soundly when he ran for office in South Delhi in 1999. Mr. Singh sits in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house whose members are indirectly elected by state assemblies. This is a little like the prime minister of Britain sitting in the House of Lords, rather than the House of Commons. For better or worse, Mr. Singh has never cultivated a power base within his own party, content instead to govern rather than to rule. Some international perspective might be useful here. Mr. Singh appears to fit perfectly into the mold of a technocrat-turned-politician who's successful in the technical and politically shielded position of finance minister, especially when backed up by a powerful prime minister, but who subsequently fails to translate this success into navigating the rough and tumble of politics involved in taking the top job of prime minister. Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom and Paul Martin of Canada both fit this script perfectly. Each man was lauded as a successful finance minister, and much touted when he eventually took charge, but each left office as prime minister much diminished in stature and with little to show in terms of tangible accomplishment. Indeed, in the cases of Mr. Brown and Mr. Martin, they each led their respective political parties to resounding defeats in the next election after taking over and invariably suffered invidious comparison with their far more successful and charismatic predecessors (Tony Blair and Jean Chretien, respectively). More ominously, neither the Labour Party in Britain nor the Liberal Party in Canada has recaptured power since their departure from the political scene. Time will tell if the same unhappy fate will befall Mr. Singh and the Congress Party in 2014. Until then, the debate over whether he is an "underachiever," relative to the high hopes held out when he took office or an "overachiever" out of his depth, is sure to rage on. Vivek Dehejia is an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a writer and commentator on India. You can follow him on Twitter @vdehejia.