India mourns former PM Manmohan Singh

India’s two major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in government, and the Indian National Congress (INC) which is the main opposition party, had mourned the death of former prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, who passed away on Thursday night, and who was cremated with state honours on Saturday.

The BJP and the Congress are bitter ideological rivals. Singh was a member of the Congress ever since he became finance minister in 1991. He was the prime minister of a Congress-led coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), from 2004 to 2014.

Singh has been the prime mover as finance minister for opening up the Indian economy in 1991 when the country was facing an acute balance-of-payments crisis in the wake of the Gulf War in January, 1991. The economic reforms in India had set the path for the country’s rapid growth in terms of increased foreign direct investment (FDI) and the emergence of a large middle class with the money power to spend. Singh in his tenure as prime minister had achieved a major breakthrough in its strategic status in the global balance of power through the India-US Civil Nuclear Deal in 2006. Until then India was denied technology by advanced economies like the US and European Union (EU).

Singh was strongly criticised by the BJP when it was in the opposition, in 1991 when he was finance minister and in 2004 when he became prime minister. His 1991 reforms package was criticised as weakening India’s economic sovereignty. And during his prime ministerial tenure he was sharply under attack for being a weak leader because it was said that the real strings of power were pulled by then Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

It was Sonia Gandhi as leader of the Congress who chose Singh to lead the Congress-led coalition government. Singh was also blamed for the many corruption scandals that broke out during his second term in office as prime minister from 2009 to 2014. Political observers also credited Singh as the reason for Congress’ return to power in 2009 with a better tally than it had since the 1984 election.

In the bitter ideological battles between Congress and the BJP, Singh stood above the fray as it were. His intellectual competency and his honesty and humility remained unassailable. And it is these qualities that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has highlighted in his tribute to Singh. The Congress party has hailed him for his personal integrity, and it has made him into a party icon. It is a rare achievement for a non-politician like Singh to find a place of honour across party lines.

Singh had also the distinction of being a Sikh, one of India’s religious minorities. He was never involved in the Sikh politics of the state of Punjab. But he was a practising Sikh. It embellished the modern Indian democratic spirit of accommodating religious minorities though he was not inducted by the Congress party for being a Sikh but for his credentials as an economist. What stands out about Singh’s political record is that he never referred to his religious identity as a marker. He was chosen as prime minister in 2004 because he was the least political person with immaculate credentials of honesty and for not being political ambitious. He stood above the factional intra-party feuding of the century-old Congress party.

Singh’s credentials as an economist were recognized by world leaders when the 2008-09 financial crisis broke out, and then British prime minister Gordon Brown acknowledged Singh’s wise counsel. But through his years in power, Singh remained a low-profile leader both at home and abroad because such was the man. His fellow-economists have pointed out that he was not a theorist but a doer. And he showed his skills in implementing policy first as finance minister and then as prime minister.