VP Singh, the initiator of coalition politics in India
Former Prime Minister of India Vishwanath Pratap Singh is remembered for heralding an era of coalition politics in the country when his party, the Janata Dal, led the National Front government in 1989 and 1990; and his initiative to implement the Mandal Commission report.
The Mandal Commission, or the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission (SEBC), headed by BP Mandal, an MP, was formed in 1979. Tasked with "identifying the socially or educationally backward classes" in India based on social, economic, and educational indicators to determine backwardness, it recommended that members of Other Backward Classes be granted reservation to 27 per cent of jobs in the Central government and public sector undertakings and seats in higher education institutions.
Following this, the total reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs went up to 49.5 per cent. A decade later, VP Singh announced the legal implementation of the scheme at his Independence Day speech. Massive protests erupted across the country, with many cases of immolation. Schools were shut down for about three months across the country, and overnight, VP Singh became a much-hated figure.
His rise in politics is as interesting as it is intriguing. Born into a Rajput zamindar family on June 25, 1931, in Allahabad, he was adopted by Raja Badaur of Manda, a princely state near Allahabad. At the age of 10, he became the heir to the throne.
First elected from Soraon to Uttar Pradesh as a Congress MLA in 1969, he got elected to the Lok Sabha in 1971 and remained minister of commerce in Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tenure. He also became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1980.
As Chief Minister (1980-82), he carried out major crackdown on dacoits, a problem that was particularly severe in the rural districts of southwest Uttar Pradesh. He personally oversaw the surrender of some of the most feared dacoits of the area, including Phoolan Devi.
During his innings as the defence minister, he stood up against his boss, the then PM Rajiv Gandhi, in the Bofors scam that had brought him to the top of India’s political orbit. He lost his ministry, and subsequently, had to resign from the Congress. However, this led to his political growth, though a controversial one. He finally set up a political outfit called the Janata Dal. Later, with the help of the BJP and the Left, he became the PM on December 2, 1989.
At the time when, the anti-reservation protests were happening across India, another political and social development, the Ram Rath Yatra, was being held by the BJP, led by the then president of the party, LK Advani. The purpose of the yatra was to garner support for the Ram Temple on the disputed site of Babri Masjid. Singh acted boldly to stop Advani’s yatra midway by issuing an arrest warrant against him. Following his opposition to the yatra, the BJP withdrew support to the National Front government and his government lost the vote of no confidence, leading to his resignation. His tenure lasted 343 days.
He was offered prime-ministership again in 1996 by United Front leaders, though he had neither contested nor campaigned for elections. His wife Sita Kumari told the author of the book ‘The Disruptor: How Vishwanath Singh shook India’, Debashish Mukerji, “VP decided that he did not want to meet or speak to the United Front leaders again, until they had chosen someone else as their new Prime Minister… Moments before he got a whiff that the United Front leaders were about to come to his house, he sneaked out with his driver and told him to keep driving on the Ring Road of Delhi till all of them left his house… The staff got tired of serving tea and biscuits to the leaders who kept waiting for him endlessly but he didn’t return till he came to know that each one of them had left his house."
Diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare kind of blood cancer in 1998, he breathed his last on November 27, 2008.
