There is a delicious irony in the political afterlife of Dr Manmohan Singh. The man who helped liberate India from the Licence Raj eventually became Prime Minister of a political party that never quite liberated itself from the dynastic raj.

In 1991, as Finance Minister in PV Narasimha Rao's government, Singh helped dismantle an economic order built on licences, quotas, controls and bureaucratic permission. India was almost bankrupt, and its foreign exchange reserves were desperately low. Evidently, the old economic model had reached the end of its tether. Singh supplied the intellectual architecture for its dismantling, while Narasimha Rao provided the political authority to turn those ideas into policy.

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It should be noted that without Rao's political backing, Singh's prescriptions might have remained what they were on paper, merely an economist's diagnosis of a crisis rather than the beginning of an economic transformation. Singh supplied the intellectual framework; what followed would transform the Indian economy and, in time, the aspirations of an entire generation.

A generation later, India was a different country. Liberalisation did not abolish inequality, inherited wealth or privilege, but it created an enormously larger space for private enterprise, professional ambition, entrepreneurship and social mobility. It helped produce a middle class increasingly accustomed to the idea that one could make something of oneself without waiting for the state, a political patron or a family name to confer permission. And precisely therein lies the great historical irony. The economy was liberalised, but the Congress party was not.

I made a similar argument in my essay, 'Manmohan Singh: The Constrained Genius', written after his death in December 2024. Singh's tragedy was not simply that he presided over the failures of UPA II. It was that an extraordinary intellect operated within a political architecture that placed obvious limits on his authority.

Sonia Gandhi has now........

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