He was called Sonia Gandhi’s rubber stamp. Tales were exchanged about how he informed her of cabinet decisions. The party set-up behaved formally with him, tolerating him as a prime minister, never a political leader.
Yet, the scholar-politician-statesman achieved a lot. If he complained, he never let anybody know. He had an endearing smile he would occasionally break into — a rare exhibition of emotion. Staunchly secular and a true patriot, he reserved his displeasure for the unabashed Hindutva bandied about across the country after 2014. He had his principles, and nothing would make him move an inch.
Singh fled to India during Partition. After graduating from Panjab University, he read economics at Cambridge and Oxford. He could have stayed in a cushy teaching or research job, but he preferred returning to India and taking up a lecturer’s post at Panjab University.
Gradually, he was drawn into institutions linked to the government before finally entering the finance ministry for the first time in 1972. From there, it was a natural step to the Planning Commission, the Reserve Bank of India and the South Commission.
His economic crusades laid the foundation for a transformed India into a world market dotted by unicorn startups and an ever-expanding entrepreneurial space, a stock market touching the skies, a stature in the comity of nations that is not easily ignored, the growing size of rupee-millionaires and billionaires, and, of course, achieving the status of the fastest growing fifth-largest economy that rivals the first world. Yes, the resulting capitalist push made Indians aspirational while inevitably widening the economic disparities between population groups.
From near-bankruptcy to monumental growth, Manmohan Singh made it all possible. Silently.
