© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
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.
Vishwanath Pratap Singh was the second UP Chief Minister, after Chaudhary Charan Singh, who went on to become the Prime Minister of India. Like his tenure as the PM, his stint as the UP CM was also brief but eventful.
Singh, who was born on June 25, 1931, belonged to the erstwhile royal family of Manda in southern Allahabad (now Prayagraj). Active in student politics since his Allahabad University days, he entered UP politics in 1969, when he contested from Soraon seat in a midterm poll as a Congress candidate and won. His rise in politics was meteoric as he got close to the then PM Indira Gandhi, which led to the decline of another “raja” (Dinesh Singh of Pratapgarh’s Kalakankar) in Congress politics.
VP Singh resigned from the Assembly after he was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1971 from Phulpur. He was the deputy minister (commerce) in the Indira Gandhi government from October 1974 to December 1976, and was elevated to the minister of state during January 1976-March 1977. In 1977 he lost the election from the Allahabad Lok Sabha seat at the hands of the Janata Party’s Janeswar Mishra.
After the Congress’s return to power following the January 1980 general elections, the Indira government dismissed the Janata Party government led by Banarsi Das in UP among other Opposition-ruled states and imposed President’s rule there. The Congress swept the UP Assembly polls held in May 1980, winning 306 seats in the 425-member House as against the BJP’s 11 seats.
In the 1980 Lok Sabha polls, Singh won from Allahabad, but resigned after being picked by Indira to head the UP government. He was sworn in as the 12th UP CM on June 9, 1980. In November 1980, he was elected to the UP Legislative Council, even as he won from the Tindwari Assembly constituency in Banda district in June 1981.
With UP beset with the dacoity problem, the Singh government cracked down on it. In the ensuing encounters in the state, many alleged dacoits were killed by police. A young woman bandit, Phoolan Devi, who was allegedly raped by several upper caste villagers in Kanpur’s Behmai, returned with a gang on February 14, 1981, and gunned down 20 men there. This led to police intensifying its operations against bandits across the state.
The Behmai village massacre also sparked an uproar in the UP Assembly when it met on February 20, 1981. Raising the matter then, a Janata Party (Secular) member Bhagwandin Kushwaha said, “I request Chief Minister to resign on moral grounds after this heinous crime in Behmai. I must also say that similar is the situation in whole state.” Another Janata Party (S) member Chhatar Singh said, “He is a Manushya-Marak (human-killing) CM. If a CM could not protect people from his own caste then how he will save the entire state. He is sitting and working just as a rubber stamp.”
The issue was again discussed in the Assembly three days later, when Janata Party (S) member Mohan Singh said, “(Behmai) incident has exposed the inefficiency of this government…It is unfortunate…it is result of the policy of fake encounters…there are efforts to divide the state administration on caste lines by deploying officials of a caste in last four-five days… Chief Minister has no moral right to remain in his chair.”
Amid such allegations over caste-linked violence and fake encounters, the Singh government’s clampdown against dacoity continued. On March 20, 1982, Justice Chandra Shekhar Prasad Singh, an Allahabad High Court judge, and his 15-year-old son Ajit Pratap Singh, were killed by dacoits in Banda. Justice Singh was the CM’s elder brother, and in his reaction VP Singh said that his brother “paid the price of my office”. Finally, on June 28, 1982, he resigned as the CM.
In July 1983, Singh was elected to the Rajya Sabha and became the Union commerce minister. Following Indira’s assassination, he was appointed as the finance minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government. In June 1987, he became the defence minister.
Subsequently, Singh’s career took a new turn as he levelled corruption allegations against Rajiv Gandhi over the Bofors scam, and resigned as the defence minister on July 17, 1987 but continued as a Rajya Sabha member. In June 1988, he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Allahabad in a bypoll on the Janata Dal ticket. The seat had fallen vacant due to Amitabh Bachchan’s resignation.
In the 1989 Lok Sabha polls, Singh successfully led the Janata Dal to oust Rajiv Gandhi from power. A slogan centred round his leadership – “Raja nahin faqir hai, desh ki taqdeer hai” – was then used by the Opposition widely in its campaign against the Congress. He won his own seat from Fatehpur.
Singh was sworn in as the 8th Prime Minister of India on December 2, 1989. He could however remain the PM for less than a year, until November 10, 1990, when he stepped down.
Singh’s tenure as the PM is notable for his seminal decision to implement the BP Mandal Commission’s report to provide 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in government jobs and education. This has proved to be a decisive measure in ensuring the social and political empowerment of OBCs in the entire country, with many considering it as the “most significant move in the interest of OBCs since Independence”. The Mandal cause boosted the politics of backward and Dalit leaders, including Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Sharad Yadav, and Ram Vilas Paswan, among others.
Singh again won from Fatehpur in the 1991 Lok Sabha polls, but took retirement from active politics by 1996, even though he remained active in championing the issues concerning the downtrodden and vulnerable people. He passed away on November 27, 2008.
