"The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." Thus Mark Antony at his funeral oration for Julius Caesar. As much can be said about the late Prime Minister, Chandra Shekhar. He was the pragmatists' pragmatist. His accession to the post was not in any script"" it just happened, like any other political accident in India which has led to a rank outsider becoming the ruler, including the more feted P V Narasimha Rao. It wasn't the best of times in 1990, and to wear what was without doubt a crown of thorns required the one thing that politicians have in abundance: vaulting ambition. Chandra Shekhar was no shrinking violet when it came to seizing opportunity and he was content to be Prime Minister even if it required him to stand on Rajiv Gandhi's admittedly wobbly shoulders. | |
| His government lasted just four months before he was forced to resign and call for elections, but in that time he did two things that the country should be grateful for. One required sagacity, the other political courage. The former allowed him to cool the political temperature in the country, in the wake of the anti-Mandal agitation and LK Advani's rath yatra on the Ayodhya issue. The sharpness and bitterness of the rhetoric were soon tempered. The latter enabled him to agree to India mortgaging its (confiscated) gold to raise desperately-needed foreign loans""though if his colleagues of the time are to be believed, he signed on the gold mortgage proposal only after getting the green signal from Rajiv Gandhi, on whom depended his government's survival. Chandra Shekhar also agreed to far-reaching policy changes in discussions with the International Monetary Fund""reforms that were later appropriated by the Congress after the 1991 elections. The decision to resort to the IMF's Extended Fund Facility (on the basis of conditions that required an about-turn on many policies) was also taken by him but could not be implemented because Rajiv Gandhi toppled his government. That these decisions, as well as permitting overflight and refuelling rights to the US at the time of the first Gulf War, were taken by a die-hard socialist shows a strong pragmatic streak that was his saving grace. |
| |
| But as a politician, he promised much and yet delivered little. As president of the Janata Party in 1977-79, he could do nothing to stop the infighting that led to the collapse of the Morarji Desai government. He ignited the imagination of many people with his Bharat Yatra in the 1980s, a marathon walk from the southern tip of the country to the northern heartland, but he had no idea what to do next, other than use the money he had raised to build a private farm in Bhondsi on land that he eventually had to give up under court directions. His relations with controversial figures, including dubious godmen, did him little credit. In 1989, he stayed out of the National Front government of VP Singh as he realised that his own ambitions had been thwarted once again. When an opportunity came to form a government with less than 40 members of Parliament belonging to his political alliance, he grabbed that with both hands, but it is a sad fact that the months that followed are rarely considered a period of good governance. In the long years after that, he was usually a critic of the reforms that have resulted in India's economic awakening, but by the time of his death, the man once called a Young Turk had acquired the stature of an elder statesman. |
| |
|
| |
