A tribute to Manmohan Singh, India's former Prime Minister, focusing on his legacy as the symbol of hope and economic progress for a generation of Indians. The article highlights his role in opening up the Indian economy, alleviating poverty, and inspiring a belief in the potential of a market-driven society.
Manmohan Singh was the face of India ’s transformation. As finance minister in the early 1990s, and from 2004 as its prime minister for a decade, his reforms loosened excessive state controls, opened up the economy, pulled millions out of poverty and made the West accept the nuclear-armed nation as an ally. Or at least, that’s how his legacy will be remembered globally. But to my generation of India ns, Singh, who died in a New Delhi hospital, was above everything else the embodiment of hope.
He instilled in us a strong belief that a market economy would work. Not just for a tiny elite in New Delhi and Mumbai, but for a majority scattered across smaller towns and villages, battling against overwhelming odds of economic and educational poverty and social discrimination.His own story gave us confidence. A 15-year-old Sikh refugee boy in newly independent India, whose family had fled from Pakistan during the subcontinent’s 1947 partition, he went on to study economics at Oxford and Cambridge and built an impressive career as a top technocrat. Singh and his colleagues were able to convince us that in a post-socialist, market-led economy, we, too, would be free to chase our dreams. With education and hard work, our lives, too, would be vastly better than our parents’; upward mobility would no longer be an exclusive preserve of the privileged. Through the 1990s, the reform project stayed on track even as governments changed. But the promise started to fray during Singh’s second term as prime minister. The unwieldy Congress-led coalition government he ran from 2009 was besieged, from one side, by crony capitalists gorging on debt from state-owned banks only to siphon off money into their Swiss bank accounts. From the other side, it was under attack by a political opposition that blamed Singh’s indecisive leadership for rampant corruption, high inflation, slowing growth and a falling rupe
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