Manmohan Singh spent the first anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai siege touring America. A self-respecting leader might have been affronted at being asked to be away from his country on such a sorrowful occasion. Singh, obsequious bureaucrat, seemed grateful for having been invited. https://twitter.com/Chellaney/status/1175661394844246016

Singh did not punish Pakistan—which directed the attacks—or extract answers from the US, which shielded a Pakistani-American double-agent with vital knowledge of the planning that produced the attacks. The rage of our interloper prime minister was directed, instead, at the poor.

16,000 farmers killed themselves every year for all but two years that Singh was prime minister. Many addressed their suicide notes directly to him. During its second term, Singh’s government contemplated using India’s Air Force against its most miserable citizens.

In 2007, thousands of tribal peasants and farmers, led by the Gandhian PV Rajagopal, marched to Delhi to demand land rights. As soon as they arrived in the capital, they were corralled into a roofless enclosure and locked up without water. Singh was entertaining foreign friends.

In 2013, desperate to look tougher than Modi, Singh’s government, in an act of cowardly one-upmanship that will always haunt India, hanged a Kashmiri man—alienating Kashmiris, who are our fellow citizens, but not, remember, punishing Pakistan for luring then into terrorism.

In the decade that he was in office, Singh held just three press conferences. His stock has risen in the age of Modi. But Modi’s spectacular triumph was enabled in no small part by Singh—a bureaucrat who never won any election in his life and yet was made prime minister.