Former Indian Prime Minister dies at 92

Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has died at the age of 92.

Singh was one of India’s longest-serving prime ministers and was seen as the architect of key liberalizing economic reforms, as prime minister from 2004 to 2014 and before that as finance minister.

He was reportedly admitted to a hospital in the capital Delhi after his health condition deteriorated.

Singh was the first Indian leader since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after serving a full first term, and the first Sikh to hold the country’s highest office. He publicly apologized in parliament for the 1984 riots in which some 3,000 Sikhs died.

But his second term was marred by a series of corruption allegations that dogged his administration. Many say the scandals were partially responsible for his Congress party’s crushing defeat in the 2014 general elections.

Singh was born on September 26, 1932, in a desolate village in the province of Punjab, in undivided India, which lacked water and electricity.

After attending Punjab University, he earned a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and then a doctorate from Oxford.

While studying at Cambridge, the lack of funds bothered Singh, his daughter, Daman Singh, wrote in a book about her parents.

“His tuition and living expenses amounted to about £600 a year. The Panjab University scholarship gave him about £160. For the rest he had to depend on his father. Manmohan was careful to live very stingily. Subsidized meals in the canteen were relatively cheap: two shillings and sixpence.

Daman Singh remembered his father as “completely helpless in the house and could not boil an egg or turn on the television.”

Singh rose to political prominence as India’s finance minister in 1991, taking over as the country was sinking into bankruptcy.

His unexpected appointment capped a long and illustrious career as an academic and public servant: he served as an economic advisor to the government and became governor of India’s central bank.

In his inaugural speech as Minister of Finance he quoted Victor Hugo when he said that “no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

That served as the launching pad for an ambitious and unprecedented economic reform program: cutting taxes, devaluing the rupee, privatizing state-owned enterprises and encouraging foreign investment.

The economy revived, industry recovered, inflation was brought under control, and growth rates remained consistently high in the 1990s.

Manmohan Singh was a man well aware of his lack of political base. “It’s nice to be a statesman, but to be one in a democracy you first have to win elections,” he once said.

When he tried to win elections to India’s lower house in 1999, he was defeated. Instead, she sat in the upper house, elected by her own party in Congress.

The same thing happened in 2004, when Singh was first appointed prime minister after Congress president Sonia Gandhi rejected the post, apparently to protect the party from damaging attacks over its Italian origins. However, critics alleged that Sonia Gandhi was the real source of power while prime minister, and that she was never really in charge.

The biggest triumph during his first five-year term was bringing India out of nuclear isolation by signing a historic agreement guaranteeing access to American nuclear technology.

But the deal came at a price: the government’s communist allies withdrew their support after protesting against it, and Congress had to make up for lost numbers by enlisting the support of another party amid accusations of vote buying.

A consensus builder, Singh presided over a sometimes difficult, assertive and potentially fractious coalition of regional coalition allies and supporters.

Although he earned respect for his integrity and intelligence, he also had a reputation for being soft and indecisive. Some critics said the pace of reforms slowed and he failed to achieve the same momentum he had when he was finance minister.

When Singh led Congress to a second, decisive election victory in 2009, he promised that the party would “rise to the occasion.”

But the shine soon began to wear off and his second term was in the news mostly for the wrong reasons: several scandals involving his cabinet ministers that reportedly cost the country billions of dollars, a parliament deadlocked by the opposition and enormous political paralysis. which resulted in a serious economic crisis.

LK Advani, a senior leader of the rival BJP party, called Singh India’s “weakest prime minister”.

Manmohan Singh defended his record, saying his government had worked with “utmost commitment and dedication for the country and the welfare of its people”.

Singh adopted the pragmatic foreign policies followed by his two predecessors.

The peace process with Pakistan continued, although this process was hampered by attacks attributed to Pakistani militants, culminating in the Mumbai gun and bomb attack in November 2008.

He sought to end the border dispute with China, negotiating an agreement to reopen the Nathu La Pass to Tibet, which had been closed for more than 40 years.

Singh increased financial support to Afghanistan and became the first Indian leader to visit the country in almost 30 years.

He also angered many opposition politicians by appearing to end relations with India’s old ally, Iran.

A former academic and studious bureaucrat, he was known for being modest and always kept a low profile. His social media account was mainly characterized by boring posts and he had a limited number of followers.

A man of few words, his calm demeanor nevertheless earned him many admirers.

Responding to questions about a coal scandal involving the illegal allocation of licenses worth billions of dollars, he defended his silence on the issue by saying it was “better than thousands of answers”.

In 2015 he was summoned to appear in court to answer accusations of criminal association, breach of trust and crimes related to corruption. An upset Singh told reporters that he was “open to legal scrutiny” and that “the truth will prevail.”

After his tenure as prime minister, Singh remained deeply engaged on the issues of the day as a senior leader of the main opposition Congress party despite his advanced age.

In August 2020, he told the BBC in a rare interview that India needed to take three measures “immediately” to stem the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, which had pushed the country’s economy into a recession.

The government needed to provide direct cash assistance to people, make capital available to businesses and fix the financial sector, he said.

History will remember Singh for leading India out of economic and nuclear isolation, although some historians may suggest he should have retired earlier.

“Honestly, I think history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or the opposition parties in parliament,” he told an interviewer in 2014.

Singh is survived by his wife and three daughters.