Singh and his colleagues were able to convince us that in a post-socialist, market-led economy, we, too, would be free to chase our dreams. With education and hard work, our lives, too, would be vastly better than our parents’; upward mobility would no longer be an exclusive preserve of the privileged. Through the 1990s, the reform project stayed on track even as governments changed. But the promise started to fray during Singh’s second term as prime minister.…