“Suddenly I found afloat; My childhood paper boat; It signalled: ‘Come, it’s time to go’.” Former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who wrote those lines not long ago, has gone. Arguably the most controversial Prime Minister India has had, he died on the day the country grappled with a new challenge mounted by terrorists in Mumbai.
For the last several years, this master of realpolitik was on dialysis, putting up a valiant battle against blood cancer and kidney failure, into painting and poetry, and taking up the problems of Delhi’s slum dwellers.
Though VP Singh was prime minister for only 11 months, from December 1989 to November 1990, the 77-year-old leader was instrumental in bringing three far-reaching changes in Indian polity. The first was his decision in August 1990 to give 27 per cent job reservation to the backward classes, popularly referred to as “Mandal” because of the recommendation made to this effect in the Mandal Commission’s report-- which led to a paradigm shift in Indian politics.
It threw up a host of OBC leaders who have ruled north India since the ’Nineties like Laloo Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav. Even the traditionally upper caste BJP, which first opposed “Mandal”, was not left untouched and was compelled to elevate OBC leaders like Kalyan Singh and Shivaj Chouhan as chief ministers.
The large-scale violence all over north India that followed the Mandal decision also gave a new push to Dalit politics, which contributed, to the rise of Mayawati and Ram Vilas Paswan.
Once the genie of Mandal was out of the bottle, no party could put it back. The Congress took the Mandal decision a step further two years ago when it went in for 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in institutions of higher learning.
But Mandal made VP Singh an object of hate among the middle classes, which had loved him in the ’Eighties when he campaigned against corruption and took on Rajiv Gandhi for the payment of commissions in the purchase of the Bofors.
VP’s rise led to the decline of the Congress party, and that was the second change he helped to bring about.
From an unprecedented 415 seats that Rajiv Gandhi had won in 1984 after his mother’s assassination, the party went down, falling short of the majority mark in the 1989 polls and the subsequent elections.
His emergence also brought an end to the rule by the Nehru-Gandhi family.
Though Sonia Gandhi heads the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi is into active politics now, no member of the family has headed the government since 1989, even though India has seen seven Prime Ministers in this period.
Thirdly, VP not only challenged the Congress, he fashioned an alternative political instrument to take on the mother of all parties. In a three-tier arrangement, he brought together disparate opposition parties in one entity called the Janata Dal, which became the centerpiece of the coalition, inducted regional parties to form the National Front, and elicited the support of both the Left and the BJP from the outside.
He also felt he had helped bring regional parties to the national stage to “involve them in the management of the country”. His rule led to the rise of the BJP. Even though he was opposed to the BJP, his opponents criticised him for helping the BJP reach the takeoff stage.
With the decline of the Congress, and the rise of regional parties and the BJP, VP Singh’s premiership was in some ways the turning point in transiting the country from one-party rule to coalition government.
