Face it, Tiger...You just hit the jackpot!

Sonia Gandhi has stepped aside and Manmohan Singh, the former Finance Minister whose policies have brought First World middle-class standards of living to millions of Indians, has been named the next Prime Minister of India. I usually find that a little pessimistic skepticism early on saves a lot of heartbreak later, but I can't help but admit that I'm a little excited at the prospect of a Singh premiership. I may regret these words later but this could be comparable to watching Lee Kuan Yew take power in 1959. Take a look around the world and you'll see that most developing countries could do a hell of a lot worse than Manmohan Singh (and usually do).

Amy Waldman, "Sikh Who Saved India's Economy Is Named Premier," The New York Times, 20 May 2004.
Manmohan Singh, the gentlemanly Oxford-educated economist who saved India from economic collapse in 1991 and began the liberalization of its economy, has been appointed the country's next prime minister.
...
Mr. Singh, who is 71, is widely described as honest, intelligent and thoughtful. Perhaps the only bad word anyone has to say about him is that he is not a better politician.

"He's miserable at it," said Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist and a friend of Mr. Singh's since their days together at Cambridge.
....
Mr. Singh, who is 71, is widely described as honest, intelligent and thoughtful. Perhaps the only bad word anyone has to say about him is that he is not a better politician.

"He's miserable at it," said Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist and a friend of Mr. Singh's since their days together at Cambridge. Mr. Singh ran for Parliament in 1999 from south Delhi, and lost.

Ordinarily, that would doom him to fail in a job that is a largely political office, especially in the coalition government he will lead, and it still might. In a December interview in his office at Parliament's upper house, where he was leader of the opposition, Mr. Singh rued the decline in Indian governance due to the broadening of its political class beyond the middle class.

He has repeatedly expressed concern about "competitive populism" - politicians' instinct to promise goodies like free electrical power regardless of the ability to pay for them - and its effect on fiscal discipline and the country's economic health.

Now he will lead a cabinet containing some of those same populists, as well as Communist parties that have vowed to slow some reforms. During his stint as finance minister, he was accused of looking the other way during a host of corruption scandals, although his own integrity has not been questioned.

But in an arrangement unusual for the Congress Party, where one leader has typically dominated, Mrs. Gandhi will remain in charge of the party, leaving Mr. Singh freer to focus on governance. "He will be a technocrat, basically," Mr. Bhagwati said.

Still, Mr. Singh has learned, after more than a decade of stops and starts with reforms, that in a democracy, political compulsions must inevitably shape economic policy.*
....
"Even good things need to be sold in this modern age of marketing," he said in the December interview.
....
[In 1991, he] was called into urgent service by the prime minister then, P.V. Narasimha Rao, to extricate India from a balance-of-payments crisis. For the first time, India was on the verge of defaulting on its external debt obligations.

Mr. Singh quickly devalued the rupee, but in two stages, to avoid provoking political opposition. He lowered taxes and tariffs and began opening the economy to foreign investment and competition, all of which helped lay the foundation for the economic boom under way here.

*Now all we need is for the Bush administration and the anti-globalist movement to figure this out and we're golden!