Manmohan Singh: The technocrat who reshaped India's economic destiny

Manmohan Singh showed that technocrats can change nations' destinies as effectively as any populist

The India of today, with all its successes and imperfections, is more a product of Manmohan Singh than of anybody else in recent history. He was always called an “unlikely” politician; but, through its successes and failures, his career is a useful reminder to us today that technocrats can change nations’ destinies as effectively as any populist.  

Objectively, if Singh was an unlikely politician, one might be forgiven for thinking that he was an even more unlikely liberaliser. He had spent an entire career, after all, as an economist-bureaucrat serving the grey, ersatz socialism that was India’s official ideology prior