Pakistan is a paradigm example of a failed state that has undergone an extremely dangerous form of radical Islamisation.
Manmohan Singh (26 Sep 1932 - present)
Manmohan Singh is the 14th and current Prime Minister of India. Regarded by
some as the "most educated" Indian Prime Minister in history, Singh is a
member of the Indian National Congress party, and became the first Sikh Prime
Minister of India on May 22, 2004. He is considered one of the most qualified
and influential figures in India's recent history, mainly because of the
economic reforms he had initiated in 1991 when he was Finance Minister under
Prime Minister Narasimha Rao.
Early life
He was born on 26 September 1932, in Gah, Punjab (now in Chakwal District,
Pakistan). He has an Undergraduate (1952) and a Master's degree (1954) from
Panjab University, Chandigarh; an Undergraduate degree (1957) from Cambridge
University (St. John's College) and a D.Phil (1962) from Oxford University
(Nuffield College). The University of Oxford awarded him an honorary Doctor of
Civil Law degree in June 2005, and in October 2006, the University of Cambridge
followed with the same honour.
Singh married Gursharan Kaur in 1958, and they have three daughters.
Political career
Singh, an economist by profession, worked for the International Monetary Fund in
his younger days. Dr. Singh is known to be an unassuming politician, enjoying
a formidable, highly respected and admired image. Due to his work at the UN,
International Monetary Fund and other international bodies, he is highly
respected around the world. He was awarded the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award
in 2002. Before becoming Prime Minister, he served as the Finance Minister under
Narasimha Rao. He is credited with transforming the economy in the early 1990s
during the financial crisis. He served as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya
Sabha (upper house) from March 1998 to May 2004, when the Bharatiya Janata
Party-led coalition government was in office.
His economic policies - which included getting rid of several socialist
policies, especially the License Raj - were popular. He enjoys strong support
among the middle classes of India due to his education. Singh lost the election
in the Lok Sabha from South Delhi constituency in the 1999 general elections. He
is thus the only Indian Prime Minister never to have been an elected member of
the Lower House of Parliament. In fact he has not won a direct election. He has
been a member of the Rajya Sabha from Assam since 1995. He was re-elected to the
Rajya Sabha in 2001 and 2007.
Economic reforms and ascent to power
Singh served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 1982 to 1985, and was
hand picked as finance minister in cabinet of then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao
in 1991.
Singh is widely regarded as the architect of India's original economic reform
programme, which was enacted in 1991 under Rao's administration. The economic
liberalization package pushed by Singh and Rao opened the nation to foreign
direct investment. The liberalization was prompted by an acute
balance-of-payments crisis whereby the Indian government, left without
sufficient reserves to meet its obligations, had begun preparations to mortgage
its gold reserves to the Bank of England in order to obtain the cash reserves
needed to run the country.
Many see the 1991 liberalization as the first of a series of economic
restructuring efforts throughout the 1990s and 2000s that have raised India's
growth rates to amongst highest in world. Despite its liberal economic policies,
Rao's government was voted out in the next general election in 1996.
Opposition and 2004 election
Singh became leader of opposition in upper house of Indian Parliament, and
stayed with the Congress Party during a major split in 1999, when three senior
Congress leaders objected to Sonia Gandhi's rise as Congress President. Being
touted as the Congress choice for the PM's job, Gandhi had become a target of
nationalists who objected to her Italian birth.
An alliance led by the Congress Party won a surprisingly high number of seats in
the Parliamentary elections of 2004. The Left Front decided to support a
coalition government led by the Congress Party from the outside. Sonia Gandhi
was elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party and was expected to
become the Prime Minister. In a surprise move, she declined to accept the post
and instead nominated Dr. Singh. He secured the nomination for prime minister on
May 19, 2004 when the then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam officially asked him to
form a government. Although most expected him to head the Finance Ministry
himself, he entrusted the job to P. Chidambaram.
His appointment is notable as it comes 20 years after India witnessed
significant tensions between the Indian central government and the Punjabi Sikh
community. After Congress Party Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the mother-in-law
of Sonia Gandhi, ordered central government troops to storm the Golden Temple
(the holiest site of Sikhism) in Amritsar, Punjab to quell a separatist
movement, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. The result was a
genocidal campaign against Sikhs and many innocent Sikhs lost their lives during
riots promoted by the Congress Party immediately after the
assassination.
Singh's image is generally regarded as intellectual, honest but cautious,
attentive to working class people (on whose votes he was elected), and
technocratic. Although legislative achievements have been few and the
Congress-led alliance is routinely hampered by conflicts, Singh's administration
has focused on reducing the fiscal deficit, providing debt-relief to poor
farmers, extending social programs and advancing the pro-industry economic and
tax policies that have launched the country on a major economic expansion course
since 2002. Singh has been the image of the Congress campaign to defuse
religious tensions and conflicts and bolster political support from minorities
like Muslims, Christians and Sikhs.
His government has endeavored to build stronger relations with the United
States, the People's Republic of China and European nations. The Government
suffered a setback when it lost the support of a key ally, several African Union
members, for its bid for a permanent membership to the U.N. Security Council
with veto privileges. One of the biggest achievements of Manmohan Singh's
Government has been a nuclear deal between India and the U.S.A. Under Dr. Singh,
an economist and Finance minister P. Chidambaram, India's economic growth has
continued, with the GDP growing at a very fast rate of 9%. This has resulted in
India becoming a trillion dollar economy.
