Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Accounting for 80 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats, and a 403-member Assembly, Uttar Pradesh, with its over 15 crore voters, is India’s most politically significant state. Since January 25, 1950, when the United Provinces was renamed as Uttar Pradesh, the state – through 17 Assembly elections — has determined the course of national politics, throwing up a legion of stalwarts, chief ministers, and Prime Ministers. Of its 21 CMs though, only Yogi Adityanath, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati have completed a full five-year term, reflecting the intense volatility of its politics. In the line-up of CMs, also lies the truth about the state’s caste equations. Ten of its 21 CMs have been Brahmins or Thakurs. The remaining include three Yadavs, three Baniyas, one Lodh, one Jat, one Kayasth, one Dalit and one Sindhi. A series looking at UP’s political history and changes through its CMs
Amidst growing Congress factionalism, party stalwart Chandra Bhanu Gupta had to resign as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister on October 1, 1963 under K Kamaraj’s plan sending some leaders from the government to the party organisation. Senior Congress leaders, including Gupta’s ex-protege Kamlapati Tripathi, mounted hectic lobbying to claim the chief ministerial chair, but the post went to Sucheta Kripalani, who was then state minister for labour, community development and industry.
Sucheta Kripalani took over as the fourth UP Chief Minister on October 2, 1963, becoming India’s first woman CM.
A Gandhian, Sucheta used to wear khadi since her student days while studying in Delhi’s Indraprashta College for Women and St Stephen’s College. The daughter of a government surgeon posted in Punjab, SN Majumdar, Sucheta married former Congress president Acharya JB (Jivatram Bhagwandas) Kripalani. They got married in April 1936 when they were both in the Congress party. Both were freedom fighters and members of the Constituent Assembly.
Sucheta was founder president of the All India Women Congress (AIWC). When Kripalani quit the Congress in 1951 and formed the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP), she also went with him and won the Lok Sabha poll from the New Delhi seat on its ticket. She, however, came back to the Congress in 1956, whereas Kripalani never returned to the party.
In 1957, Sucheta won from the New Delhi constituency as a Congress candidate. In 1962, the Congress leadership asked her to shift to UP politics and fielded her from the Mehndawal Assembly seat. She won and was inducted into the Gupta Cabinet. She was elected as an MLA in UP in 1937 too.
As the CM, Sucheta was known for her strictness and simplicity. During the last session of the third UP Assembly, in December 1966, Sucheta was drawing fire from the Opposition for not accepting the demands of non-gazetted government employees for a hike in their salary even after two months of their strike. While responding to an adjournment motion on the issue on December 8, 1966, she told the Assembly, “We have a limit. We can give only a part of what we (government) are earning. It is true that inflation has increased. But Congress alone is not responsible for it. When there are efforts to develop the country, the inflation is inevitable…You can say that Congress government is inefficient, but you will see it during elections…We will not talk to them (employees) until they change their attitude (of indiscipline).”
On December 9, 1966, the House was adjourned sine die, following which the elections for the fourth UP Assembly were held in March 1967, in which the Congress, for the first time, failed to win a majority. The party managed to win 199 seats in the 425-member Assembly, 14 seats less than a simple majority.
In his book, Shashwat Vidrohi Acharya JB Kripalani, journalist Ram Bahadur Rai, chairman of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), states, “As chief minister Sucheta Kripalani did not take a big bungalow. Once Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri visited Lucknow and was astonished to see her simple living, lauding the CM of the country’s largest state over it. She used to reach the CM office at 10 am and leave only after 6 pm. She had given instructions that no one should bring any gift for her or her staff.”
During its tenure, the Sucheta Kripalani government had to face three no-confidence motions, one moved by Bhartiya Jan Sangh (BJS) member Sharda Bhakta Singh in July 1964. Another no-confidence motion was brought in February 1965, and a third one in July 1966. It survived all of them. Her nearly three-and-a-half years tenure as the CM ended with the completion of the 3rd UP Assembly’s term in March 1967.
Since mid-1960s, North India was witnessing political upheaval. Ram Manohar Lohia’s campaign for a non-Congress government at the Centre was then at its peak. In the 1967 Lok Sabha polls, Lohia won from Kannuaj as a Samyukt Socialist Party (SSP) candidate, while in 1963 he was elected from Farrukhabad in a by-election as a Socialist Party (Lohia) nominee.
On 25 March, 1966, an erstwhile Chhattisgarh ruler in then Madhya Pradesh, Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, was killed in a police firing in Bastar. JB Kripalani was part of a delegation of the Opposition parties that went there to inquire into the killing, holding then MP CM and Congress stalwart Dwarka Prasad Mishra responsible for it. It was against this backdrop that the Congress decided not to field Sucheta Kripalani in the 1967 UP polls, although it fielded her for the then Lok Sabha elections from Gonda, which she won.
In 1971, Kripalanis decided to leave politics and settle down in Delhi. She passed away on December 1, 1974. JB Kripalani was the Congress party’s 47th president but resigned from the post in 1947 due to certain ideological differences. Subsequently, he resigned from the Congress as well and formed the KMPP in 1951. Later, the KMPP was merged with the Socialist Party to form the PSP. Kripalanis did not have children and donated their assets to a Delhi-based trust which Sucheta had founded in early fifties.
