A committed socialist and a rebel all through his life, Chandra Shekhar became the Prime Minister in 1990, but he never emerged as a successful politician who, with his standing, could have achieved much more than he actually did.
Never a conformist, he was always the “angry young man” of Indian politics. The ‘problem’ was that he had his heart at the right place and always called a spade a spade.
The fact that he conspired against the very government he had helped to form the previous year reflected in a way his angry “Young Turk” image. Although his political graph stretched over five decades and he made friends cutting across political lines but he could never carry anyone along.
The emergence of his name for the post of the Prime Minister in 1990 was another game played by the Congress which, although out of power, wanted to still control the ropes of the government at the Centre. So came the move to prop up Chandra Shekhar.
But his seven-month tenure in office in 1990-91 was not what was expected of a seasoned politician like him and he did not shine as a Prime Minister.
At a tumultuous period in Indian politics, which was marked by caste and religious frenzy and the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar just faded away as Prime Minister.
Born on July 1, 1927, at Ibrahimpatti in Ballia in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a place, which the "locals liberated from the British" during the Quit India Movement of 1942, Chandra Shekhar remained a rural man at heart even when he took the national stage later.
He joined the Praja Socialist Party in 1951, going up the ladder with committed grassroots work, until he switched over to the Congress in 1960s.
His socialist leanings took him close to Indira Gandhi who in 1969 split the Congress on ideological grounds. He quickly became a member of what came to be known as Indira Gandhi's "kitchen cabinet".
But the rebel that he was, he soon fell out of favour. In 1975 when Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency, he was among the first to be arrested and spent his time in jail until early 1977.
Chandra Shekhar then teamed up with leaders of the then Bharatiya Jan Sangh, Congress (O) and the Lok Dal to form the Janata Party under the political umbrella of Jaya Prakash Narayan.
Despite suggestions, he refused to become Prime Minister and let Morarji Desai take over the post. He remained, however, the political boss of Janata Party.
Much against his wishes, the Janata Party split and, by January 1980, Indira Gandhi was back in power.
One of the highlights of his career was the 4,260 km 'padyatra' he undertook from Kanyakumari in the south to Rajghat from January to June 1983 to know the people of India better, as he put it, winning millions of hearts.
This was when he tried to bring together the opposition again after the split in the Janata Party but failed miserably and that could also not prevent him and the entire opposition from getting decimated in the 1984 general election following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
In 1989, he was one of the key leaders of the Janata Dal, which headed the National Front coalition government that took office after the defeat of the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress.
Chandra Shekhar, however, felt cheated when his name was not proposed for the post of Prime Minister, a post that went to V.P.Singh and again the “angry” man of the Indian politics stormed out of the meeting of the elected MPs.
He finally took revenge by teaming up with an equally miffed Devi Lal to bring down V.P. Singh in November 1990. He then became the Prime Minister with the backing of the Congress, the same party he had opposed all along. His Samajwadi Janata Party was washed out in the 1991 elections.
By the mid-1990s Chandra Shekhar became a vocal critic of the free market policy pursued by the Congress and successive governments. He maintained friendship with leaders of all political parties across the country but aggressiveness kept him politically aloof.
Although by the end he was nowhere to be seen on the political scenario but till the time he remained seated on the front benches of the Lok Sabha, to which he was elected eight times, he never hesitated to speak his mind. As the head of a virtually one-man party, he was listened to with respect by both, the Treasury and the Opposition benches.
