'I don't believe I have been a weak PM... history will be kinder to me'

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, the architect of India's economic reforms, died here on Thursday night. He was 92. 

Singh's death was announced by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, where he was admitted in the Emergency ward around 8.30 PM in a critical condition. 

Singh, who was prime minister for two terms in the Congress-led UPA government from 2004 to 2014, had been in poor health for the last few months.

Months before he demitted office as prime minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh had famously asserted that his leadership was not weak and history would be kinder to him than what the media projected at that time.

Addressing a press conference here in January 2014, in what was one of his last media interactions, Singh had said, "I do not believe that I have been a weak Prime Minister ... I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the Opposition in Parliament... Given the political compulsions, I have done the best I could do." 

  "...I have done as well as I could do according to the circumstances... It is for history to judge what I have done or what I have not done," Singh, who was the prime minister for 10 years till Narendra Modi took charge on May 26, 2014.

He was responding to a volley of questions regarding criticism that his leadership was "weak" and he was not decisive on many occasions.

Singh had also chosen the press conference to launch a blistering attack on BJP's then prime ministerial candidate Modi and referred to the 2002 Gujarat riots under the Chief Minister. The BJP at that time had projected Modi as a strong leader while targeting Singh over the issue of "weak" leadership in the run-up to the next Lok Sabha polls. 

"If you measure the strength of Prime Minister by presiding over mass massacre of innocent citizens on streets of Ahmedabad, then I do not believe in it.... I do not think that this kind of strength this country needs least from its Prime Minister," Singh had said.

"I have full confidence that the next Prime Minister will be from the UPA... It will be disastrous for the country to have Narendra Modi as Prime Minister... I sincerely believe what Narendra Modi is saying is not going to materialise," he had said. 

Maintaining that his two terms as prime minister in UPA I and UPA II displayed the Congress's ability to run a coalition government and dispelled the perception that this party cannot run coalitions, Singh said though some compromises were made in the process, they were on "peripheral issues and not on national problems".

"Nobody has asked me to step down because of any inadequacy that characterised my tenure as prime minister," was his response when asked about "negative" perceptions within Congress about his leadership.