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Summary
Slogans and swagger of everyday politics were not for him.
In his parting speech as prime minister, Manmohan Singh hoped that history would judge him more kindly. He was right; he usually was, for this was a man who measured his words by the precision of facts and figures, not the wild claims of political theatre. Those of us who came of age in the 1990s and after, who found careers in industries that barely existed before he wielded his pen across the licence raj, know this more intimately than most.
Not for him were the slogans and swagger of everyday politics. He had a job on hand: To pull India out of its economic dark age into the modern world. The seeds of that transformation were sown on 24 July 1991, when the former professor of international trade stood before Parliament and borrowed from Victor Hugo: "No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. India is now wide awake."
Partition to Parliament
The life that produced that moment was itself a story of improbable journeys. Born in Gah, a village in Punjab now across the border in Pakistan, into a family of dried fruit traders, Singh lost his mother young and was raised by his paternal grandmother. When the Partition tore the subcontinent apart in 1947, the family fled to Amritsar. He was fifteen.
That rupture sharpened his resolve. He earned his economics degrees from Panjab University, then won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a First in economics. Among his teachers were Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, who pulled him in opposite directions. Robinson believed the state had to play an activist role if development was to coexist with equity. Kaldor argued that capitalism, properly managed, could be made to work. Between these poles, Singh fashioned the ability to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously and still act.
He then went to Oxford’s Nuffield College, where his 1962 doctoral thesis, and the book that followed, India’s Export Trends and the Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth, argued that India’s inward-looking trade policy was a trap. Three decades passed before he could spring it.
The intervening years were spent accumulating experience and the trust of power. He served the UN Conference on Trade and Development from 1966 to 1969, taught at the Delhi School of Economics, and then entered government as chief economic adviser in 1972. He became the governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1982, a post in which he clashed with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee over the government’s overreach into RBI’s domain.
The experiences he gathered came in handy when, in 1991, Narasimha Rao chose him as finance minister. Working alongside stalwarts like P. Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Singh devalued the rupee, slashed import duties, dismantled the labyrinthine licensing system that had turned entrepreneurship into a bureaucratic endurance test, and opened the door to foreign investment. A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates the reforms added over a trillion dollars to India's economy in the nine years that followed.
And to the prime ministerhip
His work done, this quiet man, slight in frame and with those deep-set eyes suggesting perpetual contemplation, would have happily returned to a life of reading and writing. But in 2004, Sonia Gandhi declined the prime ministership and handed it to him instead.
For the next five years, India grew at over 9%, faster than at almost any point in its history, while he delivered the Right to Information Act and the rural employment guarantee scheme. Even in his more embattled second—when his government was hit by corruption scandals, many later found to be fabricated or inflated—he drove forward the Aadhaar identity system.
The years in power were not an easy time for him. Sanjaya Baru recounts in his 2014 memoir, The Accidental Prime Minister, that Singh offered him the job with the words: “I know I will be isolated from the outside world. I want you to be my eyes and ears.” It was a remark that captured the loneliness of a technocrat navigating coalition politics.
And yet, beneath his surface diffidence, there was always a wit that high office prevented him from displaying freely. It surfaced memorably in Parliament in 2011 when the opposition leader Sushma Swaraj threw Shahab Jafri’s verse at him: “Tu idhar udhar ki na baat kar, yeh bata ki kafila kyun luta” (Don’t deflect; tell us why the caravan was looted). Singh replied with Allama Iqbal: “Maana ki teri deed ke kaabil nahin hoon main, tu mera shauq dekh, mera intezaar dekh” (Granted I am not worthy of your gaze; but look at my passion; look at my waiting).
Singh’s personal life was a rebuke to the acquisitive norms of public office. He lived simply, accumulated nothing, and shunned the limelight. His three daughters—Upinder, a distinguished historian; Amrit, a civil liberties lawyer; and Daman, a novelist—built careers on scholarship and merit alone.
Manmohan Singh died on 26 December 2024, aged 92. For those of us whose ambitions were made possible by the India he built, the debt is real. He did not seek our gratitude, only our understanding. That, perhaps, is why it feels so important to offer it now.
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