UK honours legacy of India’s ‘reluctant prime minister’ Manmohan Singh

London: India's "reluctant prime minister" and the "architect of economic reforms" is how sections of the UK media have been honouring the legacy of Dr Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister who passed away aged 92 in New Delhi on Thursday.

British High Commissioner to India Lindy Cameron took to social media to pay tribute to “a great Prime Minister, Finance Minister and global statesman who advanced India’s interests through bold economic reforms and played a key role in putting India in its rightful place on the world stage and stabilising the global economy after the financial crisis”.

“The UK will always be proud of his invaluable partnership with three UK Prime Ministers, and proud of him as an alumnus of two of our great universities. My thoughts and wishes are with his family and the people of India,” she said.

Singh’s tenure overlapped with Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and Conservative David Cameron, who later wrote in his memoir that he “got on well” with this “saintly man” who was robust on the threats India faced.

“On a later visit he told me that another terrorist attack like that in Mumbai in July 2011, and India would have to take military action against Pakistan,” notes the former UK PM in For the Record, published in 2019.

Manoj Ladwa, founder and chairman of UK-based policy and events platform India Global Forum (IGF), described the former PM as a “towering statesman and visionary economist”.

“His transformative reforms in the 1990s not only shaped India’s future but also helped spark my own commitment to fostering stronger UK-India ties. As an alumnus of Oxford and Cambridge, he symbolised the deep cultural and academic connections between our nations. His legacy will inspire generations,” he said.

The Guardian newspaper referenced Singh’s “trademark sky-blue turbans and home-spun white kurta pyjamas” in its obituary.

“Singh, called India’s ‘reluctant prime minister’ due to his shyness and preference for being behind the scenes, was considered an unlikely choice to lead the world’s biggest democracy. But when Congress leader Sonia Gandhi led her party to a surprise victory in 2004, she turned to Singh to be prime minister,” the newspaper notes.

“He served a rare full two terms as prime minister in India’s tumultuous politics and is credited with spurring the rapid economic growth that lifted tens of millions of Indians from poverty,” it adds.

The BBC, in its obituary, hailed Singh as one of India's longest-serving prime ministers who was considered the “architect of key liberalising economic reforms, as premier from 2004-2014 and before that as finance minister”.

“In his maiden speech as finance minister he famously quoted Victor Hugo, saying that ‘no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come’.

That served as a launchpad for an ambitious and unprecedented economic reform programme: he cut taxes, devalued the rupee, privatised state-run companies and encouraged foreign investment. The economy revived, industry picked up, inflation was checked, and growth rates remained consistently high in the 1990s,” reads the report.

In January last year, Singh was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Indian Students and Alumni Union (NISAU) UK during their annual India-UK Achievers Honours in London.

“The India-UK relationship is indeed especially defined by our educational partnership. The founding fathers of our nation, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr B R Ambedkar, Sardar Patel and many others studied in the UK and went on to become great leaders, leaving a legacy which continues to inspire India and the world. Over the years countless Indian students have had the opportunity to study in the UK,” Singh said in his acceptance message at the time.