The late former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was India’s genuine middle-class hero. But it was only in his death, not during his life, that this truth became evident. The massive outpouring of grief and affection at his death revealed the extraordinarily high esteem in which he was held by large sections of the urban educated class, particularly the 1990s generation he had steered into a golden age of freedom.
Manmohan Singh represented a middle-class dream. He was the epitome of the Nehruvian nation-builder of the 1950s and 60s: highly educated, scholarly, dignified, self-effacing, and driven by a sense of service. Singh stood for an open economy, prosperity for all, and an ease with a globalising world.
