Manmohan Singh obituary

The distinguished economist Manmohan Singh, who has died aged 92, was one of India’s longest serving prime ministers (and the first Sikh to hold the office), yet he never won a direct parliamentary election. After nearly two decades as an economic bureaucrat, Singh was often seen as more of a civil servant than a politician. Unlike India’s more charismatic leaders, he humbly admitted to being a poor public speaker. Yet, as India’s finance minister (1991-96) this unlikely politician played a crucial role in the economic reforms that led to the rapid growth of India’s GDP. Then, as prime minister from 2004, he forged a new relationship with the US, ended India’s nuclear isolation and passed groundbreaking social legislation. In all this, he was bolstered by his reputation for absolute honesty, a considerable asset in the world of Indian politics. The son of Amrit Kaur and Murmuk Singh, and one of 10 children, he was born in the village of Gah, in the North West Province of what is now Pakistan. His father dealt in dried fruit imported from Afghanistan. At partition, the family made the perilous journey through the Muslim-dominated West Punjab to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. Singh graduated from Punjab University and went on to study in the UK, at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he received a first in economics – the only student to achieve this distinction in his final year. Later he would return to Britain for a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford. At Cambridge, he was influenced by two renowned economists and socialists, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Both held Singh in high regard. Robinson, his supervisor, described him as “very quiet and gentle in manner ... [with] a determined resistance to bunkum of all kinds”. Kaldor, similarly impressed, recommended Singh to India’s finance minister for a position. Singh had other ideas: becoming first an academic before working for the UN. Eventually he ended up in India’s finance ministry. During his civil service career, including a tenure as governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-85), Singh implemented the Congress party’s leftwing economic policies. While civil servants are expected to remain impartial, Singh agreed with some government decisions, later telling his daughter Daman, a journalist and author, that nationalising India’s banks was “a good idea at the time”. Yet his own thinking – articulated decades earlier in his Oxford thesis – was essentially liberal, emphasising the importance of foreign trade and greater openness to the world economy for India’s development. Such an analysis became a virtue in 1991 when the then prime minister, Narasimha Rao, in the midst of an economic crisis, decided to accept IMF conditions for a massive loan in order to prevent India defaulting on its payments. The conditions included the end of India’s infamous web of bureaucratic controls and an across-the-board reduction of import tariffs as well as severe cuts in welfare spending and subsidies. Rao appointed the apolitical Singh as finance minister, thinking no politician would risk his future by implementing the unpopular IMF conditions. The reforms that followed were one reason for the defeat of the Congress party in 1996. While Congress was out of power, Singh was leader of the opposition in the upper house of parliament. In the 2004 election Congress, under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, widow of the assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, won enough seats to form a coalition government and she, instead of taking the role herself, nominated Singh to be prime minister. It was clear that ultimate power rested with Gandhi. However, Singh did defy her when he insisted on ratifying an agreement with the US intended to end the international ban on selling civilian nuclear equipment and technology to India. Gandhi feared opposition to the agreement would split the coalition and the government would fall. But Singh pressed ahead, pushing it through parliament by a narrow majority. His reputation for honesty was a factor in Congress’s improved performance in the 2009 general election. However, during his second term, corruption in the preparations for hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games and in the allocation of licences to run mobile phone networks (the “2G spectrum scam”) led to questions about whether Singh was tolerating dishonesty in his government. Throughout his two terms in office, Singh’s position was weakened by his dependence on the support of smaller parties in the coalition. As prime minister he made his disapproval of the plan to allocate the phone network licences clear, but the telecommunications minister was allowed to go ahead because his party threatened to pull out of the coalition. Pressure from coalition parties delayed economic reforms that Singh favoured, which would have introduced more foreign competition in banking, insurance, retail, and other businesses. He had to go slower than he wanted on privatising nationalised industries. He also had reservations about Gandhi’s pro-poor policies, which she insisted were necessary to combat the impression that the economic reforms only benefited the prosperous. In particular, he was concerned about the cost and effectiveness of a scheme guaranteeing employment to the jobless in rural India. But he did not oppose it. His former press adviser wrote of the Gandhi-Singh diarchy that “while power was delegated, authority was not”. For 20 years as a bureaucrat and more than 30 years as a politician, Singh played a vital role in India’s economic history. As a bureaucrat he was never an out-and-out socialist; as a politician he did not fall head over heels for the market. His partnership with Gandhi, and it was more of a partnership than was generally realised, kept two fractious coalition governments in power, governments that passed important social and economic legislation. But Singh did not acquire his own power base and remained a Congress party loyalist. Although he announced he would not remain India’s PM after the 2014 election, in opposition he continued to serve as a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament until April this year. Indian politics is a rough trade, and Singh was known more as a thinker than a brawler. The last decade, however, was marked by acrimonious exchanges between Singh and his successor Narendra Modi. Modi, a Hindu nationalist strongman, questioned his predecessor’s honesty in a “corrupt government” and even claimed that he had “colluded” with India’s arch-rival Pakistan. Both allegations were met by blistering denials. In return Singh was critical of his successor’s economic policies, describing Modi’s 2016 overnight decision to render worthless 86% of Indian banknotes “a case of organised loot, legalised plunder of the common people”. He also attacked Modi’s silence in 2018 when one of his party’s elected representatives was accused of raping a teenager. Singh, who came from a religious minority, was aware of the need for mutual respect in India and was appalled by Modi’s rhetoric. During this year’s Indian elections, Singh said of Modi that “no [Indian] prime minister in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary and coarse terms, meant to target either a specific section of the society or the opposition”. Singh was a transformative figure in Indian history. Not only was he the architect of India’s economic reforms, but in 2009 he became the first sitting prime minister in almost half a century to have completed a full term and seen his party re-elected with a bigger majority. He is survived by his wife, Gursharan Kaur, whom he married in 1958, and their daughters, Upinder, Daman and Amrit. • Manmohan Singh, economist and politician, born 26 September 1932; died 26 December 2024