The journey from UP to the prime ministerial chair began with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first PM of India, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from Allahabad district (East)-cum-Jaunpur district (West) (now Phulpur). He was followed by Lal Bahadur Shastri, an MP from Allahabad (now Prayagraj), and Indira Gandhi, Lok Sabha MP from Raebareli (prior to that a Rajya Sabha MP from UP).
The list doesn’t end here—Charan Singh from Baghpat, Rajiv Gandhi from Amethi, VP Singh from Fatehpur, Chandra Shekhar from Ballia and Atal Bihari Vajpayee from Lucknow, all went on to become PMs. It is a widespread perception that kendra ki sarkar ka raasta UP se hokar guzarta hai—the way to the Central government goes through UP.
Except Gulzarilal Nanda, Morarji Desai, PV Narasimha Rao, HD Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral and Dr Manmohan Singh, all other nine PMs of India have been either residents of UP or were elected from UP.
When statues of Ram Lalla and Sita appeared at the disputed site in Ayodhya on the night of 22-23 December 1949, Pant was the premier. Three days later, on 26 December 1949, PM Nehru wrote to him, “I am disturbed at developments at Ayodhya. Earnestly hope you will personally interest yourself in this matter. Dangerous example being set there which will have bad consequences.”
After that, Sardar Patel wrote a letter to Pant on 9 January 1950, suggesting ways to resolve the dispute. Among other things, Patel said: “I think it has been one of the outstanding achievements of your administration that despite many upsetting factors, communal relations have generally improved very considerably since 1946... I feel that the issue is one which should be resolved amicably in a spirit of mutual toleration and goodwill between two communities.”
Later, LK Advani, lamenting the fact that the Pant government did not adopt the suggestions of Patel, wrote: “The letter (by Patel) outlined an approach to the resolution of the Ayodhya dispute which was flawless. Had it been adopted, the problem could have been solved long ago—and that too, amicably and expeditiously.” This turned into the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute that has influenced India’s politics for several decades since then, and was finally settled by the Supreme Court on 9 November 2019.
During his tenure as the premier of the United Provinces, Pant took some historic decisions and implemented them effectively. One of the decisions of his government, which was admittedly revolutionary, was the abolition of the zamindari system. He is also credited with passing the Hindu Code Bill in the state, which made monogamy compulsory for Hindu men while giving Hindu women the rights to divorce as well as inheritance of ancestral property.
Prior to Independence, Varanasi was among the prominent centres of the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements and also a prime centre for the Hindu Mahasabha activities. Dr Sampurnanand had become one of the key figures in the Varanasi unit of the Congress by the early 1930s… It was Dr Sampurnanand’s government that officially changed the name of the historic city from Banaras to Varanasi, effective from 24 May 1956. On 3 January 1955, Pant was sworn in as a Union Cabinet minister after summons from PM Nehru, and on 10 January 1955, he was appointed as the minister of home affairs…
But before Pant was shifted, the Congress had already decided to replace him with Varanasi-based Sanskrit scholar and former journalist Dr Sampurnanand as the CM of UP. He was sworn in on 28 December 1954 by Governor KM Munshi, who later became the president of India… His government also intended to implement a state-wide ban on cow slaughter. Those were the years when the RSS and the BJS were trying to strengthen their relevance through a movement in support of a nationwide ban on cow slaughter.
A legislation was passed, but it was challenged in the Supreme Court, which ruled that: As regards the UP Act we uphold and declare, for reasons already stated, that it is constitutionally valid in so far as it prohibits the slaughter of cows of all ages and calves of cows, male and female, but we hold that in so far as it purports to totally prohibit the slaughter of breeding bulls and working bullocks without prescribing any test or requirement as to their age or usefulness, it offends against Article 19 (1) (g) and is to that extent void.
On 26 November 1960, Dr Sampurnanand resigned from the post of CM and Congress President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy called Chandra Bhanu Gupta to Delhi. Gupta writes in his memoir, ‘Reddy took me to Nehru to discuss the successor of Dr Sampurnanand. I suggested the names of Sri Prakash, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Charan Singh. Pandit Nehru did not like Charan Singh. He and Reddy advised me to take on the responsibility…’
Dirty politics started in the UP Congress soon after Gupta took oath. On 3 February 1961, Gupta’s predecessor Dr Sampurnanand wrote to the governor, ‘You are going to address a joint sitting of both Houses of the assembly… Since this government was formed, it has done nothing which can create enthusiasm. I don’t want to listen to what the government is going to do and, therefore, I would not like to attend the joint sitting.’…
In late 1963, at an informal meeting at the Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, a caucus called the Syndicate was formed by the then Madras CM Kumaraswami Kamaraj, Andhra Pradesh CM Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, Karnataka CM Siddavanahalli Nijlingappa, Congress stalwart from West Bengal Atulya Ghosh and Union minister from Maharashtra Sadashiv Kanoji Patil. Under what came to be known as the Kamaraj Plan, PM Nehru was advised to reorganise the party and the central and state governments. He accepted the advice, and all Union ministers and CMs started to put in their papers from 29 September 1963; Gupta did not resign easily…
After resigning under the Kamaraj Plan, Gupta contested for the post of the UPCC president in 1965 and won against Kamlapati Tripathi, but the Congress leadership was not happy with the result, and a recounting was ordered… after recounting, Gupta’s votes reduced and Tripathi was declared the winner…The downfall of a titan had truly begun. For decades, Gupta had not only dominated UP politics but was also on the forefront of fund collection for the Congress. But in the 1974 assembly polls, he had to face a big setback… Gupta not only stood fourth but also lost his deposit. That was the last poll Gupta contested.
In the last week of September 1963, when the Congress leadership was considering probable successors of Chandra Bhanu Gupta, who had been asked to resign as the CM of UP under the Kamaraj Plan, Gupta was in Delhi to pay a courtesy call to the ailing Acharya JB Kripalani, a former Congress president and a Gandhian stalwart. His wife Sucheta Kripalani, who was a cabinet colleague of Gupta, was also in Delhi at that time, taking care of her husband. During a conversation, JB Kripalani, in a lighter vein, asked Gupta, ‘Why don’t you give the CM’s post to her (Sucheta)?’
Sucheta Kripalani, while recounting the story, said that when JB Kripalani had had a heart attack and was being treated at the Willingdon Hospital (now Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital) in New Delhi where she had been taking care of him, KC Pant (the son of GB Pant) had come to see JB Kripalani, and he had told Sucheta that her name was being considered as Gupta’s successor. However, a final decision was taken after a meeting of the CLP was held in Lucknow, where party MLAs were given blank papers to write the name of the person they favoured as leader of the CLP. There were only two contenders—Sucheta Kripalani and Kamalapati Tripathi. When the counting was completed, it turned out that Sucheta won by a margin of 99 votes. That is how she was elected as the CLP leader. She was sworn in as the fourth CM of UP on 2 October 1963 and, thus, became the first female CM of not only UP, but of any Indian state…
Later events show that the CM’s chair was inching towards her. From the memoirs of Gupta and Sucheta, it appears that before Gupta resigned as the CM on 1 October 1963, he wanted someone other than his old colleagues in the cabinet to replace him. As per his wishes, Sucheta was sworn in as the fourth CM of UP on 2 October 1963…
In early 1970s, the political situation of the state as well as of the country was changing rapidly. At the Centre, PM Indira Gandhi was trying very hard to reclaim her Congress base by wiping out her rival party Congress (O). She had, on the midnight of 19 July 1969, announced the nationalisation of 14 banks before the split in the party, and then, on 5 September 1970, a bill was introduced in Parliament to abolish Privy Purses given to erstwhile rulers… After over a fortnight, the BKD, the BJS and some other parties decided on Tribhuvan Narain Singh as their leader… He staked claim to the new government with the support of 257 MLAs. Singh was sworn in as the sixth CM of UP on 18 October 1970…
In the midst of the battle of prestige and ego between PM Indira and her rivals, Singh was fielded in a by-poll from Maniram (now renamed as Gorakhpur Urban) in March 1971, a seat under which the Gorakh Peeth also comes. Yogi Adityanath’s predecessor Mahant Avaidyanath had won from this seat in 1962 as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate, in 1967 as an independent, and in the mid-term polls of 1969 again as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate… Since the assembly seat for Maniram had been vacant, TN Singh accepted the suggestion of his friends to contest the by-poll from there, but this decision proved unwise later… When the results were announced, (Congress’ candidate Ram Krishna) Dwivedi was declared elected and Singh lost his by-poll…
That historic by-poll win, by defeating a sitting CM, gave a much-needed boost to the Indira Gandhi faction of the Congress after the split. The 1971 Lok Sabha mid-term polls—in which PM Indira, influenced by leftist ideology and eyeing mass support, gave the ‘Garibi hatao’ (Remove poverty) slogan and aggressively publicised her decision of the nationalisation of banks—proved to be a big victory for the Indira Gandhi faction of the Congress. From UP’s 85 Lok Sabha seats, it won 73 seats, which included all 18 seats reserved for the SCs.
Tripathi had been eyeing the CM’s post even during the 1967 polls, but unfortunately, he lost his own assembly seat Chandauli to the SSP’s Chandra Shekhar by a narrow margin of 397 votes. This was such a big setback that he even considered leaving politics at the time…
Tripathi was an old Congressman and a true secular. But when he was the CM, he was criticised for being anti-Muslim… On the other hand, when Tripathi was out of the government and living a retired life in Varanasi, he was a staunch critic of the movement launched by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP)-RSS-BJP for the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
In June 1986, when the Congress was undergoing changes under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership, Tripathi wrote a letter to Rajiv raising his concerns, ‘My contention is that Congress is rapidly losing its contact with the masses and you are surrounded by a number of sycophants who are not only Indira-baiters, but most of them are Indira-haters.’10 He seems to have sensed the problem—since then, the Congress kept losing its ground, and as of March 2024, it is reduced to only one Lok Sabha seat, two assembly seats, and no Council seats in the state, forget the entire country.
About the decision of PM Indira to impose President’s Rule in UP after asking her own party’s CM Kamalapati Tripathi to resign, Morarji Desai wrote, ‘It was obvious that both actions were deliberately planned for the purpose of winning the (assembly) elections (in 1974)… The results came out as planned.’… By winning the UP elections, PM Indira established the fact that her faction was the real version of the Indian National Congress.
Meanwhile, Bahuguna was sworn in as the CM on 8 November 1973… Bahuguna emerged as a leader who was most popular among the state’s Muslims, next only to Charan Singh, who was the LoP…. Allegations were also made that the Bahuguna government had released hundreds of dacoits from jails to help the Congress candidates, with promises that if the Congress won, their sentences would be remitted…
There was uneasiness in his dealings with PM Indira, and even more so with Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay was attempting to bring the Congress organisation under his absolute control and looking to allocate several important posts to Youth Congress leaders because he felt old leaders like Bahuguna were not paying obeisance to him. Sanjay was emerging as the chief controller of the Congress party, and Bahuguna was finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to his autocratic ways of functioning.
On account of Narayan Dutt Tiwari’s vast political experience and understanding of the grassroots politics of the state, as well as because of his ‘flexible’ nature, PM Indira and Sanjay, in the midst of Emergency, chose him to head the government in UP. Tiwari took oath as the ninth CM of UP on 21 January 1976, after 52 days of President’s Rule and in a volatile situation where thousands of people had been put in jails under the Defence of India Rules (DIR), and Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). He took oath as the CM of UP four times but served for less than four years (three years and 314 days) in total…
Throughout Emergency, a competition of sorts existed among Congress leaders to see who would be more successful in making the party high command sitting in Delhi happy. Nearly 50,000 people were put in UP jails during Emergency. On 22 March 1976, the assembly was provided a list of 77 MLAs of different parties who were arrested and of those among them who were released after arrest during Emergency. Later, names of MLAs who were detained, arrested and released in different parts of the state were announced on different dates in the assembly. Tiwari continuously skipped answering questions in this regard from the members…
Due to Tiwari’s frequent visits to Delhi during Emergency in order to take instructions from senior Congress leaders as well as PM Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, he was known in UP during those days as ‘New Delhi (ND) Tiwari’; he was also referred to as ‘Nothing Doing (ND) Tiwari’
In 1989, Tiwari began to address many important pending issues, and one of them was declaring Urdu as the second official language of UP on 7 October 1989, evidently to woo Muslims… Tiwari resigned on 5 December 1989 and was replaced by Janata Dal’s Mulayam Singh Yadav.