Manmohan Singh becomes Prime Minister

Who: Dr Manmohan Singh, the Oxford-educated economist who, as finance minister, drafted the 1991 budget that opened India to the free market. Born in Gah, in what is now Pakistan, he came to India with his family at Partition. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress leader, declined the post and named him.

What: He took the oath as Prime Minister at Rashtrapati Bhavan on 22 May 2004. The Tribune called him the first Prime Minister from the minority Sikh community, heading the first Congress-led coalition government. President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam swore in the council of ministers, 68 members counting the Prime Minister. He served until 2014.

Where: New Delhi.

Why it mattered: A Sikh at the head of the government was a first, and it came twenty years after Operation Blue Star and the Ghallughara of November 1984. On 11 August 2005 he told the Rajya Sabha: "I bow my head in shame", apologising to the Sikh community and the nation. He said the Nanavati Commission's findings rebutted the charge that top Congress leaders were involved, and promised to reopen cases wherever the law allowed. Parkash Singh Badal said Sonia Gandhi should have apologised, and the SGPC's general secretary said resignations by Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar would not be enough.

The prosecutions that followed were slow. Human Rights Watch reports that the CBI cleared Tytler in 2007 and again in 2009, and The Tribune reports that a trial court acquitted Sajjan Kumar in April 2013 in a Delhi Cantonment case. Al Jazeera reports that the Delhi High Court convicted Sajjan Kumar and sentenced him to life in December 2018, more than four years after Singh left office.