Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh (26 September 1932 – 26 December 2024) was an Indian economist, bureaucrat, academician and politician who served as the prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014. He was the fourth longest-serving prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Narendra Modi. A member of the Indian National Congress, Singh was the first and remains the only Sikh prime minister of India. He was also the first prime minister since Nehru to be re-appointed after completing a full five-year term.

Born in Gah in what is today Pakistan, Singh's family migrated to India during its partition in 1947. After obtaining his doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford, Singh worked for the United Nations during 1966–1969. He subsequently began his bureaucratic career when Lalit Narayan Mishra hired him as an advisor in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. During the 1970s and 1980s, Singh held several key posts in the Government of India, such as Chief Economic Advisor (1972–1976), governor of the Reserve Bank (1982–1985) and head of the NITI Aayog (erstwhile, Planning Commission) (1985–1987)

In 1991, under prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, Singh was appointed as finance minister. Over the next few years, despite strong opposition, he carried out several structural reforms that liberalised India's economy. It enhanced Singh's reputation globally as a leading reform-minded economist. Subsequently, Singh was leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Parliament of India) during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government of 1998–2004.

In 2004, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly relinquished the prime ministership to Singh. His first ministry executed several key legislations and projects, including the National Rural Health Mission, Unique Identification Authority, Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and Right to Information Act. In 2008, opposition to a historic civil nuclear agreement with the United States nearly caused Singh's government to fall after Left Front parties withdrew their support. The 2009 general election saw the UPA return with an increased mandate, with Singh retaining the office of prime minister. In 2009, BRICS was established with India as one of the founding members. His coalition's second term was marked by political scandals.

Singh was born to Gurmukh Singh Kohli and Amrit Kaur on 26 September 1932, in Gah, Punjab, British India, into a family of Punjabi Sikh dried fruit traders of Khatri background. His mother died when he was very young. He was raised by his paternal grandmother Jamna Devi, with whom he was very close.

Singh was initially educated at a local gurdwara, where he began studying Urdu and Punjabi. On 17 April 1937, he was enrolled in the local Government Primary School, where he continued his Urdu-medium education until the age of 10 (Class 4), after which he and his family moved to Peshawar. There, Singh was enrolled in the upper-primary Khalsa School. He sat for his matriculation examination in the summer of 1947. Even as prime minister years later, Singh wrote his apparently Hindi speeches in the Urdu script, although sometimes he would also use Gurmukhi, a script used to write Punjabi, his mother tongue.

After the Partition of India, his family migrated to Haldwani, India. In 1948 they relocated to Amritsar, where he studied at Hindu College, Amritsar. He attended Panjab University, then in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, studying Economics and got his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1952 and 1954, respectively, standing first throughout his academic career. He completed his Economics Tripos at University of Cambridge in 1957. He was a member of St John's College.

In a 2005 interview with the British journalist Mark Tully, Singh said about his Cambridge days:

After completing his D.Phil., Singh returned to India. He was a senior lecturer of economics at Panjab University from 1957 to 1959. During 1959 and 1963, he served as a reader in economics at Panjab University, and from 1963 to 1965, he was an economics professor there. Then he went to work for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1966 to 1969. Later, he was appointed as an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Trade by Lalit Narayan Mishra, in recognition of Singh's talent as an economist.

From 1969 to 1971, Singh was a professor of international trade at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

In 1972, Singh was chief economic adviser in the Ministry of Finance, and in 1976 he was secretary in the Finance Ministry. In 1980–1982 he was at the Planning Commission, and in 1982, he was appointed governor of the Reserve Bank of India under then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and held the post until 1985. He went on to become the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (India) from 1985 to 1987. Following his tenure at the Planning Commission, he was secretary general of the South Commission, an independent economic policy think tank headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland from 1987 to November 1990.

Singh returned to India from Geneva in November 1990 and held the post as the advisor to Prime Minister of India on economic affairs during the tenure of Chandra Shekar. In March 1991, he became chairman of the University Grants Commission.

In June 1991, India's prime minister at the time, P. V. Narasimha Rao, chose Singh to be his finance minister. Singh told Mark Tully, a British journalist, in 2005:

On the day (Rao) was formulating his cabinet, he sent his Principal Secretary to me saying, "The PM would like you to become the Minister of Finance". I didn't take it seriously. He eventually tracked me down the next morning, rather angry, and demanded that I get dressed up and come to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the swearing in. So that's how I started in politics[.]

In 1991, India's fiscal deficit was close to 8.5 per cent of the gross domestic product, the balance of payments deficit was huge and the current account deficit was close to 3.5 per cent of India's GDP. India's foreign reserves barely amounted to US$1 billion, enough to pay for 2 weeks of imports, in comparison to US$600 billion in 2009.

Singh explained to the PM and the party that India is facing an unprecedented crisis. However the rank and file of the party resisted deregulation. So P. Chidambaram and Singh explained to the party that the economy would collapse if it was not deregulated. To the dismay of the party, Rao allowed Singh to deregulate the Indian economy.

Subsequently, Singh, who had thus far been one of the most influential architects of India's socialist economy, eliminated the license raj (which inhibited the prosperity of private businesses), reduced state control of the economy, and reduced import taxes. Rao and Singh thus implemented policies to open up the economy and change India's socialist economy to a more capitalistic one. They removed many obstacles standing in the way of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and initiated the process of the privatisation of public sector companies. However, in spite of these reforms, Rao's government was voted out in 1996 due to non-performance of government in other areas. In praise of Singh's work that pushed India towards a market economy, long-time cabinet minister P. Chidambaram has compared Singh's role in India's reforms to Deng Xiaoping's in China.

In 1993, Singh offered his resignation from the post of Finance Minister after a parliamentary investigation report criticised his ministry for not being able to anticipate a US$1.8 billion 1992 securities scandal. Prime Minister Rao refused Singh's resignation, instead promising to punish the individuals directly accused in the scandal.

Singh was first elected to the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, in 1991 by the legislature of the state of Assam, and was re-elected in 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2013. From 1998 to 2004, while the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power, Singh was the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. In 1999, he contested for the Lok Sabha from South Delhi but was unable to win the seat.

After the 2004 general elections, the Indian National Congress ended the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA) tenure by becoming the political party with the single largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha. It formed United Progressive Alliance (UPA) with allies and staked claim to form government. In a surprise move, Chairperson Sonia Gandhi declared Manmohan Singh, a technocrat, as the UPA candidate for the prime ministership. Despite the fact that Singh had never won a direct popular election, according to the BBC, he "enjoyed massive popular support, not least because he was seen by many as a clean politician untouched by the taint of corruption that has run through many Indian administrations." He took the oath as the prime minister of India on 22 May 2004. Singh was the fourth PM to be from the Rajya Sabha, following Indira Gandhi (January 1966 - March 1967), H. D. Deve Gowda (June 1996 - April 1997) and Inder Kumar Gujral (April 1997- March 1998).