As India’s first – and so far only – Sikh Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh said in Parliament that he hung his head in shame because some people affiliated to his own political party were responsible for massacring members of the community in November 1984 after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguard.

He said his eyes had become weak because he studied under the light of a hurricane lantern when he was young. He was born on 26 December 1932 at Gah in West Punjab in what is today Pakistan. His family migrated to India when the subcontinent was partitioned. He studied in Cambridge in the United Kingdom on a scholarship.

He held just about every important post in the Ministry of Finance, headed the Planning Commission and served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India before working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Despite the left-leaning views he espoused as head of the South Commission, as an “unlikely” 58-year-old Finance Minister in the P V Narasimha Rao government he was instrumental in shifting rightwards the trajectory of India’s economic policies. He devalued the Indian currency when the country was in the throes of a foreign exchange crisis.

His critics derided him as weak and subservient to Sonia Gandhi during his ten-year term as Prime Minister between 2004 and 2014, but in one of his last press conferences in the position he asserted that history would judge him more kindly than the contemporary media and parties that were then in Opposition in Parliament.

Despite his background as a non-political civil servant, he displayed unusual political savvy when, in 2008, he roped in the Samajwadi Party to save the first United Progressive Alliance government he headed after the Left withdrew support from his government because of the nuclear deal he signed with the United States.

The former US President Barack Obama paid him a fulsome compliment when he said that when the Prime Minister spoke, people listened.

He was attacked for the stock-market scandal masterminded by Harshad Mehta in 1992. Later, when he was Prime Minister, his government was pilloried by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the way in which telecommunications spectrum and coal mining areas were allocated.

He was sharply criticised during the conduct of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. Rahul Gandhi publicly tore up an ordinance his government had introduced.

Still the soft-spoken and mild-mannered Manmohan Singh did not mince his words when he described the November 2016 demonetisation by the Narendra Modi government as organised loot and legalised plunder.