Quotes of the Day

A Prime Minister's first 100 days in office are supposed to be a honeymoon. Things haven't worked out that way for India's Manmohan Singh—and it shows. At his official New Delhi residence, the Prime Minister greets visitors with a kindly but harried expression. In an exclusive interview with TIME, he answers questions in a shy voice, shifting in his seat. His eyes look tired and bloodshot, and his gaze bounces around the room, perhaps betraying the toll India's top job has taken on him.

The pressure began from the day in May when Singh's Congress Party boss, Sonia Gandhi, announced after the party's surprise general-election victory that she would forswear the Prime Minister's office. Gandhi, to cool protests over her Italian origins, handed the job to the gentlemanly 71-year-old Singh, an economist who has never won an election. Since then, Singh has labored under the perception that he is Gandhi's puppet, a political lightweight—and in Indian politics, that's like having a bull's-eye painted on your kurta. His right-wing opposition has attempted to take full advantage, aided by summer floods and droughts, rising inflation and slowing economic growth; on his other flank, Singh's Communist partners in Parliament have pushed their own agenda.

If that wasn't enough pressure, this week Singh meets Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. There, a senior Indian official tells TIME, Singh will make an offer to help defuse South Asia's most dangerous flash point, Kashmir. India, says the official, will offer to "adjust" the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, "by a matter of miles" eastward. Indian analysts confirm that the offer has been under discussion, in India and with Pakistan's leadership, for months—even under the government that preceded Singh's. The official says its formal presentation in New York is a result of Singh's instruction that his foreign-affairs team think "out of the box" on Kashmir "to get a solution, and soon."

A senior Musharraf aide warns that in his experience "there is more sound than substance" to India's negotiations. But he confirms that a "territorial adjustment ... is one idea being broached" and that it is an idea in which "in the past, as in the present, we have shown interest."

A senior Pakistani foreign-affairs official likewise acknowledges that a "more productive agenda" is on the table for the New York meeting. "We want to make things happen there," he says. "We want implementable ideas. We have spoken to the Indians on this score, and hopefully the meeting will break new ground in Kashmiri diplomacy."

Diplomacy is all about timing, and Singh has chosen an interesting moment for his offer. Kashmiri militants in Pakistan say that Musharraf's government, under pressure from Washington, has suspended supplying them with training, funds and weapons. Indian intelligence reports that August—usually a bloody month in Kashmir—saw a drop in guerrilla arrivals from 303 in August 2003 to 62 this year. "They [Pakistan's military-intelligence service] were our fathers," laments a commander from the Lashkar-e-Toiba group. "They are with us no more." India's main demand of Pakistan in Kashmir is that Islamabad stop Islamic-militant infiltrations over the border. On its side, Pakistan insists on its inalienable right to the Muslim territories inside Indian Kashmir. For the first time in memory, both sides appear to be offering some of what the other wants. But however timely Singh's initiative might appear, his home audience might react very differently from diplomats in New York. Indian analysts have long warned that anything but a hard-line stance on Kashmir from a Congress government risks handing the Hindu right and its extremist allies a heaven-sent opportunity to accuse the foreign-born Gandhi of selling out the country.

So the key question about Singh has changed. At the start of his time in office, analysts were asking if he was a placeholder or a real Prime Minister. As Singh prepares to leave for New York, they now wonder if he has the vision plus the political street smarts to pursue peace with Pakistan without touching off political chaos at home. As he contemplates his position, Singh won't say he is enjoying himself. "The summit," he says, "is always lonely." But for now, it is his. Singh has become his own man.

Manmohan Singh has one particular attribute that marks him as the leader India has always needed and wanted. He's honest. In the 1980s, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once observed that out of every rupee his government spent, only 12 paisa, or cents, reached the people. (That was before Rajiv himself got embroiled in a weapons-for-kickbacks scandal.) Today, antigraft watchdog Transparency International, in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, ranks India 83 out of 133 countries, on a par with Malawi and Romania, and stories about "scams" are the stock-in-trade of political reporters across the land. But the tales they tell about Singh are quite the opposite, stressing his integrity and humility. Columnist and novelist Khushwant Singh relates that he once lent his fellow Sikh thousands of dollars for his 1996 campaign for the Indian Parliament; when Singh lost, he returned the money, saying, "I didn't know you had given this. Please take it back." The New Delhi cocktail circuit is agog with stories of how Singh answers his own telephone; how he drives home daily for a simple vegetarian lunch with his wife, Gursharan Kaur; how, having promised Gandhi his silence when she first offered him the premiership, he let Kaur learn about his new post from the television; and how he has dispensed with the wailing, gun-toting police jeeps that usually announce a Prime Minister's progress through the streets of the capital. Fellow economist Professor Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, who has been a friend of Singh's since their days as undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, has his own favorite story. Last year, when Singh's daughter Amrit applied to Columbia for a doctoral fellowship, says Bhagwati, he "never even mentioned it to me." In other words, Singh refused to pull any strings. "He must be the only father in India who wouldn't make that call," says Bhagwati. "He's just a really good man."

In India, a man with such integrity can easily be dismissed as too nice for politics. "In 50 years," says Bhagwati, "I've never heard him say anything mean about anybody." Asked whether he can play rough, Singh replies: "I hope I'm firm enough without being nasty. I know where to draw the line." His press handlers deny a charisma problem but acknowledge that Singh's image needs hardening. Accordingly, last month Singh embarked on a publicity drive to try to show that he is "cool and polite, but there is steel, too," according to National Security Adviser and friend J.N. Dixit. Singh held a well-attended press conference, a normal event anywhere else in the world but unusual in India. His press office has been pushing a line proclaiming the emergence of a new "firm, assertive, confident" Singh, as the cover of Outlook newsmagazine declared this month.

And then there is the Incident of the File that was Slapped Rather Hard on the Desk. Last month, the leaders of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took to the Prime Minister's office a list of proposed changes to the national budget. Singh, who had watched the same leaders paralyze Parliament with protests and walkouts and kill any hope of a budget discussion, refused to accept it. Reports vary on what happened next. Singh may have dropped the opposition papers on the table or slammed them down or even tossed them back. Outraged BJP leaders immediately summoned the press and erupted with fury at Singh's bad manners. "In my 50 years of political life," blustered former Defense Minister George Fernandes in remarks that ran across the front pages for days, "I have never undergone such an experience." Singh's managers were delighted; suddenly their man had a temper. Still, not everyone is convinced by the make-over. "His people can try to dress him up, but he is just not assertive," says Ajai Sahni, director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management. "It's just not in his character. And politics is not his forum."

According to Indian lore, temper is one thing Singh should have in spades. India's Sikhs are regarded by their compatriots as headstrong, quick to anger and the butt of a thousand jokes. Singh shatters that myth, although he is certainly a product of his upbringing. Sikhism, born 500 years ago as a reaction to the Hindu caste system, has a strong egalitarian streak. And Gah, a Sikh-run village perched on the edge of dusty ravines in what is now northern Pakistan, provides insight into Singh's politics. The future Prime Minister spent 15 years in Gah before his family fled to India during the partition of 1947. His former classmates recall the village as a tough but proudly self-sufficient place, with no roads, electricity or running water, and where community and teamwork cut across religious and class barriers. They say Singh was a quiet and studious boy who, conscious of the relative prosperity of his merchant father, shared dried apricots, peanuts and almonds in the village's two-room school. "That was the way, back then," says Mohammed Ali, 72. "Everyone helped each other."

For Singh, memories of his childhood are still sharp. "We had only a small primary school," he says. "It leaked, so when it rained we had a holiday. I saw a lot of poverty there. I know a lot of families who lost their dear ones to infectious diseases." Singh says his background instilled in him a desire to understand "why some countries are poor and some rich." Through a series of scholarships, he went on to study economics at Cambridge and Oxford before a career as an academic and technocrat. Gah continues to inform his beliefs. "The biggest problem of India is to get rid of chronic poverty and infectious disease, which still afflict millions and millions," he says, when asked for his policy priorities. The consensus on May's election result is that the right-wing BJP was thrown out of office on a wave of rural resentment at India's roaring but uneven, city-centric growth. Spurred by this mandate, Singh has committed his government to "reform with a human face."

But Singh is above all a pragmatist. He became Finance Minister in 1991 at a time of crisis: India was in danger of defaulting on its debt and had twice turned to the International Monetary Fund to bail it out. He accelerated the free-market reforms that would earn him a reputation as the father of India's economic growth. Lawrence Summers, now president of Harvard University, worked closely with then Finance Minister Singh when he was chief economist of the World Bank and a top U.S. Treasury official. "It's not that he has an ideological commitment to capitalism rather than socialism," Summers says. "If anything, the opposite. But he has a pragmatic attachment to the best way to get things done, and that, to my mind, made him one of the most important figures of the 1990s." Today Singh is focusing on modernizing India's decrepit and inefficient infrastructure through public-private partnerships, cutting state subsidies on utilities and attracting more foreign investment in an effort to spur that growth to his target 7-8% for the next five years. But he knows that he must temper liberalization so as to satisfy the rural poor, who have yet to benefit from trickle-down wealth, and his Communist allies in Parliament. After taking office, he quickly announced that profitable state companies would not be privatized and that there would be a new focus on agriculture.

This flexibility, plus his position in the middle of India's religious puzzle—he is a Sikh with a fondness for Urdu poetry—gives observers hope on Kashmir. In a situation in which rigid, competing territorial claims work against a settlement acceptable to both sides, the key thing is to keep talking so as to drain the heat from the issue. In this context, says the Institute for Conflict Management's Sahni, Singh is a "safer bet" than former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was given to dramatic, inconsistent pronouncements. "Singh may inspire little excitement," says Sahni, "but what he puts on the table will be sustainable." Adds Brahma Chellaney, professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi: "What we're talking about is managing the problem, not solving it, and in that he's as good as anyone." In his interview with TIME, Singh was modest about his expectations for next week's meeting with Musharraf. "Getting to know each other is important," he said. "But we are willing to discuss all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, and find solutions rooted in ground realities."

On the Pakistani side of the border, some doubt Singh has the dynamism to be a dealmaker. A former militant says: "Any Indian concession to Pakistan over Kashmir would disturb India's domestic politics and may even threaten its breakup." Adds Humayun Gauhar, editor of Islamabad-based Blue Chip magazine: "Manmohan Singh won't be able to sell a solution. Whatever [it is], it will be unpopular, and you need a strong man to make unpopular decisions. He's not born to make history."

Is that judgment fair? Singh turns 72 this month, and National Security Adviser Dixit admits that Singh is feeling the strain from "working too hard." One friend says Singh told him he felt lonely and isolated in the Prime Minister's office. But at his press conference, Singh told reporters: "This misconception that I can be pressured into giving up is simply not going to materialize." Indeed, after a difficult start, there is a sense that Singh is quietly developing real stature. Summers predicts Singh's profile can only grow, adding that in the time they worked together, Singh gradually emerged as a unifying figure of trust. "There's winning the fight," Summers says, "and transcending the battle. Manmohan's way is more the second." Or, as friend Bhagwati puts it: "He rises above all the crap. He's not a typical politician at all." And that, India is beginning to realize, may be just what the country needs.

• Alex Perry | New Delhi
• Manmohan Singh is pragmatic, honest—and starting to show some steel as Prime Minister of India