Chandra Shekhar was an improbable prime minister who faced an impossible task. He held the job at the height of one of the worst outbreaks of political, economic and communal upheaval in independent India, and did so only at the discretion of Rajiv Gandhi, who toppled him after four months on the dubious pretext that Shekhar was spying on him.
Shekhar, appointed on November 10, 1990, was never more than Gandhi’s puppet, enabling the Gandhi dynasty to regain power through a proxy prime minister. A shaky, unrepresentative government formed in smoky back rooms, was the last thing India needed at the time. Politics had sunk to one of its lowest ethical ebbs, and the country was being torn apart by Hindu-Muslim riots inspired by extremist politicians. The economy, too, was falling apart.
Shekhar had neither the parliamentary authority nor the personal charisma to stem the rot. The small socialist party he headed wobbled atop a bizarre pyramid of disparate coalition parties, with Gandhi’s Congress party MPs holding it all precariously together. Its collapse at Gandhi’s whim was only a question of time.
Gandhi quickly felt obliged to destroy the disaster he had in effect created, clearing the way for a second general election in less than two years. By then, Gandhi and Shekhar were at such loggerheads they communicated only through intermediaries. Rarely had Indian democracy sunk to such depths.
Shekhar was brought down by Gandhi in a parliamentary vote in March 1991, but remained as caretaker Prime Minister pending a summer general election. On May 21, a limbo period in which India was effectively without a functioning central government, Gandhi was assassinated in southern India, probably by the Tamil Tigers. India was shaken to the roots, and nobody was in charge.
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The murder unleashed fierce argument about the shoddy security that Shekhar’s Government had approved for Gandhi. Before his death the Intelligence Bureau had privately expressed alarm that security for Gandhi and his family was inadequate, and the Gandhi camp raged at Shekhar’s failure to protect the man who had both made and destroyed him. An opposition MP accused Shekhar of deliberately doing nothing in response to the Intelligence Bureau warning – “except to get the Deputy Prime Minister to put constables on to spying on Shri Rajiv Gandhi. That was the only reaction. They did nothing to protect him.”
Indian politics had rarely seen such recrimination and intrigue. Shekhar’s rump political party was weakened in the following elections and both it and its leader faded away. He spent his years as a backbench MP in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) doing what he had started out doing – espousing old-style socialism.
Shekhar had once enjoyed a reputation for probity, but the manoeuvrings that elevated him briefly to the prime ministership tainted his reputation. Gandhi’s name, not held in great esteem at the time, was also further sullied by the shabby deals of the era.
Together they had created a bizarre coalition to replace another bizarre coalition, which had Communists at one end and right-wing Hindu nationalists at the other. Apart from religious riots, high-caste Hindus were rioting over plans to reserve government jobs for “backward” castes – around 52 per cent of the population. Shekhar seized the chance for a political coup.
He hurriedly formed a new political party, commanding only a ninth of the members of the Lok Sabha, and cobbled together a replacement coalition with the Congress party and others. The President decided that the country could not face the trauma of another general election so soon after the last one, and gave Shekhar a chance to prove himself. It was a wrong call. The Government never rose above the accusation that it was a front for proxy rule by Gandhi, who had lost the 1989 elections. It was neither credible nor viable.
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Shekhar had been one of the few parliamentarians arrested during Indira Gandhi’s 1975-77 Emergency for criticising her autocratic rule. As Prime Minister he nevertheless gave a top ministerial job to the man who had enforced her strict censorship of the press, demonstrating what political contortions he had to perform to try to stay in power. He gave away a huge number of ministerial jobs to MPs in exchange for political support. Some of the new ministers, aware that the Government would soon fall apart, never bothered to turn up for work.
Shekhar was born to a farming family in Ibrahimpatti in Uttar Pradesh, and took an MA at Allahabad University. He became a leftwing student activist and after graduation devoted himself to socialist politics. He was a member of the indirectly elected Rajya Sabha (Upper House) in the 1960s, joined the Congress Party of the Gandhi dynasty and became general secretary of its parliamentary party.
One of his more dubious projects was the creation of an ashram in the northern state of Haryana. He became embroiled in a legal battle over attempts to take back hundreds of acres of public land “gifted” to the ashram by the local town council. Even the Border Security Force, a powerful paramilitary group responsible in large measure for quelling the Kashmir uprising, accused the ashram of stealing land used as a firing range. A few days after becoming Prime Minister several more acres of public land were reportedly “gifted” to the Shekhar project.
Petitioners claimed it was a centre for Shekhar’s personal, political and commercial activities. He established it in 1983 after gaining widespread nationwide publicity from a 4,000km padayatra (march) across India, supposedly to gain spiritual insights.
Apart from one five-year break Shekhar was an MP from the 1960s until his death. He had won eight elections, the last under the socialist ticket of the latest political party he had created. Even three years ago, before cancer had taken hold, he was presenting himself as a possible prime minister in the event of another hung parliament.
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Shekhar is survived by two sons.
Chandra Shekhar, Prime Minister of India, 1990-91, was born on July 1, 1927. He died on July 8, 2007, aged 80