by VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
Former Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral (1919-2012). PHOTO/Wikipedia
In 1991, when Inder Kumar Gujral made one of his rare entries into the Lok Sabha election fray by filing from Bihar’s Patna constituency, the then Chief Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader, Lalu Prasad, devised a special description for him. In the quintessential Lalu Prasad style, it was part funny and fictional and part factual. A translation of sorts from Bhojpuri would be as follows: “Gujral ji is a Gujjar, which is a variation of the Yadavas in Punjab. And so, he is our own man and not a foreigner as his opponents are trying to make him out to be. And like all Yadavas, he is focussed on the development of the agricultural sector and the rural poor. At the same time, he pursues, like Bhagwan Krishna, his manifold interests in art, poetry, diplomacy and languages like English, Punjabi and Urdu.” This writer was witness to this jovial description being narrated many times over during the election campaign that year, and on each occasion, it was evident that the audience could differentiate between the fictional and the factual elements. The subject of the description, as also Lalu Prasad’s political opponents, accepted it as part of the “special freedom of speech” that Lalu Prasad enjoyed. This good humour around the personality of Gujral was in sharp contrast to the electoral battle itself. The contest was bitter; there were allegations of irregularities, and the elections were countermanded. But Gujral’s personality survived all this unscathed.
This situation in the 1991 Patna election does symbolise the effect that Gujral, the person and the politician, had on the overall political firmament too. The late Prime Minister, who passed away on November 30 in Delhi, barely a week before his 93rd birthday, was one of the most non-controversial politicians the country has seen, though he had his firm convictions with regard to his political ideology. In a conversation with this writer in 2005, Gujral identified the key aspects of his core ideology as secularism, socialism, adherence to democratic values and promotion of friendly neighbourhood relations in the subcontinent. “I believe in negotiation and settlement with different streams of opinion, and I do not think I have ever compromised on these core values,” he said during the course of that conversation.
A study of his life as well as his political and administrative career does underscore that these were indeed the dominant streams that impacted him. Gujral belonged to a family of freedom fighters in the Jhelum district of Punjab, which is currently in Pakistan. He actively participated in the freedom struggle and was jailed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement. This streak of a fighter for democratic rights came into play in the 1970s too, by which time he had become a well-known politician. When the Emergency was imposed, bringing in arbitrary press censorship, he was the Information and Broadcasting Minister. He was not comfortable with this and expressed his reservations clearly, leading to his removal from the Ministry. He later joined the Janata Party, when it successfully contested the elections in 1977. In the following years, he consistently took a position against communalism of various forms, particularly the Hindutva variety advanced by the Sangh Parivar and its associates, even though his government had shared power with them on a couple of occasions as part of a power-sharing arrangement. But, he always expressed his opposition in a dispassionate, intellectual manner.
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