India's new prime minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, began his political education in college. Mahatma Gandhi's nationalist movement had affected him like many other of his generation. Following Gandhi's call to boycott British goods, Singh wore khadi (homespun cotton cloth), even spinning his own cotton. A part from these symbolic gestures, Singh also participated in some student-led demonstrations while attending Uday Pratap College and later became president of his student union. Thanks to his royal background, however, his political activism against the British raj was short-lived, and soon after his initial involvement in the demonstrations, his adoptive family put an end to his nationalist activities.
In the post independence era, Singh was drawn to the Congress Party and the towering influence of its principal leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. After joining the party, his political commitments assumed more concrete form. Around this time, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, a disciple of Gandhi, led a land distribution program to encourage large, rural landlords to hand over a portion of their holdings to landless peasants. While the overall successor failure of this movement is a matter of considerable debate, Singh did in fact give away some well-irrigated farmland in the village of Pasna near Allahabad as part of his contribution to the movement.
After this spell of grassroots politics, Singh, as an active member of the Congress Party was elected to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly in 1969. This was a momentous year for Indian politics. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, had recently succeeded Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister, and she was keen on asserting her independence. She was also inclined toward shifting the ideological course of the party in a leftward direction. But her attempts to pursue a more autonomous course ran up against a major barrier, the so-called Syndicate, composed of the party bosses. Determined to break free from their stranglehold, Gandhi split the Congress Party, taking a number of the younger dissidents with her, including the young Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh, V.P. Singh.
Following a two-year stint in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly, Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament; literally, "the house of the people") in 1971. In 1974, shortly after his entry into the Lok Sabha, he was made a deputy minister of commerce, holding this position until 1976, when he was promoted to mister of state for commerce. Later that year when Gandhi declared a state of emergency, suspending civil rights and due process of law, like many other congressmen, Singh remained loyal to her. (He has subsequently stated that it should not be allowed to occur again.) This loyalty obviously came at a price. With the defeat of Gandhi in mid-1977, he, along with many colleagues, found himself a political outcast. But this political eclipse was short-lived. Prime Minister Morarji Desai's Janata regime quickly became mired in internecine quarrels. In late 1979, the regime that had come to power based on their common dislike of Gandhi, unable to govern once in office, collapsed. Again Singh remained steadfastly loyal to Gandhi. This loyalty, at a time when Gandhi’s political standing had plummeted was suitably rewarded. Following Gandhi's comeback in 1980, Singh was given a Congress (I) berth and returned to Parliament.
He was not to say in New Delhi for long, however. As a Gandhi loyalist, and given his standing in his home state of Uttar Pradesh, he was
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