The Great Statesman: Manmohan Singh was not just the liberator of India’s economic fortunes but also a genuine grand strategist
Manmohan Singh, India's 13th PM, was the last of the Partition generation to lead the country. This trauma not only shaped his perception of the value of India's multifarious diversity, but also strengthened his resolve to nourish it in ways that only a liberal democratic society could.
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Many have commented on his extraordinary decency, his generosity of spirit, and his understated perspicacity about politics and policy. I witnessed these traits in many meetings with him since 2001, and especially when the US and India consummated the civil nuclear deal.
His reputation as a brilliant economist and as coauthor of India's epochal 1991 reforms was entrenched by the time I first met him in New Delhi. But right from that meeting and through subsequent encounters, I was convinced that Singh was not merely the liberator of India's economic fortunes, but also a genuine grand strategist who perspicaciously envisioned what was necessary to cement India's successful rise as a great power while doing well by both its own people and the world.
Singh understood better than most that continued economic reforms would liberate India's productive energies and expand its economy. But being a child of Partition, he appreciated that a burgeoning economy would be insufficient to provide
