The former Prime Minister of India died at the age of 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 credited as the architect of key liberalizing economic reforms, serving 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 deteriorated.

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

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

Singh was born on September 26, 1932, in a remote village in undivided India’s Punjab province that lacked water and electricity.

After studying at the University of the Punjab, he received an MA from the University of Cambridge, followed by a PhD from Oxford.

During his studies at Cambridge, Singh’s lack of funds troubled him, his daughter Daman Singh wrote in a book about her parents.

“His tuition and living expenses were around £600 a year. A scholarship from the Punjab University gave him about £160. For the rest, he had to depend on his father. Manmohan tried to live very sparingly. relatively cheap at two shillings and sixpence.”

Daman Singh remembered his father as “totally helpless at home and unable to boil an egg or turn on the television”.

Singh rose to political prominence as India’s finance minister in 1991, taking over when the country was on the brink of bankruptcy.

His surprise appointment capped a long and distinguished career as an academic and civil servant, serving as an economic adviser to the government and becoming the governor of India’s central bank.

In his first speech as finance minister, he quoted Victor Hugo as saying that “no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

This served as the launching pad for an ambitious and unprecedented program of economic reforms: he cut taxes, devalued the rupee, privatized state-owned companies and encouraged foreign investment.

The economy recovered, industry revived, inflation was contained, and growth rates remained consistently high throughout the 1990s.

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

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

The same thing happened in 2004, when Singh was appointed prime minister for the first time after Congress president Sonia Gandhi relinquished the post – apparently to protect the party from damaging attacks on her Italian origins. However, critics argued that Sonia Gandhi was the real source of power when he was prime minister, and that he was never truly in charge.

The biggest triumph of his first five-year term was India’s break from nuclear isolation by signing a landmark treaty to provide access to US nuclear technology.

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

A consensus builder, Singh led a coalition of sometimes difficult, assertive and potentially recalcitrant allies and supporters of the regional coalition.

Although he earned respect for his honesty and intelligence, he also had a reputation for being soft-spoken and indecisive. Some critics have argued that the pace of reform has slowed and he has failed to achieve the same momentum as finance minister.

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

But the luster soon began to wear off, and his second term was in the news mostly for the wrong reasons: several scandals involving his cabinet that allegedly cost the country billions of dollars, a parliament stalled by opposition, and massive policy paralysis that led to a major economic recession.

L. K. 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 “great commitment and dedication to the country and the welfare of its people”.

Singh adopted the pragmatic foreign policy pursued by his two predecessors.

He continued the peace process with Pakistan – although that process was hampered by attacks blamed on Pakistani militants, culminating in the November 2008 Mumbai bombings.

He tried to end a border dispute with China by reaching a deal to reopen the Nathu La Pass in 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 nearly 30 years.

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

A careful former academic and official, he was known for his reticence and always kept a low profile. His social media account was marked by mostly sad posts and had a limited number of followers.

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

Asked about the coal scandal involving the illegal allocation of billions of dollars in licences, he defended his silence on the matter, saying it was “better than thousands of answers”.

In 2015, he was summoned to court to answer charges of criminal conspiracy, breach of trust and corruption offences. An upset Singh told reporters that he was “open to legal scrutiny” and that “the truth will prevail”.

After his prime ministership, Singh remained deeply involved in 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 steps “immediately” to stem the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, which has plunged the country’s economy into recession.

The government should have provided direct cash assistance to the people, made capital available to businesses and fixed the financial sector, he said.

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

“I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the modern media or, for that matter, the opposition parties in parliament,” he said in a 2014 interview.

Singh is survived by his wife and three daughters.