Ending a decade at the helm, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Saturday submitted his resignation to President Pranab Mukherjee, a day after the BJP routed the Congress in the Lok Sabha election.
Manmohan Singh was the prime minister at the head of a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government since 2004.
He went to Rashtrapati Bhavan to submit his resignation in the afternoon after meeting his cabinet for the last time.
At the cabinet meeting, all the ministers passed motions of thanks for the prime minister for helming the nation for a decade.
The prime minister, in turn, also passed a motion of thanks for his cabinet colleagues.
In the morning, Manmohan Singh gave a televised farewell address to the nation where he acknowledged his debt to the country that empowered him, "an underprivileged child of partition", to occupy the high office of prime minister and said he had tried to do his best in serving the country.
He said the just concluded national election, in which the Congress suffered its worst defeat, "deepened the foundations of our democratic polity" and its judgement should be respected by all.
He said: "India is a far stronger country in every respect than it was a decade ago."
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