I believe it struck Manmohan Singh around mid-1993, when the enormity of the public heist of billions of rupees of public money to use government bond to boost stocks came to light. His successor, P. Chidambaram, a brilliant mind and an intuitive liberaliser who, it seemed, could tweak the woolly-headed mammoth that was India's political economy at will, came face to face with his mortality in 1997. That year, he saw the privatisation process take a near-fatal dive pushed by Communist factions in the ruling coalition. He also had to watch, slack-jawed, as his prime minister I.K. Gujral wrote off almost a similar amount in debt of the Punjab government in a thinly veiled attempt to ensure a parliamentary seat from that state for himself.
Mortality is such a sobering thing.
Because Sinha must realise that there is little he can do except become a player in a sideshow. In the past two months, the evidence of an economic slowdown has gathered momentum. Despite recent noises about privatisation of India's two state-owned airlines and a clutch of telecom operations, there is a great deal of reservation about the process. These are troubling things. And so is having to accept that earlier projections of robust macro-economic growth of 7 per cent for the year ending next March is in fact quite hollow and growth will wind up at two percentage points below.