Vishwanath Pratap Singh


Vishwanath Pratap Singh was an Indian politician who was the 7th Prime Minister of India from 1989 to 1990.
Born in a zamindari family, he was educated at the Allahabad University and Pune University. In 1969, he joined the Indian National Congress party and was elected as a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. In 1971, he became a Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha. He served as the Minister of Commerce from 1976 to 1977. In 1980, he became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
In the Rajiv Gandhi ministry, Singh was given various cabinet posts, including Minister of Finance and Minister of Defence. During his tenure as Minister of Defence, the Bofors scandal came to light, and Singh resigned from the ministry. In 1988, he formed the Janata Dal party by merging various factions of the Janata Party. In the 1989 elections, the National Front, with the support of the BJP, formed the government and Singh became the 7th Prime Minister of India.
During his tenure as prime minister, he implemented the Mandal Commission report for India's backward castes. Following his opposition to the Ram Rath Yatra, the BJP withdrew its support for the National Front, and his government lost the vote of no-confidence. Singh resigned on 7 November 1990. His prime ministerial tenure lasted for 343 days.
Singh was the prime ministerial candidate for the National Front in the 1991 elections, but was defeated. He spoke out against the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. After 1996, Singh retired from political posts, but continued to remain a public figure and political critic. He was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in 1998, and ceased public appearances until the cancer went into remission in 2003. He died on 27 November 2008, at the age on 77.

Early life and background

Singh was born on 25 June 1931, as the third child of the Rajput Zamindar of Daiya, which is located on the banks of the Belan River in the Allahabad district. He was adopted by Raja Gopal Singh of Manda and became the heir-apparent. He became the Raja of Manda at the age of 10 in 1941.
He obtained his education from Colonel Brown Cambridge School, Dehradun and did his Bachelor of Arts and Law degree from  Allahabad University. He was the elected the vice president of Allahabad university students union and later did a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Fergusson College in the Pune University.

Early career

Singh was elected from Soraon to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly in 1969 as a member of the Congress Party and became the chief whip for the legislative party. He got elected to the Lok Sabha in 1971 and was appointed a Deputy Minister of Commerce by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1974. He served as the Minister of Commerce in 1976–77.

Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh

He was appointed as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1980, when Indira Gandhi was re-elected after the Janata interlude. As Chief Minister, he cracked down hard on dacoity, a problem that was particularly severe in the rural districts of the south-west Uttar Pradesh. He received much favourable national publicity when he offered to resign following a self-professed failure to stamp out the problem, and again when he personally oversaw the surrender of some of the most feared dacoits of the area in 1983.
He resumed his post as Minister of Commerce in 1983.
Singh was responsible for managing the coalition of the Left and the Bharatiya Janata Party against Rajiv Gandhi to dethrone him in the 1989 elections. He is remembered for the important role that he played in 1989 that changed the course of Indian politics. Singh acted boldly by issuing an arrest warrant against L. K. Advani midway through the latter's Rath Yatra.

Minister for Finance (1984-87) and Defence (1987), Bofors and HDW

Called to New Delhi following Rajiv, Gandhi's mandate in the 1984 general election, Singh was appointed to the post of Finance Minister in the tenth Cabinet of India, where he oversaw the gradual relaxation of the License Raj as Gandhi had in mind. During his term as Finance Minister, he oversaw the reduction of gold smuggling by reducing gold taxes and giving the police a portion of the confiscated gold. He also gave extraordinary powers to the Enforcement Directorate of the Finance Ministry, the wing of the ministry charged with tracking down tax evaders, then headed by Bhure Lal. Singh's efforts to reduce government regulation of business and to prosecute tax fraud attracted widespread praise.
Following a number of high-profile raids on suspected evaders including Dhirubhai Ambani and Amitabh Bachchan – Gandhi was forced to sack him as Finance Minister, possibly because many of the raids were conducted on industrialists who had supported the Congress financially in the past. However, Singh's popularity was at such a pitch that only a sideways move seemed to have been possible, to the Defence Ministry.
Once ensconced in South Block, Singh began to investigate the notoriously murky world of defence procurement. After a while, word began to spread that Singh possessed information about the Bofors defence deal that could damage Gandhi's reputation. Before he could act on it, he was dismissed from the Cabinet and, in response, resigned his memberships in the Congress Party and the Lok Sabha.
In an interview with Shekhar Gupta in July 2005, Singh said that he had resigned from the Rajiv Gandhi cabinet due to differences that arose in the dealing of information regarding commissions taken by Indian agents in the HDW submarine deal, and not due to Bofors. In April 1987, Singh received a secret telegram from J.C.Ajmani, the Indian ambassador in West Germany. The telegram stated that Indian agents had received large commissions in the HDW deal. These commissions amounted to a staggering Rs. 32.55 crore. Singh informed Rajiv Gandhi about this and instituted an inquiry. However, the handling of this case led to differences and Singh finally resigned from the cabinet.

Formation of Janata Dal

Together with associates Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammad Khan, Singh floated an opposition party named Jan Morcha. He was re-elected to Lok Sabha in a tightly contested by-election from Allahabad, defeating Sunil Shastri. On 11 October 1988, the birthday of the original Janata coalition's leader Jayaprakash Narayan, Singh founded the Janata Dal by the merger of Jan Morcha, Janata Party, Lok Dal and Congress, in order to bring together all the centrist parties opposed to the Rajiv Gandhi government, and Singh was elected the President of the Janata Dal. An opposition coalition of the Janata Dal with regional parties including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Telugu Desam Party, and Asom Gana Parishad, came into being, called the National Front, with V. P. Singh as convener, NT Rama Rao as president, and P Upendra as a General Secretary.

National Front coalition government

The National Front fought 1989 General Elections after coming to an electoral understanding with Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left parties that served to unify the anti-Congress vote. The National Front, with its allies, earned a simple majority in the Lok Sabha and decided to form a government. The Bharatiya Janta Party under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani and the left parties such as the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India declined to serve in the government, preferring to support the government from outside.
In a meeting in the Central Hall of Parliament on 1 December, Singh proposed the name of Devi Lal as Prime Minister, in spite of the fact that he himself had been clearly projected by the anti-Congress forces as the 'clean' alternative to Rajiv Gandhi and their Prime Ministerial candidate. Chaudhary Devi Lal, a Jat leader from Haryana stood up and refused the nomination, and said that he would prefer to be an 'elder uncle' to the Government, and that Singh should be Prime Minister. This last part came as a clear surprise to Chandra Shekhar, the former head of the erstwhile Janata Party, and Singh's greatest rival within the Janata Dal. Shekhar, who had clearly expected that an agreement had been forged with Lal as the consensus candidate, withdrew from the meeting and refused to serve in the Cabinet.
Singh was sworn in as India's Prime Minister on 2 December 1989.

Prime Minister (1989 90)

Singh held office for slightly less than a year, from 2 December 1989 to 10 November 1990. After state legislative elections in March 1990, Singh's governing coalition achieved control of both houses of India's parliament. During this time, Janata Dal came to power in five Indian states under Om Prakash Chautala, Chimanbhai Patel, Biju Patnaik, Laloo Prasad Yadav, and Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the National Front constituents in two more NT Rama Rao, and Prafulla Kumar Mahanta. The Janata Dal also shared power in Kerala under EK Nayanar and in Rajasthan under Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.
Singh decided to end the Indian army's unsuccessful operation in Sri Lanka which Rajiv Gandhi, his predecessor, had sent to combat the Tamil separatist movement.
V. P. Singh faced his first crisis within few days of taking office, when Kashmiri militants kidnapped the daughter of his Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. His government agreed to the demand for releasing militants in exchange; partly to end the storm of criticism that followed, he shortly thereafter appointed Jagmohan Malhotra, a former bureaucrat, as Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
In Punjab, Singh replaced the hard-line Siddhartha Shankar Ray as Governor with another former bureaucrat, Nirmal Kumar Mukarji, who moved forward on a timetable for fresh elections. Singh himself made a much-publicised visit to the Golden Temple to ask forgiveness for Operation Blue Star and the combination of events caused the long rebellion in Punjab to die down markedly in a few months.
He also thwarted the efforts of Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto to start a border war with India.

Mandal Commission report

Singh himself wished to move forward nationally on social justice-related issues, which would, in addition, consolidate the caste coalition that supported the Janata Dal in northern India, and accordingly decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission which suggested that a fixed quota of all jobs in the public sector be reserved for members of the historically disadvantaged called Other Backward Classes. This decision led to widespread protests among the upper caste youth in urban areas in northern India. OBC reservation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008.

Tussle with Reliance group

In 1990, the government-owned financial institutions like the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the General Insurance Corporation of India stonewalled attempts by the Reliance group to acquire managerial control over Larsen & Toubro. Sensing defeat, the Ambanis resigned from the board of the company. Dhirubhai, who had become Larsen & Toubro's chairman in April 1989, had to quit his position to make way for D. N. Ghosh, former chairman of the State Bank of India.

Ram temple issue and the fall of the coalition

Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party was moving its own agenda forward. In particular, the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, which served as a rallying cry for several Hindu organisations, took on a new life. The party president, LK Advani, with Pramod Mahajan as aide, toured the northern states on a rath – a bus converted to look like a mythical chariot – with the intention of drumming up support. Before he could complete the tour by reaching the disputed site in Ayodhya, he was arrested on Singh's orders at Samastipur on the charges of disturbing the peace and fomenting communal tension. The kār-Seva proposed by Advani on 30 October 1990 was prevented by stationing troops at the site.
This led to the Bharatiya Janata Party's suspension of support to the National Front government. VP Singh faced the vote of no confidence in the Lok Sabha saying that he occupied the high moral ground, as he stood for secularism, had saved the Babri Masjid at the cost of power and had upheld the fundamental principles which were challenged during the crises. "What kind of India do you want?" he asked of his opponents in Parliament, before losing the vote 142–346; only a portion of the National Front remaining loyal to him and the left parties supported him in the vote.
Singh resigned on 7 November 1990.

The Chandra Shekhar government

Chandra Shekhar immediately seized the moment and left the Janata Dal with several of his own supporters to form the Samajwadi Janata Party/Janata Dal. Although Chandra Shekhar had a mere 64 MPs, Rajiv Gandhi the leader of the Opposition, agreed to support him on the floor of the House; so he won a confidence motion and was sworn in as Prime Minister. Eight Janata Dal MPs who voted for this motion were disqualified by the speaker Rabi Ray. His government lasted only a few months before he resigned and called for fresh elections.

Post-premiership

VP Singh contested the new elections but his party was relegated to the opposition chiefly due to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi during the election campaign, and he later retired from active politics. He spent the next few years touring the country speaking about matters related to issues of social justice and his artistic pursuits, chiefly painting.
In 1992, Singh was the first to propose the name of the future President KR Narayanan as a candidate for vice president. Later the same year in December, he led his followers to Ayodhya to oppose the Karseva proposed by LK Advani, and was arrested before he could reach the site; the Masjid was demolished by the Karsevaks a few days later.
In 1996, the Congress party lost the general elections and Singh was the natural choice of the winning United Front for the post of Prime Minister. But he declined the offer made to him by communist veteran Jyoti Basu, Bihar strongman Lalu Prasad Yadav and almost all leaders of the Janata family.
Singh was diagnosed with cancer in 1998 and ceased public appearances. When his cancer went into remission in 2003, he once again became a visible figure, especially in the many groupings that had inherited the space once occupied by his Janata Dal. He relaunched the Jan Morcha in 2006 with actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar as president. After Jan Morcha drew a blank in the 2007 UP elections, Raj Babbar joined the Congress, and Singh's elder son Ajeya Singh took over the reins of the party in anticipation of the 2009 General elections. Ajeya Singh then contested as Jan Morcha candidate from Fatehpur, but lost to Rakesh Sachan of the Samajwadi Party. The Jan Morcha was renamed as the National Jan Morcha in June 2009. A month later, the Jan Morcha merged with the Indian National Congress.
Singh was placed under arrest in Ghaziabad as he and his supporters were proceeding towards a hauling where prohibitory orders under Section 144 had been imposed to join the farmers agitating against the acquisition of land at Dadri by the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Industries and demanding adequate compensation. Later, Singh and CPI General Secretary AB Bardhan were again arrested on the UP border when they were proceeding to Dadri. However, Singh and Babbar were later able to evade the police, reaching Dadri on 18 August 2006, and ploughing the land in solidarity with the farmers.

Death

Singh died after a very long struggle with multiple myeloma and kidney failure at Apollo Hospital in Delhi on 27 November 2008, aged 77. He was cremated at Allahabad on the banks of the River Ganges on 29 November 2008, his son Ajeya Singh lighting the funeral pyre.

Personal life

Singh married Princess Sita Kumari, the daughter of the Raja of Deogarh-Madaria, Rajasthan, on 25 June 1955. It was an arranged marriage. He turned 24 on the day of the marriage, and she was 18. Kumari was a Sisodia Rajput descended from Rana Pratap of Udaipur. The couple had two sons, Ajeya Singh, a chartered accountant in New York, and Abhai Singh, a doctor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

Cultural legacy

Films