Manmohan Singh
Manmohan Singh opened the Indian economy as finance minister and then governed for ten years as a prime minister who had never won a constituency. He was a Sikh born in what became Pakistan, an economist trained at Cambridge and Oxford, and had been chief economic adviser, governor of the central bank and head of the planning commission before entering politics at all. In 1991, with three weeks of foreign exchange left and the gold reserves flown to London as collateral, he dismantled the licensing system, devalued the rupee, cut tariffs and opened Indian industry to foreign investment. He became prime minister in 2004 because Sonia Gandhi, whose party had won, declined the office and named him. He sat in the upper house throughout, having lost the only direct election he contested. The arrangement gave him authority he had not sought and a party leadership he did not hold, and it defined how his government worked. Growth averaged near eight per cent across his first term. His government legislated a right to information, a rural employment guarantee that gave a hundred days of paid work to any household that asked, and a forest rights act. He staked his government on the civil nuclear agreement with the United States in 2008, survived the confidence vote when the left parties withdrew, and ended three decades of nuclear isolation. His second term was consumed by corruption cases in telecommunications and coal licensing, and by an anti-corruption movement in the streets. He was not accused of taking anything himself. He was accused of silence, and answered that history would be kinder to him than the press. He died in 2024, and the successor who had campaigned against his record attended the funeral.
- Lived: 1932 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
