Hindustan Times

Dhrubo Jyoti

Dipankar Ghose

These five Indians will be remembered for their role in this era.

Advani, Narasimha Rao, Jayalalithaa: 5 key leaders

<h2 style="text-align:center;">VP Singh</h2><p>By the time Vishwanath Pratap Singh thrust himself into the national consciousness in the late 1980s, he was already a senior politician. A member of the royal family from a region near erstwhile Allahabad, Singh had served in Parliament, was a Union minister and the chief minister of India’s most-populous state. But it was during his stint in the Rajiv Gandhi government, as minister of finance and then minister of defence, that he started gaining a national footprint.</p><p>When the Bofors scandal broke in 1987, he was quick to separate himself from Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress. He was sacked and then resigned from the Congress. A year later, he brought together disparate strands of socialist parties in the heartland under the umbrella of the Janata Dal. By then, his meteoric political rise had spooked the Congress.</p>

<p>By the time of the 1989 election, Singh was addressing rallies saying he had the list of alleged Bofors middlemen in his pocket and would have them arrested as soon as he came to power. In his year-long tenure between 1989 and 1990, he confronted the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, the abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, and the rising Ram Janmabhoomi movement. But his decision to accept the Mandal Commission report – which catalysed a churn in the heartland and fuelled the rise of a string of regional parties mobilising backward communities – remains his legacy. Rarely has such a short tenure been so eventful.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Narasimha Rao</h2><p>The first Prime Minister of India from southern India was also among its most influential. PV Narasimha Rao may have ascended to the highest position in the national executive in a moment of deep crisis for the nation – just after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi – but he delivered what is often considered the most consequential set of reforms in India’s history.</p>

<p>In the 1991 election, the Congress won 232 seats, far from the magic figure of 272. With the party deeply divided between powerful competing factions, Rao emerged as a consensus choice. Once in the saddle, though, he took quick decisions to defuse the balance-of-payments crisis. Along with finance minister Manmohan Singh, Rao helped liberalise the economy, unshackled it from the fetters of the licence-permit raj, and unleashed a wave of prosperity that nurtured the rise of a new middle class. He also proved his political adeptness by running a minority government for a full term, though the controversy around alleged bribery allegations surrounding a no-confidence motion in 1993 tarnished his legacy.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">HD Deve Gowda</h2><p>This accidental prime minister-of-sorts ascended to the highest seat in India’s political executive in extraordinary circumstances. When the 1996 Lok Sabha election threw up a hung House and Atal Bihari Vajpayee couldn’t muster enough votes to sustain his government, the then chief minister of Karnataka was the unlikely nominee of the United Front after heartland politicians couldn’t reach an agreement and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) famously refused to let then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu ascend to the top position.</p>

<p>Deve Gowda lasted a year in the post, before being replaced by IK Gujral after the Congress threatened to withdraw support. He came to signify the turbulence and chaos of a time when three general elections were held in as many years, but later appraisals of his tenure have been brighter, focusing on his nuanced view of the dynamics of agriculture, his wide-ranging relationships in Karnataka and Delhi, and his remarkable personal journey from a humble farming family to the prime minister’s chair.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">LK Advani</h2><p>Even as the socialist parties were in churn and the Congress was slowly losing its grip on the Hindi belt in the 1980s, the controversial Ram Janmabhoomi movement was on the ascent. The aggressive leadership of LK Advani, the movement’s key architect, helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) increase its footprint, particularly in Uttar Pradesh. The results would soon be evident, as the BJP’s electoral numbers soared from two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to 85 in 1989.</p><p>In 1990, Advani went a step further, leading a rath yatra as part of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, mobilising young men across the heartland. The yatra helped further expand the BJP base in north India.</p>

<p>A pracharak with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Advani began his political career with the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, and was known for his more hardline positions on Hindutva, in contrast with the moderate politics of his contemporary, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Advani’s leadership ensured that the BJP won the second-highest number of seats in the 1991 election, after the Congress. But his political legacy would be tainted by the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992. By the time the BJP got a shot at power in 1996, Vajpayee was the clear face of the party, and became PM. Advani would rise as high as deputy prime minister, in 2002, before leading the party to a loss in 2009. His ambition of serving as prime minister would remain unmet.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">J Jayalalithaa</h2><p>The iron lady of Tamil Nadu wielded strong influence through the 1990s. After emerging as the clear victor in the fight for the legacy of actor, politician and chief minister MG Ramachandran in the late 1980s, Jayalalithaa became CM in 1991, and began working her way to greater influence in Delhi. This effort reached its peak in 1998, when the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) helped prop up the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.</p>

<p>But things started to go south when she was named in a clutch of corruption cases by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) state government. There was speculation that AIAMDK lawmakers were pressuring the Centre to dismiss the state administration. Things came to a head on April 17, 1999, when the Vajpayee government lost a no-confidence motion by a single vote after the AIADMK withdrew support. Vajpayee came back to power in the next general election and ruled for a full term, but Jayalalithaa would come to symbolise the muscle that regional powers developed in the coalition years.</p>