Jaipal Reddy: The Man Who Lost Battles Wins The War

It was 1963 and Jaipal Reddy, a 21-year-old Congress leader, was the president of the students union of Osmania University in Hyderabad. Tempers were running high during an agitation and, as the university registrar emerged, a student hurled a stone towards him. Without a thought, Reddy used his crutch to fling himself between the stone and the teacher.

Decency has always been the soul of Jaipal Reddy. He was one of the few leaders to be suspended from the Congress for opposing the Emergency. By then, he was the general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee and, given his relative youth and sparkling erudition, was sure to go places.

 

His erudition and facility with the English language is amazing for the son of a farmer who couldnt speak a word of English. Nor did he learn English at a convent school. He was sent to a zilla parishad school. Determined to beat the odds, he read through the entire Oxford dictionary five times when he was in the seventh grade.

His grit is most clearly evident in the way he never allowed the polio that afflicted him when he was two years old to get him down. When rival students sought to attack him soon after his re-election as Osmania University Students Union president, he jumped from the 11th step of a staircase to avoid being assaulted.

For all his agility, Reddy never manoeuvred to position himself on the winning side, quite unlike the general run of politicians. Rather, his decency and honesty always brought him down on the losing side.

Having parted ways with the Congress over the Emergency, he fought the 1977 Lok Sabha elections on a Janata Party ticket, but Andhra Pradesh was one of the few states that the Congress swept. Nevertheless, in 1980, he was the Janata Partys choice to contest against the resurgent Indira Gandhi from Medak. He lost, but with a creditable number of votes.

He won a seat in the Lok Sabha in 1984, but that was the year the Congress won a stunning majority in the House and Reddy emerged as one of the only articulate voices on the Opposition benches. When his party came to power after the 1989 elections, he lost his election. Andhra Pradesh was about the only major state in the country that the Congress swept that year.

He returned to Parliament as a member of the Rajya Sabha in April 1990, but the V P Singh government was already getting into choppy political waters and, by July, was doddering on the brink. By November, it had fallen and Reddy remained one of the champions of the losing side.

He became a leading light of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha during the next six years, emerging as the Leader of Opposition in that House from July 1991 to June 1992. Just a few weeks before his party returned to power in June 1992, Reddys term in the Rajya Sabha ended and he was not a member of either House when the Gowda government took office.

Reddy, an avid reader, has earned a reputation for repartee and oratory in Parliament and as spokesperson of the Janata Dal and the United Front. For the first time, he must now prove himself as an administrator too.

Prime Minister I K Gujral has chosen to test him in one of the most challenging assignments of the times: as the architect of Indias role in the information age. Reddy must chart Indias future as technology develops at a mind-boggling pace to bring sophisticated images of the globe and beyond to surfing finger tips in homes and offices, transforming the frontiers and the potential of the possible.