Manmohan Singh may not have wanted to be a politician, but many believe that he ended up being one of India’s more accomplished leaders.
Born in poverty, Singh earned an Oxford doctorate and did much to cement the position of the populous nation as one of the world’s economic powerhouses.
In 1991, when working as an economic adviser, Singh famously ignored a message from then prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao appointing him as finance minister, thinking it was not serious.
"He eventually tracked me down the next morning, rather angry, and demanded that I get dressed up and come to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the swearing in," Singh said in a 2005 interview.
Born in 1932 in a village in the Punjab province, Singh, who initially had to study by candlelight, showed immediate promise at school.
A brilliant academic career took him through bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Punjab to a Cambridge University degree in economics in 1957.
Singh then got his doctorate in economics from Nuffield College at Oxford University in 1962 before returning home to teach, initially at Panjab University before joining the faculty at the Delhi School of Economics.
Singh became a civil servant in 1971, as an economic adviser in the Commerce Ministry; 11 years later he became chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry. He also served as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and as governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
Softly spoken Singh seemed an unlikely politician, but with India facing a major economic crisis, prime minister Rao needed Singh’s expertise.
India was facing a huge balance of payments deficit and its foreign currency reserves were negligible: Singh instituted reforms that opened up the economy and moved India away from a socialist-patterned economy and toward a capitalist model, initiatives which returned the economy to a stable footing.
In his first Budget speech, paraphrasing Victor Hugo, Singh said: "No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. The emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea."
Following his elevation, Singh had been elected to the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, in 1991, by the legislature of the state of Assam. After the fall of the Rao government he served as leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, but Singh did not have designs on higher office.
The coalition government he headed for a decade brought together politicians and parties with differing ideologies that were rivals in the country’s various states.
Riding an unprecedented period of economic growth, a boom partly due to Singh’s reforms when finance minister, his government shared the spoils of India’s new-found wealth and introduced welfare schemes such as a jobs programme for the rural poor.
In 2008, his government also clinched a landmark deal that permitted peaceful trade in nuclear energy with the United States for the first time in three decades, paving the way for strong relations between New Delhi and Washington.
Singh adopted a pragmatic foreign policy approach, pursuing a peace process with nuclear rival and neighbour Pakistan, but his efforts suffered a major setback after Pakistani militants carried out a massive gun and bomb attack in Mumbai in November 2008.
He also tried to end the border dispute with China, brokering a deal to reopen the Nathu La pass into Tibet, which had been closed for more than 40 years.
Known for his simple lifestyle and with a reputation for honesty, Singh was not personally seen as corrupt.
But he came under attack for failing to crack down on members of his government as a series of scandals erupted in his second term, triggering mass protests.
The latter years of his premiership saw the Indian growth story that he had helped engineer wobble due to global economic turbulence, slow government decision-making, battered investment sentiment and corruption charges over the organisation of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
In 2012, his government was tipped into a minority after the Congress Party’s biggest ally quit their coalition in protest at the entry of foreign supermarkets.
Two years later, Congress was decisively swept aside by the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi.
Modi called Singh one of India’s "most distinguished leaders" who left "a strong imprint on [their] economic policy over the years".
"As our prime minister, he made extensive efforts to improve people’s lives ... His wisdom and humility were always visible."
Manmohan Singh died on December 26, aged 92. — Agencies.
