Who should’ve been the weakest, but turned out to be most decisive Indian prime minister?

Illustration by Arindam Mukherjee | ThePrint

Think of a man who was prime minister for just seven months, three of which were as the head of a caretaker government.

A trick question on the politics of our lifetimes: who should have been the weakest prime minister in our history? Tricky, because of the twist here: and yet turned out act as if the strongest? I will offer you another clue: it’s a good question to ask on 8 July.

Think of a man who was prime minister for just seven months, three of which were as the head of a caretaker government. It left him effectively just four months in power, he only had a strength on 54 MPs in Lok Sabha, merely a scrawny tail while the dog (Congress) stayed outside the ring. And didn’t it wag spectacularly.

This prime minister took decisions those with full majorities and five-test terms would have found daunting. He allowed American military aircraft refuelling rights as they flew from their Indian Ocean bases (especially Diego Garcia) to participate in the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussain (to liberate Kuwait). Three full-term prime ministers after film have dithered over signing a military logistics support agreement with America. The Congress, in fact, had made a ruckus in parliament.

He sent out India’s gold by the planeload to avoid an external payments default. He brought Manmohan Singh back in the “system,” making reform easier subsequently. He introduced Yashwant Sinha in politics as his finance minister and let him prepare a reform blueprint. Like much else in his regrettably little known political life, there are hidden stories behind his finding these two long-distance runners. Yashwant Sinha remembers he first met Chandra Shekhar when both had gone to call in onKarpoori Thakur, a former chief minister of Bihar. Sinha, a Bihar cadre IAS officer and now joint secretary surface transport, was planning to leave and work in voluntary sector.

Little did he know that Chandra Shekhar had head-hunted him. He called him home, and lectured him: in an NGO, he could transform one village, may be a couple. But to bring about change on scale, he should join politics. Which Sinha did after working at the relief camps for Delhi’s Sikh victims of 1984, run by Chandra Shekhar and George Fernandes.

And from where did Manmohan Singh come? Sinha says Chandra Shekhar was concerned he had no Sikh in his cabinet and it was a sensitive gap. So he appointed Singh, just back from his tenure at South Commission as his chief economic adviser and made him a regular invitee in cabinet meetings. It made his elevation as finance minister seamless for P.V. Narasimha Rao just months later.

He presided over a most complicated transition and maintained stability in a period where many had imagined the worst in India. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated midway through the mid-term elections, caused by Congress withdrawing support to him — on the incredible excuse that he had sent two Haryana policemen to spy on the Gandhis!

I bet you’ve figured who we are talking about. 8 July is the death anniversary of Chandra Shekhar. He passed away this day in 2007.

File photo of Chandra Shekhar being interviewed a day after resigning | Robert Nickelsberg/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

In the 1991 elections, his slogan was “chalees saal banam char maheene” (40 years versus four months). The old socialist knew he had zero chance, but was compulsively cheeky. Kuldip Nayar said then, “Isn’t he speaking the truth? What the Congress fellows made in 40 years, his people may have made in four months!” With his parliamentary strength of about 54, and concentration of power in his own hands (he also kept home and defence ministries with himself), he gave his opponents a sitter of a slogan against him: Alibaba Aur Chalees Chor.

No, Chandra Shekhar was no angel. There was much about him that was wrong and rotten, from personal lifestyle, to political cynicism and to the empire he built in Village Bhondsi in Haryana (40 km from Delhi) in the name of his dodgy trust, some of it encroaching BSF land. But he was a born leader with a spine, ideology and finally the intellect to be flexible.

In his few months, he was a stronger prime minister than most, in our post-Indira history. Ask Saifuddin Soz. When his daughter was kidnapped by Kashmiri separatists, Chandra Shekhar made a cold call to Nawaz Sharif and asked him persuasively but firmly to make sure she was sent back home safely. There was no on-the-one-hand/on-the-other hand business with him. He was among the most prime ministerial of our prime ministers who made his mark in a short term, with the strength of less than 10% in Lok Sabha.

Having tided over an election broken into two by Rajiv’s assassination, initiating a robust probe, and handing over power to Narasimha Rao’s minority government, he retired into a comfortable — if colourful — personal life. Never to be a nuisance to friend or foe, but a buddy to all. Generally constructive, helpful, oozing good counsel.

I had seen and heard him as a firebrand young socialist, leading the campaign against Indira Gandhi post-Emergency when I was still a journalism student. He had started as a Lohiaite, gravitated to Congress as Indira turned socialist, then led a four-member hunger group of Young Turks questioning her — the other three being Krishan Kant, Mohan Dharia and Ram Dhan. All four were expelled and jailed by her during the Emergency. He had an unfulfilled political lure subsequently. He believed V.P. Singh, a “hypocrite” in his view, had stolen the adulation that should have been his.

I got to know him mostly in his past-prime ministerial phase, when he had the time and patience. I went to see him several times when he was battling an excruciatingly painful form of multiple myeloma. Even in that state, he would fret endlessly over what he saw as the most dangerous trend in our politics: leaders of various parties no longer talking to each other.

The BJP and the Congress have stopped talking, he would say. The Left won’t talk to the BJP anyway, and Lalu and Mulayam stay clear of each other, as do Mulayam and Mayawati. Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa won’t even greet each other. “This is no way to run India’s politics. It wasn’t like this even when the Emergency ended and so many of us came out of Indira’s prisons,” he said when I dropped by to check on his health in February, 2007.

He was happy the NDA had got defeated in 2004, and that Sonia Gandhi had decided “wisely and magnanimously” not to become prime minister, as it would have divided India and embittered its politics. But even a veteran like him was completely foxed by how polarised the Parliament had become. At this rate, he said, it might just become impossible to build another coalition in 2009. What is the point of building a V.P. Singh or Gowda kind of coalition that will be brought down within months, more by personal antagonism than by ideological differences?

In the bitterest of times in the past, he said, the consultative process between the political parties and serious players had not broken down. Most importantly, social graces, “subeh shaam ka uthna-baithna” (social and family contact) as he put it, were never lost. But now, he was dismayed by how divided the polity had become. He said he did not exactly know where the talks with Pakistan or the US on the nuclear issue were headed but he trusted this government to look after India’s interests as well as anybody else. But will they be able to settle anything unless they take the NDA along?

Many biographical tributes have been written since to the man who, more than being an accidental prime minister, will be remembered as one of the last great titans of the Indira era who was both a destroyer and conciliator at the same time. I am not qualified to write another. May be Yashwant Sinha or Subramanian Swamy (he was commerce and law minister in Chandra Shekhar’s cabinet) should write something.

I wasn’t covering national politics in his heyday and had got to know him only lately, because he had more time, and if you were curious to learn about Indian politics there wasn’t a better tutor. For years now, he had had a detached view of politics, with no stakes of his own except his Lok Sabha seat in Ballia which, it seems, all other parties conspired to leave alone for him. He was too much of a character, too warm and individual and, more recently, too harmless a politician to have been kept out of Parliament.

He had seen India’s evolution from socialism to a free market economy. In fact he started that process, in a manner of speaking, as he had inherited a bankrupt exchequer from V.P. Singh. He knew socialism of the kind he had believed in, closer to JP’s rather than Indira’s, was now passe. But he was never bitter. He acknowledged the fact that all old socialists, including committed Lohiaites, had accepted that reality now. But only if Mulayam, Lalu, Mayawati and Nitish would somehow come together! He’d be pleased by the latest turns in those equations now.

The last time I called on him, he joked about how times had changed with India’s economy.

There was a time, he said, when foreign exchange was so short, he had to mortgage India’s gold reserves. “Now they say they have too much foreign exchange, so much that they don’t know what to do with it, so will they send it out by the plane-load, or what?” But not for a moment did he see this as some kind of defeat for his long-held socialist beliefs. He only laughed like a child from his bed, tubes and all.

Chandra Shekhar was probably the last of the greats in our politics who had seen the picture from all sides, and represented a generation of very tough, but very flexible leaders that fought yet networked — and partied — with everybody.

Postscript: Chandra Shekhar left me with a mystery that only Sonia Gandhi can resolve now. He had said to me, as Atal Bihari Vajpayee crossed paths with Sonia Gandhi in Rashtrapati Bhawan after losing in 2004, he had affectionately advised her not to become prime minister. Atalji’s view, he said, was “anarth ho jayega,” (it will be a blunder) as nobody will accept it and let her rule. I subsequently asked Vajpayee if this was true. Typical if him, he twisted his eyebrows and asked who had told me. I said Chandra Shekhar. “Bahut shaitan hain woh,” is all he said, not committing. Chandra Shekhar is gone, Vajpayee silenced. Only Sonia has the answer now.