Dyaneshwar Gawade
IN an embarrassing blunder, a leading Pakistani economic institute invited “President of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Manmohan Singh” to preside over its annual convocation next week, a media report said on Friday.
According to a local newspaper ‘Dunya News’ the PIDE official invitation issued showed Manmohan Singh printed in place of Mamnoon Hussain, thus declaring the former Indian premier as president of Pakistan.
Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), located in the capital, is holding its convocation on October 28 and wanted to invited president of the country Mamnoon Hussain to preside over the event.
The blunder was later identified and corrected but it was already too late and the official invitation had been dispatched to several high-profile VIP guests.
Who is Manmohan Singh
Manmohan Singh an Indian Economist and 14th prime minister of India- served from 2004 to 2014. The first Sikh in office, Singh was the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term.
Born on September 26, 1932 in Gah (now in Punjab, Pakistan), Singh’s family migrated to India during its partition in 1947. After obtaining his doctorate in economics from Oxford, Singh worked for the United Nations in 1966–69. He subsequently began his bureaucratic career when Lalit Narayan Mishra hired him as an advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Over the 70s and 80s, Singh held several key posts in the Government of India, such as Chief Economic Advisor (1972–76), Reserve Bank governor (1982–85) and Planning Commission head (1985–87).