By Alan Cowell     

Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken and cerebral former Indian prime minister who was credited with far-reaching changes that propelled his country’s emergence as an economic powerhouse able to compete with China, died Thursday (26) in New Delhi. He was 92.

His death was announced in a statement by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the hospital where he died. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also announced the death on the social platform X, in which he called Singh one of India’s “most distinguished leaders”.

With his trademark powder-blue turban, Singh was the first Indian prime minister from the country’s small Sikh minority, which is concentrated in the northern state of Punjab.

Born in what is now Pakistan, he belonged to a generation whose early lives were moulded by the mass migrations that followed partition as India won independence in 1947 — the precursor to many tortured decades of ethnic, religious and regional conflicts punctuated by the assassinations of political leaders.

Such was his fabled reticence that he gave only a handful of news conferences, even as the economy slowed and his government became mired in accusations of scandals related to the allocation of cellphone licences and coal fields.

Singh came to public prominence in 1991 when, as finance minister and a former governor of India’s central bank, he oversaw changes that set his vast, turbulent nation of more than 1.1 billion people on a path toward becoming a regional economic dynamo. The changes fuelled a huge expansion in white-collar prosperity in a country that nonetheless continued to struggle with extreme poverty.

As a prime minister of coalition governments from 2004 to 2014, he held office in the world’s most populous democracy with the crucial support of the political party created by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the founders of modern India.

At the time Singh came to power, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (and no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), headed the powerful Indian Congress Party, which won a surprise victory in the 2004 elections over the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Defying expectations that she would assume a top office, Sonia Gandhi declined the role of prime minister, citing fears that her non-Indian roots would provoke opposition. But she maintained her position as head of the Congress Party while Singh became prime minister, drawing criticism that he was little more than a placeholder for her son, Rahul Gandhi.

Sonia Gandhi cast the appointment in a different light.

“Manmohan Singh became prime minister at a time when the country was on the edge, when its collective nerves were frayed and when its secular fabric was under assault,” she said in late 2018. “Within months, his persona and policies had a profound calming effect. The country once again had the assurance that the man at the very top was not a divisive person, that no group or individual need feel insecure.”

Once in office, Singh pressed forward with attempts at reconciliation with Pakistan, which, like India, was a nuclear-armed regional player with ambitions for more influence and a visceral suspicion of its neighbour. Those efforts came under severe strain when terrorists from a Pakistan-based jihadi movement, Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched a three-day assault on targets in Mumbai, India, in 2008 that killed 171 people.

The onslaught was the bloodiest and most sustained in a string of attacks that had begun six months earlier in Indian cities, and it exposed Singh to charges that his administration had been ineffective against terrorism.

As the Mumbai attacks unfolded, Singh’s main political adversary, Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat state, was quick to denounce the prime minister’s attempt to calm the nation with promises to get tough on Pakistan and to “strengthen the hand of our police and intelligence authorities”.  Modi, a Hindu nationalist, eventually succeeded Singh as prime minister.

Tensions between India and Pakistan, which had fought three wars and remained at loggerheads over the disputed border territory of Kashmir, rose again after the Mumbai attacks.

Despite the crisis, the Congress Party triumphed again in 2009, and Singh received a second term. But during that period, he grew remote.

“Great leaders, even moderately good ones, are willed to action in times of crisis,” Vaibhav Vats, an author and journalist based in New Delhi, wrote in The New York Times in early 2014. “Mr. Singh retreated into a perplexing and imperturbable silence.”

In 2014, he announced that he would not run for a third term. “History will judge me more kindly than the contemporary media,” he said at the time.

Manmohan Singh was born on Sept. 26, 1932, in the village of Gah, which is now in Pakistan. His mother, Amrit Kaur, died when he was a child, and he was raised by the family of his father, Gurmuk Singh.

Manmohan Singh married Gursharan Kaur in 1958. They had three daughters: Upinder Singh, Daman Singh and Amrit Singh. He is survived by his wife and daughters.

He studied at Hindu College and Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, and went on to St. John’s College at Cambridge in 1957. In 1960, he started a doctoral thesis at Nuffield College, Oxford that explored India’s export performance in the 1950s.

After a stint with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Singh taught international trade at the University of New Delhi. He began his career in public policy in 1972 as chief economic adviser in the Finance Ministry. He became governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, in 1982.

In June 1991 — to his surprise, he said — he was appointed finance minister by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who took office after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi as India seemed on the verge of economic collapse.

Singh’s appointment was regarded as an unconventional choice. His policies broke from the mould in a country with a centralized economy, permitting a degree of deregulation and opening India up to foreign investment. One government minister once called him the Deng Xiaoping of India, referring to the Chinese leader who unleashed his country’s economic might.

Singh was prime minister when India became a founding member in 2009 of the so-called BRICS group: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which joined in 2010. The founding of the group was widely seen as a display of emergent economic muscle.

Singh was never elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, but had been a member of the upper Rajya Sabha since 1991. His arrival as a technocrat prime minister in 2004 was seen by many Indians as a break with entrenched corruption among the political and business classes.

By 2007, India had one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, at 9% a year.

During Singh’s tenure, India signed a deal with Washington that ended a moratorium on nuclear trade; improved its relations with Israel and China, its rival as Asia’s leading powerhouse; and supported the government of Afghanistan with financial aid, enhancing India’s regional standing.

When he first came to office in 2004, Singh seemed bent on resolving the festering dispute over Kashmir, which had been divided at independence into areas controlled by predominantly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan. At the time, a deal seemed possible with Pakistan, which was led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a Muslim born in New Delhi who, like Singh, was a child of partition. But the divisions never healed.

In May 2009, the Indian National Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, pulled off another surprise in national elections, scoring its best result in 25 years and putting itself in a position to shed its troublesome coalition partners, notably India’s Communist parties. The victory was ascribed by Singh’s critics in large part to Gandhi’s dominant role in the political manoeuvrings that underpinned his premiership.

Where he had once been depicted by supporters as erudite and decisive, he was now ridiculed by his critics as weak and ineffective. India’s growth had eased; rural poverty persisted; and the country faced newer challenges, such as the riots and protests that followed the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in 2012.

Singh announced his resignation before the 2014 elections.

After his party’s defeat that year, Singh returned to academia as a professor at his alma mater, Panjab University. He continued to sound warnings about where India was headed under its new, Hindu nationalist government.

In April 2018, he declared in a lecture at Panjab, “We need to ask ourselves whether we are losing patience with democracy and turning to more authoritarian alternatives that may well yield superior short-term results but in the long term will end up destroying our country and all the achievements of the last 70 years.”

-New York Times