Manmohan Singh passes away at 92
Manmohan Singh, the former Indian prime minister whose economic reforms made his country a global powerhouse, has passed away in New Delhi last night. He was 92.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confirmed Singh's death, posting on X that India "mourns the loss of one of its most distinguished leaders."
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Singh was taken to a hospital in New Delhi after he lost consciousness at his home yesterday evening, but could not be resuscitated and was pronounced dead at 9:51pm local time, according to a statement by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
Singh, who was twice prime minister in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 to 2014, has been in indifferent health for the last few months.
Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and her mother Sonia Gandhi reached the hospital soon after the news of Singh's hospitalisation broke.
Singh, who was the finance minister under the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, was the architect and the brainchild of economic reforms in 1991 that pulled India from the brink of bankruptcy and ushered in an era of economic liberalisation that is widely believed to have changed the course of India's economic trajectory.
Singh is credited with having overseen an economic boom in Asia's fourth-largest economy in his first term, although slowing growth in later years marred his second stint.
Born in 1932 in the mud-house village of Gah in what is now Pakistan, Singh studied economics to find a way to eradicate poverty in the vast nation and never held elected office before taking the nation's highest office.
His life was a testament to service, scholarship and leadership.
He earned a Master's degree in Economics from Panjab University, Chandigarh, and obtained a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
Singh's village, where he was born, lacked a school, healthcare, and electricity, forcing him to walk miles to an Urdu-medium school and study by kerosene lamp at night.
He attributed his rise to the "system of scholarships" for poor students that existed at the time.
Singh worked in a string of senior civil posts, served as a central bank governor and also held various jobs with global agencies such as the United Nations.
Amid one of the worst financial crisis in India's modern history, Congress PM Narasimha Rao appointed his as finance minister to pull the country back from the brink. And he did exactly that.
Later, in his first term as PM, Singh steered the economy through a period of nine-percent growth, lending the country the international clout it had long sought.
He also sealed a landmark nuclear deal with the US that he said would help India meet its growing energy needs.
Known as "Mr Clean", Singh nonetheless saw his image tarnished during his decade-long tenure when a series of corruption cases became public.
Several months before the 2014 elections, Singh said he would retire after the polls, with Sonia Gandhi's son Rahul earmarked to take his place if Congress won.
But Congress crashed to its worst-ever result at that time as the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Modi, won a landslide.
Singh -- who said historians would be kinder to him than contemporary detractors -- became a vocal critic of Modi's economic policies, and more recently warned about the risks that rising communal tensions posed to India's democracy.
Singh paid an official visit to Dhaka in September 2011, a trip that was overshadowed by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's opting out of it at the eleventh hour opposing the Teesta river water-sharing accord which, as a result, could not be signed.
Singh contested Lok Sabha elections only once from the South Delhi constituency in 1999 and suffered defeat. After that, he never again ran for the Lok Sabha poll.
However, Singh has been a member of the Rajya Sabha since 1991, where he was the Leader of the Opposition between 1998 and 2004.
In April this year, he retired from Rajya Sabha, the upper House of parliament.
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