India’s former PM Manmohan Singh dies aged 92

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 on Thursday (Dec 26) in New Delhi. He was 92.

India on Friday announced seven days of state mourning, and he will also be accorded a state funeral.

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.

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 towards 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 prime minister, 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.

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Despite the crisis, the Congress Party triumphed again in 2009, and Singh received a second term. But during that period, he grew remote. In 2014, he announced that he would not run for a third term.

Manmohan Singh was born on Sep 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. He won scholarships to attend both Cambridge, where he obtained a first in economics, and Oxford, where he completed his PhD.

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.