A tribute: 'Manmohan Singh was unfailingly measured, thoughtful and wise'

It is both an honour and pleasure to have been invited to address this event in honour of Dr Manmohan Singh, the greatest man I have had the privilege of knowing.

 

Singh’s achievements as a public servant are far above those of anybody else whom I have known. Many will speak today of those achievements. I would emphasise even more his exceptional character.

 

I have met many clever and able people. But Singh was different from others. He was unfailingly measured, thoughtful and wise. He was, above all, that rarest of beings, a thoroughly decent person in high office. 

 

 

I first met him in mid-1974, when he was Chief Economic Advisor to the Indian government, and I was the World Bank’s senior divisional economist on India. This was just before the first oil shock.

 

Singh had already identified the problems India would face after such a shock in his seminal thesis, ‘India’s export trends and the prospects for self-sustained growth’, subsequently published by Clarendon Press in 1964.

 

India’s extreme vulnerability to the huge rise in oil prices was largely due to the country’s desperately low level of exports and the resulting squeeze on imports to the barest of necessities. Both were the product of the extreme anti-trade bias in India’s policies.

 

Subsequently, I published my own book India’s Exports, in 1982, as a small contribution to the desperately needed project of liberalisation. Not coincidentally, I had been taught at Nuffield College by Ian Little, who was also Singh’s thesis supervisor.

 

When I first met him, I had no idea that he would be the finance minister to radically reform this perverse policy system, under Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao.

 

Cometh the hour; cometh the man: 1991 was the hour; he was the man. He transformed India and so ultimately the world.

 

These are not the only personal links I had with him. I had met my lifelong friends Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Shankar Acharya in 1971 when I was a young professional in the World Bank’s Domestic Finance Division. Both, of course, went on to serve him with distinction. My friendship with them deepened my connection with him.

 

I continued to meet Singh in the years after I left the Bank, this time as a journalist.

 

Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times tells the following story about one of those meetings: “As India’s finance minister, Manmohan Singh visited the FT’s London offices in the early 1990s to discuss his reform programme with Martin Wolf and me. Martin asked why he hadn’t made what seemed like a perfectly obvious policy change – something to do with capital flows, I think. “Yes, Martin,” replied Singh quietly. “I understand the economics. But the difference between you and me is that if you make a mistake, you can correct it in your next column. If I make a mistake, 20 million people die.” For a moment, even Martin was lost for words. Singh was a very great man.”

 

During his years as Prime Minister, I met him at his residence on several occasions. I remember talking with him about his desire to find a way to peace with Pakistan and his determination to put relations with the US on a new footing.

 

We talked, more recently, this time at his home, about the future of democracy in India. On this he was firmly optimistic.

 

In my last conversation with him, in the summer of 2023, I was concerned at first that he was finding it too difficult to talk. I was wrong. He was able in the end to express his concerns over the conflict between the West and Russia over the war in Ukraine. We disagreed. Yet, as always, his disagreement was courteous, his arguments rational and the roots of his anxiety humane.

 

Knowing Manmohan was one of the greatest privileges of my life. He showed me and everybody else what leadership and service truly mean.

 

The economically dynamic India of today is his legacy. So, too, is his example of devoted service to the cause of a prosperous and democratic India open to the world.

 

As Shakespeare would have written, “here was a Singh, when comes such another”?

 

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(Transcript of a tribute Martin Wolf delivered at a meeting on January 4. The author is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times)