Like the Jan Morcha in 1987, Yashwant Sinha’s Rashtra Manch has started off as an apolitical movement of ruling party outcasts and opposition leaders.
New Delhi: In 1987, Vishwanath Pratap Singh launched the Jan Morcha, riding the momentum to become Prime Minister of India within two years. Thirty years later, another former Union finance minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha seems to be trying to capture the same spirit by launching a forum called ‘Rashtra Manch’.
At the launch of the platform Tuesday, Sinha said it was not an organisation but a movement. “Anyone and everyone is free to join this movement and come together to raise the issues relevant to the nation today,” he said.
Sinha was joined by friend and BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha and a host of leaders from different parties – Ashutosh and Sanjay Singh from AAP, Dinesh Trivedi from the Trinamool Congress, Renuka Chowdhury of the Congress, Uday Narayan Choudhary and Pavan Verma of the JD(U), and former diplomat K.C. Singh, among others.
Genesis of Jan Morcha
On the face of it, there are interesting parallels between Sinha’s Rashtra Manch and V.P. Singh’s Jan Morcha.
In 1987, then defence minister Singh was suspended from the Rajiv Gandhi cabinet in the wake of the Bofors scandal. He had earlier served as finance minister as well; however, Singh had not endeared himself to the PM by conducting raids on top industrialists through the Enforcement Directorate in his time at the finance ministry.
After his suspension, Singh began working to create a forum that would challenge Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress. He invited all leaders who were expelled or felt ignored by the party.
On 25 June 1987, his birthday, a meeting was called at his residence on Sunehri Bagh Road in Lutyens’ Delhi. Former Congress minister Arif Mohammad Khan, who had resigned from the cabinet over the Shah Bano case, recalls: “I was invited by two leaders close to V.P. Singh, and so I went to the birthday meeting.” Another senior Congress leader, Arun Nehru, was also present at the meeting.
Under the leadership of Singh, the Jan Morcha was then formed as a non-political organisation that would aim to follow the basic principles and ideology of the Congress while fighting what was then the Congress (I). The morcha was apolitical because Singh was technically still part of the Congress, and forming a new party could have invited trouble under anti-defection laws.
Then, on 19 July 1987, Singh was officially expelled from the Congress, and began the process of formalising the Jan Morcha as a political outfit. Important state leaders like Odisha’s Biju Patnaik and Karnataka’s Ramkrishna Hegde volunteered to join. Khan says Singh’s name carried credibility, and everyone wanted to join him in the search for greener pastures.
On 27 July, the Jan Morcha became the Rashtriya Morcha, and Singh the consensus candidate to oppose Rajiv Gandhi for the PM’s post in the 1989 elections.
Sidelined Sinha
Yashwant Sinha did not contest the 2014 Lok Sabha elections; his Hazaribagh seat was offered to son Jayant Sinha, who is now a junior minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet.
The senior Sinha was sidelined, and remained largely silent for more than three years, only occasionally speaking about the problems in the party.
In September last year, Sinha broke his silence and wrote an article attacking the Modi government for its economic policies. Since then, he has been regularly invited by opposition leaders for book launches and other functions, where he minces no words in criticising Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah.
Shatrughan Sinha, in fact, is more consistent in attacking the party leadership, and it’s quite common to find both the senior leaders together, since the former Bollywood actor calls Yashwant Sinha his ‘older brother’.
Interesting parallels
Like V.P. Singh, Sinha is also planning to travel around the country. “I am going to Madhya Pradesh tomorrow to meet farmers. I have invitations from Gujarat, Bangalore and many other places,” he said.
However, Sinha refutes that there is any political motive behind this. “This is a political action group; we are not contemplating making it a political party as such,” he said.
Sinha was recently in Akola, Maharashtra, where he protested with farmers and was arrested too. His focus will be on the farm crisis and unemployment, the two things the opposition calls the big failures of the current government.
However, it’s still a long road ahead for Sinha to emulate Singh and become the opposition’s consensus candidate to take on Modi and Shah. For his part, Sinha is using his political maturity to keep his cards close to his chest.