Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs David Lammy has hailed the bold economic reforms of Dr Manmohan Singh as a legacy which continues to shape modern India.
In a social media tribute to the former prime minister who was cremated in New Delhi on Saturday, David Lammy also credited Singh for laying the foundations of the “thriving” bilateral partnership between India and the UK.
“Dr Manmohan Singh’s bold economic reforms transformed India’s economy,” Mr Lammy said in a post on X on Friday evening.
“His legacy continues to shape modern India, and his vision laid the foundations for today’s thriving UK-India partnership. My deepest condolences to his family and the Indian people,” he said.
Manmohan Singh, who was prime minister between 2004 and 2014 and finance minister before that, has been widely hailed the world over as the architect of India’s economic liberalisation.
He died aged 92 and was laid to rest with full state honours in a ceremony attended by leading political dignitaries and included a 21-gun salute.
Following his death on Thursday night, the government declared seven days of national mourning.
Earlier, 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.
Dr 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.
The Guardian’ newspaper referenced Dr 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.
The BBC, in its obituary, hailed Dr 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,” reads the report.
