Manmohan Singh, 66 Other Ministers Sworn In

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The oath was administered by President A P J Abdul Kalam in the Ashoka Hall of Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Manmonhan Singh become the 6th Prime Minister belonging to the Congress party since 1947.

Along with Dr Singh, 66 others took oath of office as ministers in the new government in an hour and 45 minutes-long ceremony.

Among the first cabinet ministers to be sworn in were senior Congress party figures Pranab Mukherjee, Arjun Singh and P Chidambaram.

Other cabinet ministers include Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar and Laloo Prasad Yadav, the maverick leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RDD) party in Bihar

As many as six former Prime Ministers of the country - Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P V Narasimha Rao, H D Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral and Atal Behari Vajpayee were among the top dignitaries who attended the ceremony.

Pranab Mukherjee (Congress, West Bengal), Arjun Singh (Congress, Madhya Pradesh), Sharad Pawar (Nationalist Congress Party, Maharashtra), Laloo Prasad Yadav (Rashtriya Janata Dal , Bihar), Shivraj Patil (Congress, Maharashtra), Ram Vilas Paswan (LJP, Bihar), Ghulam Nabi Azad (Congress, Jammu &Kashmir), S Jaipal Reddy (Congress, AP), Sisram Ola (Congress, Rajasthan), P Chidambaram (Congress, Tnadu), Mahavir Prasad (Congress, UP), P R Kyndiah (Congress, Meghalaya), T R Baalu (DMK, TN), Shankarsinh Vaghela (Congress, Gujarat), Natwar Singh (Congress, Raj), Kamal Nath (Congress, MP), H R Bharadwaj (Congress), and Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi (Congress, West Bengal) also took the oath as cabinet ministers.

Manmohan Singh became premier after Congress leader Sonia Gandhi's shock refusal to accept the post, despite winning the election.

Saturday's ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi capped a week of drama following the Congress-led alliance's surprise election victory.

Dr. Singh, a respected economist credited with launching the country's reform programme, has spent the last few days trying to decide on the shape of the new government.

There has been intense haggling over the top posts between the Congress party and more than a dozen allied parties.

Countrys Communist parties decided not to join the Congress-led government. But their support for Congress has led to unease in the markets - with huge swings over the last week as investors waited for news of the make-up of the government and its economic policies.

Dr. Singh has said the main task of his government is to reduce poverty, and continue economic reform. He also wants to push the peace process with Pakistan.

International reaction to the change of government has been positive, and Islamabad welcomed Dr. Singh's statement on improving relations.

With Manmohan Singh becoming the Prime Minister of the India, two decades after country's minority Sikhs were targeted by rioting mobs during a Congress government, the wounds have seemed to have healed between the community and India's grand old party.

Sikhs assassinated Indira Gandhi after she ordered the Golden Temple attack.

Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the riots that were sparked by the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984.

She had ordered a raid on Sikhism's holiest shrine in Amritsar in Punjab to flush out separatist militants who had taken refuge there.

For the Sikhs, who make up nearly 3% of India's population of over a billion, the assault was a grave psychological blow. In the run-up to the raid, Punjab had been wracked by militancy that began in 1981 and lasted for nearly a decade. Several thousand people lost their lives.

All that looks like a bad dream now with the elevation of Manmohan Singh - a Sikh from Punjab - as the new prime minister of India.

"The alienation between the Sikhs and Congress is a distant memory now. The ground realities are very different today," analyst Mahesh Rangarajan told BBC News Online.

Though there are many Sikhs who still feel bitter about the way they were targeted after Indira Gandhi's assassination and the Congress' "inaction" in quelling the riots, the deep distrust that once existed between the community and the party no longer exists.

One reason is the sheer length of time which has elapsed since the horrific riots of 1984, when Sikhs were singled out to be lynched and torched to death in public.

Militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was killed in the storming of the Golden Temple.

"Time is a great healer, and it has done the same to the relationship between Congress and the Sikhs," said Punjab-based political scientist Professor PS Verma.

"With time, the antagonism between the Congress party and the Sikh community has healed.Now the appointment of Manmohan Singh, the process of reconciliation, inevitably, will get a big push," he said.

The wounds have been actually healing over the last decade. Though Sikhs were excluded from the bodyguards of one-time Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, India has had a Sikh president and a home minister, both with roots in Congress party since Indira Gandhi's murder.

The antagonism between the Sikhs and Congress - more specifically the Gandhi family - lost some of its steam. No member of India's first family participated in active politics between 1991, after the killing of Rajiv Gandhi and 1998, when Sonia Gandhi became the party chief.

Interestingly, the Congress' fortunes began picking up in the early 1990s in the northern Sikh majority state of Punjab, which had been the epicentre of the separatist militancy.

This was despite the overwhelming dominance of Punjab's regional Akali Dal party, which has been consistently critical of what they describe as the Congress' "insensitivity and mistreatment" of the Sikhs.

In 1993, barely a decade after the pogrom, the Congress swept the village council polls in Punjab - the turnout of voters was as high as 82%. Six years later, in the 1999 general elections, the Congress party led in Punjab over its formidable Akali Dal rivals.

Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi also played her role in the reconciliation process. After taking charge of the party in 1998, she went around Sikh places of worship - gurdwaras - in Delhi apologising for the riots. "I feel this kind of incident should not have happened," Sonia Gandhi told the Sikhs. "And my husband Rajiv Gandhi felt the same."

Two years ago, the Congress convincingly won the state elections in Punjab, dislodging the Akali Dal from power. The state continues to have a Congress-led government.

"The Congress was not an untouchable any more for the vast majority of Sikhs, as it was for many years after the raid on the holiest shrine," said analyst Yogendra Yadav. "The election also signalled a return to normal politics in Punjab, where questions of development and interest fulfilment were taking centre stage - thus displacing questions of identity, alienation and terrorism that dominated its politics for well over a decade," he said.

Surveys reveal that Sikhs in the capital Delhi, which saw most of the rioting in 1984 and has a substantially large community population, began voting for the Congress heavily from the 1998 general elections.

With Manmohan Singh in charge, analysts think the gap between the Sikh community and Congress will narrow. So much so that in the recent general elections, Congress mopped up six of the seven parliamentary seats in Delhi. This was despite the fact that the party had fielded two candidates, including a former minister, who were indicted for their involvement in the riots, and later acquitted by the courts.

In fact, Punjab's Akali Dal party had appealed to all Sikhs in the Congress to quit the party as it was "brutally insensitive" and insulted the Sikhs by deciding to field the two candidates who were "the butchers of innocent Sikhs".

The Akali Dal's campaign is not entirely political rhetoric  it reflects the sentiments of a smaller section of Sikhs who still remain bitter with the Congress and feel that it did not do enough to punish the rioters.

Manmohan Singh's appointment in India's top job will now further bridge the gap between the community and the party, analysts believe. "It will make a big difference, make no mistake about it," said Verma. "The few lingering doubts that remain within a section of Sikhs about the Congress party now should largely disappear," he added.

FATHER OF REFORMS: It is worth mentioning here that the designate Prime Minister is known as the father of economic reforms. In the last five years, somewhere in the haze of India's rapid economic growth and the glowing corporate performance, the spotlight turned away from one man who years ago had changed the way India's economy moved.

As finance minister in Narasimha Rao's government of the nineties, Manmohan Singh was the man who ushered in the reforms that liberalized India's economy, changing the fundamental way that in corporate India thinks and with it the lives of millions of middle class Indians.

Manmohan Singh is an accomplished economist and had spent much of his career as a bureaucrat -- he was even the Governor of Reserve Bank of India from 1982-85 -- before he got inducted into politics and into Rao's cabinet as the finance minister.In the 1991, when Singh became the finance minister, India's economy was in a shambles. The country had an unsustainable fiscal deficit of close to 8.5 per cent of the gross domestic product -- almost double of what it is currently.There was a huge balance of payments deficit. The current account deficit was close to 3.5 per cent of GDP and there were no foreign lenders who were willing to finance it.

India had barely a billion dollars in terms of foreign exchange reserves -- roughly equal to two weeks' imports (today forex reserves stand at over $118 billion). In short the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The healing process begins Manmohan Singh slowly started the process of restructuring the economy. By 1994, when he presented his historic budget, the economy was well on its way to recovery. Yet he ploughed ahead instituting deep changes in the institutions of the country.

He went to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and told him that India needed a strong vision to take it forward. "I said to him it is possible that we will still collapse, but there is a chance that if we take bold measures we may turn around, and that, I said, is an opportunity. We must convert this crisis into an opportunity to build a new India, to do things which many people before us have thought and said should be done, but somehow were never done," said Singh in an interview to PBS in 2001.

Premier Rao backed Manmohan Singh to the hilt and India embarked on a path of reforms. Under Singh, that year, the government of India entered into an understanding with the Reserve Bank of India to deny itself the right to 'draw' on the RBI to fund its deficit. This put paid to the unlimited monetisation of fiscal deficit, and was a historic step.

Looking back, Singh says that when he stood up in Parliament stating the case for reforms his argument was that in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, it was time to think big rather than 'tighten the belt.' "We could, in a traditional way, tighten our belt, and we did that, tighten and tighten. But persistence on that path would have led to more misery, more unemployment, and I said there is an alternative path.

Stabilisation plus a credible structural adjustment programme would shorten the period of misery. It would release the innovative spirit, [the] entrepreneurial spirits which were always there in India in [such] a manner that our economy would grow at a much faster pace, sooner than most people believed. That's exactly what happened," said Manmohan Singh in that interview.

During his speech in Parliament while presenting the Budget in 1994-95, he quoted Victor Hugo: "No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come."His dream was that in a crisis India should undertake basic structural changes, which would lead to the emergence of a new country that would become a major global player in the world economy.

Manmohan Singh started the process of simplification and rationalisation of the tax system. Many controls and regulation on the industry were removed, which meant the death of the Permit Raj and a free rein to entrepreneurs. The result was that productivity in the Indian industry grew like never before.

Manmohan Singh holds an M.A., D.Phil. (Oxford), D.Litt.(Honoris Causa); I.N.C.(Assam). He was born in Gah, West Punjab, on September 26, 1932 to Gurmukh Singh and Gursharan Kaur.After the Congress was voted out of power, Manmohan Singh kept a rather low profile, though he was the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Always a quiet, unassuming personality, out of the spotlight Singh faded into the background.

Except when his name began to be tossed around as an alternative to the position of the prime minister to those who could not accept Sonia Gandhi. Manmohan Singh himself never said a word about his ambitions or aspirations and has pretty much been a loyal supporter of the Gandhi family.

On matters political, Singh has always remained quiet -- both during his stint as finance minister and out of power. His only indulgence in the last two years has been to comment on the Budget.

Last year's budget (2003-04) put forth by Jaswant Singh came under severe criticism by Singh who termed it a budget of 'tokenisms.'Manmohan Singh felt that Jaswant Singh, the finance minister, had refused to address the basic problems facing the economy in terms of eradication of poverty, infrastructure development, agriculture development and fiscal consolidation.

* FOLLOWING ARE THE MINISTERS:

" Cabinet Ministers: Pranab Mukherjee, Arjun Singh, Pawar, Laloo, Shivraj Patil, Paswan, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Jaipal Reddy, Sisram Ola, Chidambaram, Mahaveer Prasad, P R Kyndia, T R Baalu, Vaghela, Natwar Singh, Kamal Nath, H R Bharadwaj, P M Sayeed, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, P R Dasmunshi, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Sunil Dutt, Meira Kumar, K Chandrasekhar Rao, Shibu Soren, A Raja, Dayanidhi Maran, Ramadoss.

Ministers of state (Independent Chrage): Jagdish Tytler, Oscar Fernandes, Renuka Choudhary, Subodh Kant Sahay, Kapil Sibal, Vilas Muttemwar, Kumari Selja, Praful Patel, Premchand Gupta.

Ministers of state: E Ahamed, Suresh Pachauri, V K Hande, P Laxmi, Dasari Narayanrao, Shakeel Ahmad, Indrajit Singh, Narayanbhai Ratwa, A Rehman Khan, K Muniappa, M V Rajashekharan, Kantilal Bhuria, Manikrao Gavit, Shriprakash Jaiswal, Prithviraj Chauhan, Taslimuddin, Suryakanta Patil, M Fatmi, A Narendra, R Velu, Elangovan, Akhilesh Singh.

· THE LIST OF OUR PRIME MINISTERS SO FAR:

1) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru2) Lal Bahadur Shastri3) Indira Gandhi 4) Morarji Desai 5) Chaudhry Charan Singh 6) Rajiv Gandhi 7) Vishwanath Pratap Singh 8) Chandra Shekhar 9) P V Narasimha Rao 10) H D Deve Gowda 11) Inder Kumar Gujral 12) Atal Behari Vajpayee 13) Dr. Manmohan Singh.