Dr Manmohan Singh’s legacy continues to form India: UK international secretary

Britain’s Secretary of State for International Affairs David Lammy has hailed the daring financial reforms of Dr Manmohan Singh as a legacy which continues to form fashionable India.

In a social media tribute to the previous prime minister who was cremated in New Delhi on Saturday, Lammy additionally credited Singh for laying the foundations of the “thriving” bilateral partnership between India and the UK.

“Dr Manmohan Singh’s daring financial reforms reworked India’s economic system,” Lammy mentioned in a submit on X on Friday night.

“His legacy continues to form fashionable India, and his imaginative and prescient laid the foundations for as we speak’s thriving UK-India partnership. My deepest condolences to his household and the Indian folks,” he mentioned.

Manmohan Singh, who was prime minister between 2004 and 2014 and finance minister earlier than that, has been broadly hailed the world over because the architect of India’s financial liberalisation.

He died aged 92 and was laid to relaxation with full state honours in a ceremony attended by main political dignitaries and included a 21-gun salute.

Following his loss of life on Thursday night time, the federal government declared seven days of nationwide mourning.

Earlier, British Excessive Commissioner to India Lindy Cameron took to social media to pay tribute to “an important Prime Minister, Finance Minister and world statesman who superior India’s pursuits by way of daring financial reforms and performed a key function in placing India in its rightful place on the world stage and stabilising the worldwide economic system after the monetary disaster”.

“The UK will all the time be pleased with his invaluable partnership with three UK Prime Ministers, and pleased with him as an alumnus of two of our nice universities. My ideas and needs are together with his household and the folks of India,” she mentioned.

Singh’s tenure overlapped with Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and Conservative David Cameron, who later wrote in his memoir that he “obtained on effectively” with this “saintly man” who was sturdy on the threats India confronted.

“On a later go to he instructed me that one other terrorist assault like that in Mumbai in July 2011, and India must take navy motion towards Pakistan,” notes the previous UK PM in ‘For the File’, revealed in 2019.

The Guardian’ newspaper referenced Singh’s “trademark sky-blue turbans and home-spun white kurta pyjamas” in its obituary.

“Singh, referred to as India’s ‘reluctant prime minister’ resulting from his shyness and desire for being behind the scenes, was thought of an unlikely selection to steer the world’s largest democracy. However when Congress chief Sonia Gandhi led her occasion to a shock victory in 2004, she turned to Singh to be prime minister,” the newspaper notes.

The BBC, in its obituary, hailed Singh as one among India’s longest-serving prime ministers who was thought of the “architect of key liberalising financial reforms, as premier from 2004-2014 and earlier than that as finance minister”.

“In his maiden speech as finance minister he famously quoted Victor Hugo, saying that ‘no energy on Earth can cease an thought whose time has come’. That served as a launchpad for an bold and unprecedented financial reform programme: he lower taxes, devalued the rupee, privatised state-run corporations and inspired international funding,” reads the report.

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