“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” – Voltaire

Shortly before he demitted office as prime minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh said that history would judge him more generously than the media was then doing. Now, reading the outpouring of adulatory tributes to Singh after his passing, this historian is led to wonder – are these eulogies altogether merited? Was he the wise, all-knowing, and apparently flawless statesman that he is now being presented as?

There were three distinct phases to Manmohan Singh’s career: of a scholar, an economist in government and a politician. Most assessments have concentrated on the second phase, and especially on his tenure as finance minister, when he played a critical role in dismantling the license-permit-quota raj. The freeing of the Indian economy from the shackles of the state led to three decades of steady economic growth, a surge in entrepreneurship and a dent in mass poverty.

This is indeed a major achievement, for which Singh is being rightly praised, though one must not forget the support of his prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, who brought an unelected economist into the cabinet and gave him cover against hostile politicians (including some within the Congress Party). Working alongside Singh and under his direction were some extremely capable economists and civil servants, of the kind that run thinly on the ground in government today.

Manmohan Singh made his contributions as finance minister due to chance and contingency – to the facts that India faced a foreign exchange crisis, that Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination allowed Rao to become prime minister, that the first person Rao tapped for the job (IG Patel) declined.

On the other hand, his academic distinctions were entirely his own. One only has to contrast his personal trajectory with that of his Cambridge contemporaries, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, to appreciate the magnitude of what he achieved. Sen and Bhagwati were born into the intellectual aristocracy.

Sen came from a family of scholars close to Rabindranath Tagore – indeed, it was Tagore who named him “Amartya”. Bhagwati was the son of a justice of the Supreme Court. Their social privilege made Cambridge a natural destination. On the other hand, given his modest family background and the traumas he experienced during Partition, Singh was not supposed to get to a great Western university at all. Yet he did, obtaining the only First in Economics in his year at Cambridge before garnering a DPhil in Oxford as well.

Sen and Bhagwati have spent most of their careers abroad. Singh could have done so too, except that he chose to make his homeland his karmabhumi. He spent almost a decade as a university teacher in Punjab and Delhi, and a further decade-and-a-half working in government, holding such important posts as finance secretary, governor of the Reserve Bank, and deputy-chairman of the Planning Commission.

The recent tributes to Manmohan Singh have concentrated on his career as an economic reformer in government. While they have paid some attention to his work as a scholar and teacher, they have largely glossed over his political legacy. Between 1991 and 1996, Singh could be considered a policy economist who had strayed into politics; after 1996, however, he became a full-time politician. In this, the last of his vocations, it is the ten years he served as prime minister of India, between 2004 and 2014, that are of most significance.

Singh became finance minister through the benefaction of the then prime minister; and he became prime minister by accident too, through the benefaction of his party president, Sonia Gandhi. In his first term as prime minister, Singh acquitted himself moderately well. Having a secular-minded Sikh at the helm calmed the sectarian tensions that came in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat; the economy grew steadily, which helped fund social welfare programmes; research in basic science got a boost; and a civil nuclear deal with the United States of America was signed.

In the spring of 2009, I spent a month in New Delhi. I had a meeting with the prime minister; more importantly, I had conversations with people close to him, within and outside government. They all felt that, given his age and the fact that he had recently undergone heart surgery, Singh should honourably exit the public stage before the next general elections. One admirer did say that if Singh wished to stay in office, it would strengthen his credibility if he won a Lok Sabha seat (which he could easily have done, from Punjab).

In the event, Singh took a second term as prime minister while still serving in the Rajya Sabha. Even during this first term, sharp-eyed observers noted an undue deference to his party president. Now the deference became more extreme, and more injurious to his personal and political standing. Meanwhile, corruption allegations against his government began surfacing; while some allegations were largely spurious (such as those emanating from a tendentious Comptroller and Auditor General report), others perhaps had more substance.

As prime minister, Manmohan Singh was hesitant to exercise his authority against recalcitrant cabinet ministers. In his first term, he appointed a Knowledge Commission with some excellent members, yet allowed the Human Resource Development minister, Arjun Singh, to render it toothless.

In his second term, he gave Pranab Mukherjee an extended run as finance minister, in which Mukherjee diminished the standing in global markets that India had enjoyed, so much so that he was described as “the worst finance minister” since liberalisation began.

Manmohan Singh knew much more about scholarship than Arjun Singh, and of course had run a much better finance ministry than Mukherjee ever could. His timidity when confronted with a challenge in cabinet encouraged other ministers who had won Lok Sabha seats themselves (and who Singh perhaps feared had the ear of the Congress president) to be bolder in their defiance.

As he felt more beleaguered, Manmohan Singh responded by being even less of his own man. His silence on Rahul Gandhi’s publicly declaring that a government ordinance should be torn up was telling. Even more telling was his statement, made late in his second term, that he would be “very happy” to serve under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi. It was as if Singh felt that only abject displays of sycophancy would restore his standing within the party and government.

This was a tragic error of judgment. For the truth is that Sonia Gandhi owed Manmohan Singh as much as he may have owed her. Back in 2004 she knew that, having never worked in government herself, she was unfit to be prime minister. She knew she was incapable of conducting cabinet meetings, deciding on policy matters, or meeting foreign heads of state on equal terms. By taking on the mantle, Singh rescued her from much embarrassment.

However, after the United Progressive Alliance’s re-election in 2009, Sonia Gandhi became committed to doing all she could to making her underqualified son a future prime minister. And here was the serving prime minister, himself one of the most experienced public servants in the history of independent India, playing along with this delusion as best he could.

It is for future historians to judge how much Manmohan Singh’s public displays of helplessness helped Narendra Modi in his own campaign to become prime minister. Having witnessed a visibly weak and vulnerable prime minister, many voters were swayed by the rhetoric of someone who said he would be a strong and assertive leader instead. That Modi was from an underprivileged background, whereas the Congress had, with Manmohan Singh’s blessing, come out afresh as a Family First Party was also something that worked in the challenger’s favour.

Of course, what we have seen since 2014 is not authority but authoritarianism. There has been a steady erosion of our democratic and pluralistic credentials. The economy has underperformed, with rising inequalities and shrinking prospects for gainful employment. Encouraged by the prime minister, the home minister, and the Uttar Pradesh and Assam chief ministers, public discourse has plumbed ever lower depths with each passing year. And there has been an unprecedented ravaging of our natural environment.

It may be that the malevolence of the Modi years has encouraged the sensible, sensitive, liberal and democratic Indians who have chosen to write on Manmohan Singh to extol all the good that he did during the course of his public life and to ignore or euphemise the bad. There is little question that Singh’s scholarly achievements were impressive, and that his contributions as an economic reformer were both substantial and enduring. Yet his record as prime minister, and his political legacy more broadly, are decidedly more mixed.

In his second term especially, he unwittingly enabled the rise of authoritarianism in government and willingly perpetuated the culture of sycophancy and family privilege in India’s oldest political party.

Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.