Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh was born on 26 September 1932 in Gah, Punjab Province, British India, a village now in Pakistan. His parents were Gurmukh Singh Kohli and Amrit Kaur, and the family were Punjabi Sikh dried fruit traders of Khatri background. His mother died when he was very young, and he was brought up by his paternal grandmother, Jamna Devi, with whom he was very close.

He first studied Urdu and Punjabi at a local gurdwara, then entered the village government primary school in 1937, continuing in Urdu medium until he was about ten. The family then moved to Peshawar, where he attended the Khalsa School and sat his matriculation in the summer of 1947. Partition that year forced the family to leave for India, settling first in Haldwani and then, in 1948, in Amritsar. Even as prime minister he wrote his Hindi speeches in the Urdu script.

In Amritsar Singh studied at Hindu College before moving to Panjab University, then based in Hoshiarpur, where he took his BA (1952) and MA (1954) in economics, standing first throughout and winning the Uttar Chand Kapur Medal. He went to St John's College, Cambridge, completing the Economics Tripos in 1957 and winning the Wright Prize (1955) and the University's Adam Smith Prize (1956). He said his teachers Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor shaped his thinking about the state, development and social equity.

In 1960 he went to Nuffield College, Oxford, for a DPhil supervised by Ian Little. His 1962 thesis on India's export performance from 1951 to 1960 became the book India's Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth.

Singh taught economics at Panjab University from 1957, rising to professor by 1963. From 1966 to 1969 he worked for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and from 1969 to 1971 he was professor of international trade at the Delhi School of Economics. Lalit Narayan Mishra brought him into government as an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Trade.

He became chief economic adviser in the Ministry of Finance in 1972 and finance secretary in 1976, worked at the Planning Commission from 1980 to 1982, and served as governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 1982 to 1985. He was deputy chairman of the Planning Commission from 1985 to 1987 and secretary general of the Geneva-based South Commission from 1987 to 1990. Returning to India, he advised Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar on economic affairs and in March 1991 became chairman of the University Grants Commission.

In June 1991 P. V. Narasimha Rao chose Singh as finance minister. Singh later told the journalist Mark Tully that he had not taken the offer seriously until Rao tracked him down and told him to get dressed for the swearing in. India faced a fiscal deficit near 8.5 per cent of GDP and foreign reserves of about one billion US dollars.

With Rao's backing and despite resistance within the Congress party, Singh abolished much of the Licence Raj, reduced state control and import duties, eased foreign direct investment and began privatising public sector firms. P. Chidambaram compared his role to that of Deng Xiaoping in China. In 1993 he offered to resign after a parliamentary report criticised his ministry over a securities scandal, but Rao refused. He was named Finance Minister of the Year by Euromoney and Asiamoney in 1993. He served until 1996.

Singh was elected to the Rajya Sabha by the Assam legislature in 1991 and re-elected in 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2013. From 1998 to 2004, during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, he was Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. His only attempt at a direct election, for South Delhi in the 1999 Lok Sabha poll, was unsuccessful. In 2019 he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan and served until he retired in April 2024, when Sonia Gandhi succeeded him.

After the 2004 general election Sonia Gandhi, chair of the United Progressive Alliance, surprised the country by naming Singh for prime minister. He was sworn in on 22 May 2004, the fourth prime minister to come from the Rajya Sabha.

His first term delivered rapid growth, peaking at about nine per cent in 2007, along with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Right to Information Act (2005), the National Rural Health Mission, value added tax, expansion of the IITs and the Unique Identification Authority (2009). After the 2008 Mumbai attacks his government created the National Investigation Agency. In foreign policy he pursued peace with Pakistan, better ties with China and the landmark civil nuclear agreement with the United States, signed in October 2008 after Left parties withdrew support and nearly toppled his government.

The UPA returned with a larger mandate in 2009 and Singh was sworn in again on 22 May 2009. India became a founding member of BRICS, and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act was enacted. His second term was dominated by allegations over 2G spectrum, the Commonwealth Games and coal block allocations; the accused in the 2G case were acquitted in 2017. He did not stand as the Congress candidate in 2014 and handed over to Narendra Modi on 26 May 2014.

Singh married Gursharan Kaur in 1958. They had three daughters: Upinder Singh, a historian and professor at Ashoka University; Daman Singh, an author; and Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a vegetarian, was attacked during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and supported the Citizens' Relief Committee. Until his death he lived at 3 Motilal Nehru Marg in New Delhi.

Singh described himself as shaped by Keynesian economics at Cambridge, where Joan Robinson argued for a strong state role in combining development with social equity and Nicholas Kaldor showed him that capitalism could be made to work. He had helped build India's planned economy before becoming the architect of its liberalisation, and as prime minister he paired market reform with rights-based welfare laws on employment, information, education and land acquisition. In 2005 he apologised in Parliament, on behalf of the Congress party, for the 1984 anti-Sikh violence.

Singh is widely remembered as the architect of India's 1991 economic liberalisation. Newsweek called him the leader other leaders love, Forbes said he was universally praised as India's best prime minister since Nehru, and Henry Kissinger called him a statesman with vision, persistence and integrity. Barack Obama wrote that he was wise, thoughtful and scrupulously honest. Critics, including L. K. Advani and, in 2013, Narendra Modi, called him weak and beholden to the Gandhi family, and Time's Asia edition labelled him an underachiever in 2012. In 2024 Modi praised his long guidance of Parliament and recalled him arriving in a wheelchair to vote.

His honours include the Wright Prize, St John's College, Cambridge (1955); the Adam Smith Prize, University of Cambridge (1956); the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour (presented 1987); Finance Minister of the Year from Euromoney and Asiamoney (1993); the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress Association (1995); the Order of King Abdulaziz, Special Class, from Saudi Arabia (2010); the World Statesman Award of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation (2010); and the Order of the Paulownia Flowers, Grand Cordon, from Japan (2014). Forbes ranked him 18th on its 2010 list of the World's Most Powerful People.

The 2019 Hindi film The Accidental Prime Minister, directed by Vijay Gutte with Anupam Kher as Singh, was based on Sanjaya Baru's 2014 memoir of the same name. The 2013 ABP News documentary series Pradhanmantri covered his tenure.

His second government faced the 2G spectrum allocation case, the Commonwealth Games scandal and a 2012 auditor's report on coal block allocations made while Singh held the coal portfolio. In April 2013 he declined to appear before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on the 2G case. All the accused in the 2G case were acquitted in 2017. He also faced criticism over national security after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Singh had several cardiac bypass operations, the last in January 2009, and was hospitalised in 2020 and twice in 2021, including with COVID-19. On 26 December 2024 he collapsed at his home in New Delhi and was taken to the emergency department of AIIMS Delhi, where he died a few hours later, aged 92. The government declared national mourning until 1 January 2025. Narendra Modi called him one of India's most distinguished leaders, and Mauritius and Bhutan flew flags at half-mast. He was cremated with full state honours at Nigam Bodh Ghat, New Delhi, on 28 December 2024, attended by President Droupadi Murmu and the King of Bhutan.