Do we like Manmohan Singh?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A modest, honest-by-reputation leader who did real good for the poor, with a few contested calls and ministers who dragged his name through the mud.
Manmohan Singh was born in 1932 in a village in the Punjab province of undivided India and ended up as one of the most important economists to run a country. As finance minister in 1991, he opened up India's economy during a severe balance-of-payments crisis and helped steer it away from a socialist-style model. That made him the architect of the reform era long before he held the top job.
He became prime minister in 2004, India's first Sikh to hold the job, and served two terms. His government oversaw the Right to Information Act of 2005 and a rural jobs scheme guaranteeing 100 paid days of work. He also signed the nuclear deal with the United States, which cost him the support of his Communist allies.
The second term is where it got messy. Corruption allegations against his ministers and a string of financial scandals, including over the 2010 Commonwealth Games, damaged his reputation for personal integrity. Outlook noted he told officials to keep “at arm’s length” from the telecom department after the 2G licences went out. At his last press conference in 2014 he said he honestly believed history would be kinder to him than the media or the Opposition.
On harm, there's nothing hateful in his own words that we found. In 2005 he apologised to Parliament over the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, saying he bowed his head in shame, though Sikh groups said it didn't go far enough. In 2006 he spoke of giving minorities a priority claim on resources, which PM Modi later recast as meaning Muslims alone; BOOM rated that claim misleading.
The weaker spot is gay rights. In 2008 his government sent the Delhi High Court mixed signals on Section 377, with the Home Ministry saying gay sex came from a “perverse mind” while the Health Ministry backed repeal. Singh's own move was to tell the two ministers to sit down and sort it out, rather than pick a side. It's a dodge, not an attack, but it's why this is an asterisk.
The recent news is a bit of late justice. In July 2026 the Supreme Court accepted the CBI's closure reports in the Talabira-II coal block case, set aside the 2015 summoning order, and gave him a clean chit. Singh had denied any criminality, and the appeal was wrapped up because he'd died.