The Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh turned 80 yesterday. He is the second oldest Prime Minister the country has had. Morarji Desai was the oldest. He became Prime Minister in 1977 at 81 and left office at 83 two years later.
Dr Manmohan Singh took over as the PM when he was 72. He would be 82 if he continues in office till 2014. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee took over as the Prime Minister when he was 74 and left office at 80 after the defeat of his party in the elections of 2004. If the BJP had been returned to power in the 2004 elections, he might have continued as the PM till the age of 85.
Rajiv Gandhi was the youngest Prime Minister in the history of independent India. He became Prime Minister when he was 40 and left office at 45 after his Congress Party lost the elections of 1989. His mother Indira Gandhi was the second youngest Prime Minister in the history of independent India. She became the PM at the age of 49 and was assassinated when she was 67 in 1984. For three years between 1977 and 1980, she was in political wilderness. The remaining years between 1966 and 1984, she was in office as the Prime Minister. The other Prime Ministers of India were in office between 50 and 70 years of age.
Till 1991, when Narasimha Rao, on being sworn in as the Prime Minister, inducted Dr Manmohan Singh as the finance minister, he had served as a bureaucrat and not as a politician. He joined the Congress after taking over as the Finance Minister in 1991. He enjoyed the total trust of Rao and was totally loyal to Rao.
Rao gave him a free hand to re-shape the economy and he performed the task creditably. His success as the finance minister between 1991 and 1996 was due to the fact that he and Rao were on the same wave-length on the need for liberalising and modernising the economy. He did not have to hold any important post in the party in order to be successful as the finance minister.
When he took over as the Prime Minister in 2004 at the request of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Dr Manmohan Singh faced many handicaps due to the fact that he had never held any post in the party and people like Mr Pranab Mukherjee under whom he had worked as a bureaucrat were now required to work under him as the Prime Minister. Initially, this created uneasy personal equations but he managed to get over them. Another major difficulty faced by him arose from the fact that the primary loyalty of the ministers from the Congress in his Council of Ministers was to Mrs Sonia Gandhi and not to him. There was and there still is no minister whose primary loyalty is to Dr Manmohan Singh.