A late night call that catapulted Manmohan Singh into politics

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Back from a conference in Netherlands, then University Grants Commission chairman Dr Manmohan Singh had called it a day when he received a call that would change India's economic landscape and his career trajectory.


In 1991, when PV Narasimha Rao assumed the prime ministerial post, India battled a balance of payments crisis and political lows, while the world was rattled by the fall of the Soviet. At this time, Dr Singh was woken up by an "out of the blue" call from Mr Rao's then principal secretary PC Alexander, who informed him that he was the pick to be the finance minister.


"He also jokingly told me that if things worked well we would all claim credit, and if things didn't work out well I would be sacked," he said in the book 'Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan' written by his daughter Daman Singh. On June 21, 1991, Dr Singh was at the Rashtrapati Bhavan to take oath.


The oath was the beginning of a sea change in India's economic landscape as liberalisation opened up India's economy to the world, albeit after as skeptical Mr Rao was persuaded by Dr Singh. "I had to persuade him. I think he was a skeptic to begin with, but later on he was convinced that what we were doing was the right thing to do, that there was no other way out. But he wanted to sanctify the middle path - that we should undertake liberalisation but also take care of the marginalised sections, the poor," recounted Dr Singh, as per his daughter's book.


Dr Singh went on to also free most industries from licensing controls, amended the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, put in place a new taxation regime and ended the public sector's monopoly in many sectors.


Daman Singh's book traces the journey of the former prime minister and his wife Gursharan Kaur's life from the 1930s to 2004 and is based on Daman's conversations with her parents and hours spent in libraries and archives. 


The book's anecdotes come into focus after Dr Singh passed away on Thursday night at AIIMS Delhi at the age of 92.