Mehmet Özay 16.07.2025
Manmohan Singh passed away three days ago, on December 26, at the age of 92.
In India, the passing of former prime minister Manmohan Singh offers the country a new opportunity to remember and reflect on the recent past.
First of all, it is noteworthy that Singh's passing has become a phenomenon that has united the country.
Given that Singh had served as a Congress Party minister and then as prime minister, his 'send-off' to the 'eternal realm' as a politician admired by his rival, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who immediately succeeded him as the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party and remains prime minister, cannot be considered a mere political spectacle.
Rather, it should be seen as an expression of appreciation of Singh's performance as a technocrat who contributed to the economic development of his country, as the thirteenth prime minister of the country, serving from 2004 to 2014.
He was also admired for his humble personality, perhaps as a result of his commitment to the values of the Sikh faith to which he belonged.
Singh, a technocrat with an interest in economics from an early age and an interest in why some countries developed while others did not, must have solved at least part of this mystery during his career, so that he was able to lead India to a significant development process.
It was important that Singh was able to ask this question.
Because, despite all its opportunities, the basic social realities such as India's failure to take its rightful place in the economic development processes and the fact that large segments of society - just like the family and social environment in which he was born - lived in poverty were enough facts to mobilize him on behalf of his country.
The discovered technocrat
Singh, who served as Finance Minister in the Congress government led by Prime Minister Narasimha Roa in the 1990s, was named prime minister as a 'technocrat' politician after his successful policies.
Singh, who ensured that the 1990s, i.e. the post-socialist-economy period and rising global liberalism were relatively bright in India and carried this into the new millennium with his premiership in 2004, can be said to have deeply understood the economic problems of his country and implemented possible processes for their solution.
However, given that the 1990s were also a period of uncertainty, with the end of the Cold War and the winds of global change, India's success under Singh's policies deserves careful scrutiny.
The fact that this was a period of globalization and the rise of the liberal economy is an indication that this process - thanks to Singh - was understood and captured in the recovery of the Indian economy.
That is why Singh is today remembered as a prime minister who was able to realize India's economic development through 'liberal economic approaches'.
Singh was able to realize the development process of the period with his approach that reduced the role of the state in the economy and reorganized the economy through markets.
Thanks to the economic policies of Singh, who was allowed to continue this process as prime minister in 2004, India achieved a high growth rate of 8.5/9 percent between 2004 and 2009.
The fact that his second term as prime minister, starting in 2009, was characterized as a failure shows us whether there was such a contradiction in economic policies as to make the two periods so different.
At this point, it would not be wrong to say that Singh's 2014 statement on leaving office, quoted by almost all media outlets these days, "History will be kinder to me than today's media", reflects his belief in the correctness of his economic policy.
The details of Singh's bitter departure as prime minister will perhaps be found in his writings.
Extraordinary success in the economy
Was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's economic policy a miracle or was it a rational approach based on India's social and economic reality?
I think this question will continue to be raised in the relevant circles.
When we remember that economics as a science has its own rationalities, the irrelevance of the 'miracle' phenomenon becomes apparent.
However, as noted above, the fact that economic opening in India changed direction with Singh, who was named prime minister as an alternative name after the Congress Party governments faced problems, should be seen as an opening outside party politics.
The main difference was that, unlike the long Congress Party administrations that had reacted to the 'economic policies' implemented by the British during the colonial period, Singh reasserted this historical norm that had in fact been realized on the very soil in which he was from.
His career as an academic and technocrat gave Singh a place in the world of politics that, in a sense, offered a kind of political salvation for Congress leaders in search of an alternative.
In addition, there was a new, covert and overt synthesis between Singh's background of Western education in economics and the global openings that came to the fore in the post-Cold War 1990s.
Unlike other countries that were unprepared for the post-Cold War situation at the time, India was able to offer ways out of the economic bottleneck by reading the characteristics of the period correctly, with the presence of a technocrat like Singh, again as a historical chance.
The answer as to why a similar situation could not be demonstrated in 2009 can be explained by the global crisis triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
Perhaps, based on this development, Singh was saying that 'history will vindicate itself', implying that the problem was not with the economic policies it was implementing, but with global and external factors.
After Singh, as the prime minister of the Congress Party, which had ruled the country with closed, semi-socialist and semi-statist policies for many years, thought and practiced liberal economies, the political elite of the Congress Party, in particular, will have to re-read the political history of the party.
Perhaps, with the lessons learned from this, they will be able to showcase a new Congress Party opening in Indian politics.
In this context, the economic policies of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who died three days ago at the age of 92, will be revisited in the light of the current circumstances.
English and Indonesian versions translated with DeepL AI
