Manmohan Singh, The Designated Survivor Of Congress Politics

Dr Manmohan Singh would go down in history as a great visionary and the architect of Liberalization, who besides being a distinguished academic was also a pragmatic leader familiar with the circumstances of his times.

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There are a number of accounts which would put him on top as an economist and a reformer and some would rate his navigation of the Indo-US nuclear treaty as one of the highlights of his glorious innings. However, he was a designated survivor, who managed to retain his position and cool despite the most diabolic political maneuvers by some of his erstwhile colleagues. He was a humble man who empathized with the ground level reality and his story is about a person who had very modest beginnings before being pushed to a fame which made him a household name both in India and abroad. There are many untold stories concerning him and it would be worthwhile to recall some of them.

The general belief is that he was picked up by Sonia Gandhi to be the Prime Minister in 2004 after she decided to withdraw herself from the race on account of multiple reasons, the security concerns of her children, being one of them. The fact is that when the Atal Behari Vajpayee government was toppled by one vote on the floor of the House in 1999, and Sonia was shown on the TV screens stating "that we have the numbers, 272" to form the government following her visit to the Rashtrapati Bhawan, she had recommended his name for the Prime Minister's post to President K R Narayanan. It was a closely guarded secret.