Mr Singh's relevance was reaffirmed when he turned 75 on June 25 and was felicitated by a cross-section of people, including the poorest of slum-dwellers.

The celebrations turned into an occasion for leaders ranging from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Ram Bilas Paswan to the Communist parties' AB Bardhan and Sitaram Yechuri, to express solidarity and signify that Mr Singh will have a major role in any future Centre-Left regroupment. This is so despite his complicated relationship with the Congress, thanks to the Bofors issue.

As noteworthy as the presence of these leaders at Mr Singh's birthday was the absence of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Samajwadi Party, who were crucial to the formation of Mr Singh's National Front government.

The reason for Mr Singh's continued relevance isn't that was he was Prime Minister for long. In fact, he held the office for just 11 months, one of the shortest tenures of any PM.

Nor can one attribute Mr Singh's relevance largely to his stature as the "Mandal messiah," who a long 16 years ago extended affirmative action to the Other Backward Classes.

Mr Singh's relevance derives from his unique role as The Transition Man, who bridges many divides. Mr Singh was influenced in his youth by Socialist thought, but joined the Congress. Yet, he quit the Congress in 1987 and became the non-Congress parties' biggest rallying-point.

He has since continued to be pivotal to all efforts to mobilise Centre-Left forces. No other person has offered so many bridges across different parts of the spectrum.

Mr Singh stands at the centre of India's shift from leader-driver, top-down, manipulative politics, to a politics of plebeian self-assertion. It's not that leaders no longer matter -- of course, they do. But subordinate groups like Dalits and OBCs have become vocal. They want self-representation, rather than patronage-based indirect representation on their behalf.

This is reshaping Indian democracy into a system that is seen by the people as capable of empowering them -- not just exercising power over them. The change has helped formal democracy, based on representation and elections, acquire a more substantive character.

This shift makes India's current politics -- with its many flaws, but with its robust, rambunctious and vibrant character -- qualitatively different from numerous anaemic democracies. Mr Singh is one of the leaders who catalysed it.

Mr Singh forms another bridge: between public morality and politics, symbolised by his resignation over Bofors. Bofors was a scam with many cross-links: between military and civilian decision-making, foreign arms manufacturers and domestic recipients of bribes, and between them and middlemen like the Hindujas.

The Bofors investigation turned exceptionally rich information and generated an outcry. With Bofors, VP Singh too became a household name.

Over the last five years, Mr Singh has forged links between political parties, on the one hand, and people's movements, non-party political groups and NGOs, on the other. He tirelessly defends the rights of slum-dwellers, informal-sector workers, landless Dalits, and victims of displacement.

No political leader has done more for the Right to Information campaign in the Hindi belt than Mr Singh.

Mr Singh always tries to reach out to movements of the downtrodden. His amazing dedication to the underprivileged and the energy he gets from it explains why 12 years after he was detected with a nasty cancer, as well as kidney failure, he continues to be active among marginal groups who are nobody's constituency.

Every week, he addresses dozens of public meetings and activists' discussions in different cities, taking a break only for his thrice-weekly dialysis.

None of this minimises the importance of Mr Singh's decision to implement the Mandal report. This was done partly to counter Hindutva, which then posed a big challenge to secular politics. But Mandal's significance lay neither in this, nor in opening up 15 percent of Central jobs for OBCs -- barely 14,000 annually, or a drop in the ocean.

Mandal's true significance is that it mainstreamed affirmative action and made it irreversible. Only a well-regarded upper-caste leader of impeccable reputation could have taken such a bold step which was bound to provoke violent opposition.

It redounds to Mr Singh's credit that he did so knowing this would topple his government. As he himself puts it: "I scored a goal, but I broke my leg irreparably!"

After the United Front's collapse in 1998, Mr Singh concentrated on building a broad secular front and also used his informal-sector mobilisation to this end. But he decided to take sanyas from competitive politics and didn't join or build a party.

In the 2002 Uttar Pradesh and 2004 Lok Sabha elections, he worked closely with the Centre-Left and regional parties, including the Samajwadi Party -- because that was crucial to "unhinging" the BJP from power.

Mr Singh has now revived his Jan Morcha with Mr Raj Babbar, who was recently expelled from the SP. This has set him on a collision course with the SP.

It seems likely that the Jan Morcha will erode the SP's base to some extent in next year's election in UP while indirectly helping the Congress and other non-BJP forces. The outcome will also determine whether a front independent of both the Congress and the BJP can be formed.

Platforms like Jan Morcha will continue to reshape public thinking in parts of India along broadly progressive lines. The political space that Mr VP Singh represents will also expand.

One can only wish Mr Singh well as he fights for an equal and just social order in which the poor can live with dignity and pursue the agenda of emancipation.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.