Manmohan Singh, Indian PM who presided over dynamic change

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Former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, the soft-spoken Oxford-educated economist whose financial reforms helped transform his struggling, poverty-stricken nation into an emerging power but whose second term was tainted by allegations of rampant corruption within his government, died Dec. 26 at a hospital in New Delhi. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which did not provide a specific cause in its statement.

The blue-turbaned Sikh with the cerebral image and oversize glasses became a household name in the 1990s when, as finance minister, he promoted India’s economic liberalization by quoting Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

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Singh’s dramatic rise to prime minister at age 71, in May 2004, followed a decision by the leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, to turn down the job – one that was hers for the asking. Bowing to the wishes of the Italian-born Gandhi, party lawmakers unanimously elected Singh, a technocrat who had held top economic policymaking jobs and had worked for the International Monetary Fund.

Singh took power during one of the most dynamic chapters in India’s postcolonial history. His leadership marked a new era in India-U.S. relations, which warmed significantly with the signing of a historic nuclear-energy deal initiated in 2005, during the George W. Bush administration.

During those years, Washington and New Delhi formed a robust partnership against terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan and in favor of trade and people-to-people contacts, an alliance that President Barack Obama called “one of the defining relationships” of the 21st century.

During his second term, Singh’s reputation for probity was undermined by accusations against his administration. A group of anti-corruption activists – who became national celebrities – attempted to expose a variety of governmental wrongdoing, including shady land deals and waste and corruption in the allocation of coal-mining concessions. The activists alleged that a nexus of corruption existed between India’s top politicians and its richest business leaders.

Still, Singh was praised by Washington for exercising restraint against neighboring Pakistan, a rival nuclear power, after attacks in Mumbai by 10 gunmen from Pakistan killed 166 people in November 2008.

Opposing Indian political parties, however, excoriated Singh as capitulating to Pakistan. He was accused of failing to strike back after a string of terrorist attacks on Indian cities in the months before the three-day rampage in Mumbai, the nation’s financial capital.

Before the Mumbai attacks, Singh was close to negotiating a historic deal with then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. Singh believed that differences over Kashmir had to be resolved if India was to achieve its economic aspirations.

The negotiations, perhaps the closest that India and Pakistan ever came to resolving one of Asia’s most explosive and enduring disputes, fell apart at the last minute.

Singh’s government also struggled with domestic criticism over a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at ending a seemingly endless internal uprising by Maoist rebels, also known as Naxalites, who had a presence in 20 of India’s 28 states.

The only Sikh to hold India’s top job, Singh won reelection in 2009, becoming one of two Indian prime ministers, alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, returned to power after completing a full five-year term. (Narendra Modi would become the third.) But in 2014, Singh announced that he would not seek another.

By the 2014 national elections, Singh’s Congress party – which had dominated Indian politics since the partition of the British-ruled subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 – was mired in allegations of graft and complaints about skyrocketing inflation.

The party was swept aside by the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Modi, a social media-savvy Hindu nationalist whose promise of creating jobs and fighting corruption electrified a generation of younger Indians.

After leaving office, the reticent Singh retreated further from public view. But he was the subject of an aide’s tell-all memoir and a subsequent Bollywood film, “The Accidental Prime Minister,” which fed his public image as a principled but ultimately powerless man, overruled and outflanked by his own party.

“It seemed to me,” wrote the adviser, Sanjaya Baru, “he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others.”

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Reading by kerosene lamp

Manmohan Singh, one of 10 siblings, was born Sept. 26, 1932, in a colonial-era Punjabi farming village in what is now Pakistan. His father ran a small dried-fruit shop. After his mother’s death, he was raised by his paternal grandmother. Singh often said he healed his pain by plunging into schoolwork.

In April 2010, his government enacted the landmark Right to Education Act, making education a basic right. In an unusually emotional national address, Singh said he had studied by kerosene-lamp light because his village did not have electricity.

“I read under the dim light of a kerosene lamp,” he said, his typically faint voice becoming animated. “I am what I am today because of education.”

After partition, the family migrated to Amritsar, India. Singh studied economics in India before heading to Cambridge and then Oxford, where he was famously antisocial and more likely to be found in a library than in a pub. His doctoral thesis, “India’s Export Performance, 1951-1960, Export Prospects and Policy Implications,” was later published as a book.

In 1991, when Singh became the finance minister, India’s economy was on the verge of collapse. But he soon began dismantling the socialist-era system of business permits, known as the “license raj,” and a labyrinth of import restrictions, earning praise from investors.

By 2007, India had achieved its highest GDP growth rate, 9 percent, and had become the second-fastest-growing major economy in the world, after China.

Singh was a champion of globalization and believed that India’s vast pool of skilled labor, along with its textiles, spices and gems, could relieve its poverty if the nation linked hands with the world’s markets.

Singh described the new government’s approach as “economic reforms with an emphasis on the human element.” He was eager to reassure India’s vast number of working poor that the government would work carefully to sell off public-sector industries that were (and remain) a stable source of jobs in a country of 1.2 billion (now more than 1.4 billion).

In his first Independence Day speech after assuming power, Singh said in his trademark self-effacing style that he had no promises to make, “only promises to keep.”

Still, political pundits often said that he was too methodical for the intrigue and intensity of Indian politics.

With his simple clothing and schoolteacher-chunky black shoes, he led a frugal life when many Indian leaders were infamous for fancy clothing and frequent meals at five-star hotels.

At first, Singh’s low-profile background was his biggest asset, and his name did not figure in any corruption scandals. But during his second term, the respect he commanded gave way to widespread ridicule in the Indian media and among ordinary Indians, who accused him of ignoring corruption within his government and operating as an ineffective proxy for the powerful Gandhi family.

At times, questions about his health hovered in the background. Singh underwent multiple coronary bypass surgeries. He is survived by his wife, Gursharan Kaur, and their three daughters.

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The nuclear deal

Singh faced one of the biggest political battles of his career when he tried to implement an initiative that he hoped would transform India in the 21st century: a nuclear-energy agreement with the United States.

The agreement would give India access to nuclear fuel and technology, even though the nation had not (and still has not) signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

For months, the deal was nearing collapse. Critics said it would erode India’s sovereignty, tying the country to U.S. strategic interests and surrendering its right to conduct nuclear tests. The country’s communist parties called Singh a stooge of the United States.

Singh was defiant, staking his reputation on the deal. He argued that it was crucial to achieving energy security for the power-starved economy.

Critics said his presentation of the nuclear deal failed to explain the benefits to a country where remnants of Cold War-era anti-Americanism remained.

The deal threatened to topple Singh’s government, which survived a confidence vote in Parliament in July 2008 by patching together regional parties as part of a coalition.

The most crucial show of support came from his party’s heir apparent, 38-year-old Rahul Gandhi.

Gandhi said “you need guts” to push the agreement despite the opposition. “I appreciate it,” he said. “I would tell [Singh] to take the risk again, again and again. That is leadership.”

In a 2006 interview with public television host Charlie Rose, Singh explained his hopes for his country.

“India has aspirations of getting out of its poverty, ignorance and disease, which still afflict millions of people,” he said. “Nowhere else will you find a country of India’s diversity, of India’s complexity, 1 billion people trying to seek their social and economic salvation in the framework of democracy, in the framework of an open economy. I sincerely believe what happens in India has, I think, lessons, morals for a future evolution of humankind in the 21st century.”

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