MANMOHAN SINGH September 26, 1932

In 1997, I interviewed Manmohan Singh and asked him if he wanted to be Prime Minister. “Who doesn’t want to be Prime Minister?” he replied. It was a rare moment of candour for a man who had always portrayed himself as a reluctant politician. In retrospect however, he may have been better off not taking the job. He appears on his list because he was one of our best finance ministers, abandoning his old socialist beliefs and embracing market economics with newfound passion. In the process, he transformed India and brought prosperity to a whole generation.

His record as Prime Minister is mixed. He did his job efficiently during UPA I when Sonia Gandhi made the major decisions (the write-off of farmers’ loans, right to information, NREGA, etc) and he ran the administration. The problem arose at the end of his first term when he threatened to resign if the Indo-US nuclear deal was not passed. The Congress had no majority of its own, the Left was opposed and so Singh must have known that the party’s managers would have to do some unsavoury dealing to get the bill passed. No matter. The bill was passed somehow and when the UPA won a second term, he genuinely believed it was because of his personal popularity and his nuclear deal.

By UPA II, Sonia Gandhi had fallen ill and Singh, at first super-confident, was out of his depth. As corruption scandals kept exploding, he became the Invisible Prime Minister, creating the leadership vacuum that Narendra Modi later filled.

But his stint as finance minister ensures that history will be kind to that avatar of Manmohan Singh.