For the record, the record books and history will show the UPA 1 and 2 governments under Manmohan Singh as one of the most dented and tainted governments, with its unique achievement being the lack of governance, as many apolitical sceptics and political critics in the opposition point out. Equally for the record, the prime minister and Congress president Sonia Gandhi is scheduled to unveil the government’s report card on its ninth anniversary later today.

The 34-page report will showcase achievements of the UPA over the last nine years.

We hazard a guess on what they might contain.

1. Making Rahul Gandhi the party vice-president and chief strategist for the next general elections. The Gandhi scion has been a backroom boy for long, meeting Kalawatis and migrant labourers from Gorakhpur, UP, on trains bound for Mumbai for far too long. From now, he will meet the real honchos – the people who matter. Like, ahem, Sonia Gandhi, his mother, the godmother of the Congress party and both god and mother of the UPA government under Manmohan Singh.

2. Making CAG a household name. While there have been CAGs, no one has been a CAG like Vinod Rai. He taught us to count (number of scams), doubt (all defence put out by the government) and hunt (for a con under every bed sheet). But what people should remember is, the basic course structure was set by the government; Rai only followed a path well laid and lit torchlights along the way.

3. Making scam a very common noun. While India had heard of cons and shams earlier, corruption lost its stiff upper-lipped twang under Manmohan Singh’s watch. Anyone, anywhere could do it – any which way. All you needed was a ministry, a minister, a sham programme and a silent prime minister; none of which were, purportedly, in short supply. So much so that some of the worthies are capable enough to write how-to bestsellers on conning: ‘Woh con hai!”

4. Intensifying India’s ties with zero. While Aryabhatta is credited with investing zero as a mathematical unit sometime around 500 AD, the UPA governments 1 and 2 can be credited with realising its full potential, and salvaging the country’s love for the figure. Okay, start counting: 10,00,00,00,00,000. That’s 1 lakh crore. Now google for a converter to get 1,85,591 crore. That’s the coal block allocation scam in figures, as reported by the CAG. The figure was Rs 1,70,000 crore for the 2G spectrum allocation scam. Now go, fetch your zeroes.

5. Making a man out of the CBI. While it came unintentionally, and quite late in the day, it did come all right. And the nation should be grateful of the Manmohan Singh government for that. Legend has it that Ashwani Kumar, lawyer, Congress old hand and the then law minister, was a little too gruff with the CBI director, till then an otherwise pliable officer named Ranjit Sinha, and showed his annoyance over language and reported typos in the draft report on the probe into the above-mentioned coal allocation scam in a none-too-polite language. Piqued, Sinha reported Kumar’s meddling to the supreme court, leading to a strict censure of the then minister’s role, and further leading to his resignation/sacking, which has not been confirmed till date. From a “caged parrot”, the CBI has suddenly transformed into a crouching, grouching tiger.

6. Making silence a viable option. While the prime minister floored everyone, including the floor itself, the roof having earlier been brought down inside parliament on the coal scam ruckus, with his passion for poetry in August this year, he has ambled on in the same vein all throughout these nine years. He has showed his passion to open his mouth only when parliament was forced to be adjourned by the opposition over scams – and a whole list of them. When it was in session, and whenever the occasion arose, the PM operated like a cell phone going on in silent mode. Asked to speak when a whole generation of youth eagerly awaited a word from the top leadership after the Delhi gangrape on December 16, 2012, PM Singh kept the mute button on for a week, before walking in front of the camera and saying: theek hai? His line of defence, operable in all seasons, never mind the crisis: “Hazaaron Jawabon Se Acchi Hai Meri Khamoshi, Na Jaane Kitne Sawaalon Ki Aabru Rakhe” (My silence is better than a thousand questions, at least it keeps the dignity of the questions). (Read the PM’s secret new year diary for more)

7. Identifying foot-in-mouth syndrome among probable ministers. Think Sushilkumar Shinde or Beni Prasad Verma or Sriprakash Jaiswal or even Salman Khurshid, and you know it’s a serious issue that has to be tackled. And the UPA has tackled it the best way it can be tackled: by unleashing them on an unwary nation and making it ready to tackle the syndrome on its own. As a people, we should thank the government for letting us reach the depth and breadth of a sense of humour, rage, concern and despair we never knew existed in us.

8. Giving birth to PJs with G and ji, and India’s newest political party of “mango people”: That came after Robert Vadra, a.k.a. damaad-ji of The G, hit the headlines after his dalliance with DLF came to the fore. In what could be deemed a big boost for the economy, more text messages with PJs (concerning a concerned damaad-ji) were sent than perhaps any time or issue in Indian political history. The son-in-law’s repartee (“mango people in banana republic”) also helped sow the seeds for anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal, who had outed Vadra’s reported jig with DLF, to launch his mango people party, or Aam Aadmi Party in Hindi.

9. Completing nine years with Manmohan Singh at the helm. If there is a singular achievement for any government, this has to be it. No one, least of all the man himself, thought it was a possibility. A Rajya Sabha member from a state he visited either for re-election or following floods and communal riots, Singh showed what tenacity was all about. With drive, doggedness and silence as his shields, what can man not achieve at the end of the day?