Left parties condole former PM Manmohan Singh's death

New Delhi, Dec 27 (PTI) Left parties on Thursday night condoled the death of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, calling him a leader with strong commitment to secularism.
     "We express our sorrow at the death of Former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. He was a leader with a strong commitment to secularism, democracy and the pluralist ethos of India," Communist Party of India (Marxist) said in a post on X.
     "We express our deep condolences to his wife Smt. Gursharan Kaur, his daughters and family," the Left party said.
     Meanwhile, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya recalled the former prime minister's remarks that "history would be kinder" to him.
     "He was grilled for scams that would never be proved, for his reticence that'd be held against him as a sign of weakness. But today India will perhaps agree to his 2014 remark: 'history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media'," Bhattacharya said in a post on X.
     Singh, the architect of India's economic reforms and a consensus builder in the rough world of politics, died here on Thursday night. He was 92.
     His death was announced by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, where he was admitted in the Emergency ward around 8.30 PM in a critical condition.
     Months before he demitted office as prime minister in 2014, Singh had famously asserted that his leadership was not weak and history would be kinder to him than what the media projected at that time.
     Addressing a press conference here in January 2014, in what was one of his last media interactions, Singh had said, "I do not believe that I have been a weak Prime Minister ... I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the Opposition in Parliament... Given the political compulsions, I have done the best I could do."

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)