Ex-PM Manmohan Singh, behind India's economic reforms, dies

Manmohan Singh spent more than four decades in public service, during which he wore many hats, as central bank governor, finance minister and finally prime minister.

Singh was born in 1932 in the village of Gah, in present-day Pakistan. By the time British India was partitioned into two countries — India and Pakistan — in 1947, he and his family had moved to the Indian side of the border in Amritsar, Punjab.

Singh was a highly qualified public servant. He completed his Economic Tripos, a three-year undergraduate degree program, at the University of Cambridge, and later received his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

He began his career in academics, starting as an economics lecturer at a university and later worked with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

By the time Singh returned to India in 1969, he was a renowned economist. He started working with the Indian government and subsequently rose to key positions.

He was appointed as chief economic adviser to the government and later as the governor of India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India.

After another brief stint abroad, he returned to become the prime minister's adviser.

Liberalizing the Indian economy

Singh's moment in the sun came in 1991, when his time with politics began.

At the time, India was facing its worst economic crisis. Its foreign exchange reserves were barely enough to meet a few weeks of imports and the country was looking at a sovereign default.

P.V. Narasimha Rao, who took over as India's new prime minister in June 1991, appointed Singh to steer the Indian economy out of crisis as his finance minister.

A month after the prime minister and his cabinet were sworn in, Singh presented his first budget.

He gave a landmark speech in parliament that shifted the course of the economy. "No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come," said Singh at the time, quoting French author and politician Victor Hugo. India went from socialism and protectionism to market-based liberalization.

The reforms not only staved off an economic crisis, but they also ushered in unprecedented growth in the subsequent years that brought millions of people out of poverty and raised living standards for average Indians.

Return to power

More than a decade after his historic speech, Singh found himself in the limelight once again.

The Indian National Congress, the country's grand old party of which Singh was a member, won the 2004 parliamentary elections.

It seemed that powerful Congress leader Sonia Gandhi was set to become the prime minister. But Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, decided to not take up the highest office in the country amid political outrage over her foreign origins.

Instead, she picked Singh as prime minister.

During his tenure, he worked with several world leaders, including two US presidents. One of them was Barack Obama who, in his 2020 book "A Promised Land," described Singh as "a man of uncommon wisdom and decency."

Singh was "a self-effacing technocrat who'd won people's trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher standards of living and maintaining a well-earned reputation of not being corrupt," Obama wrote in his post-presidency memoir.

A 'weak' prime minister?

Critics have said the reason Sonia Gandhi chose Singh was because even though he had impeccable credentials, he had virtually no political power.

Never in his political career did he win a popular election. The one time he contested as a Congress candidate in the 1999 election, he lost.

From 1991 to 2019, Singh was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament elected by a state legislature where the Congress held a majority.

He simply could not pose a challenge to Gandhi, who retained real power in government.

This remained one of the biggest criticisms of Singh's premiership, which lasted from 2004 to 2014.

Singh's legacy was further marred by a series of corruption scandals.

While he was never personally implicated in any of the scandals, he was seen as lacking control of his party which was widely perceived as corrupt.

He defended his record in one of the last press conferences he gave as prime minister.

"I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister," he said. "I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the opposition in parliament.

"Given the political compulsions, I have done the best I could do," he added.

Edited by: Shamil Shams