4 March 2011: Arjun Singh, Congress leader, died

Arjun Singh, a three-time Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and union minister who in his long political career was once a contender for the post of prime minister, was born on 5 November 1930. He died on 4 March 2011.

Arjun Singh was born to a Rajput family in Sidhi, Madhya Pradesh. His father, the Congressman Rao Shiv Bahadur Singh, was minister of industry in the Jawaharlal Nehru cabinet. Rao Shiv was convicted in 1950 in a bribery case and sentenced to three years imprisonment and expelled from the Congress.

The veteran journalist M.V. Kamath wrote in The Free Press Journal in October 2014:

“His father’s disgrace, it was, writes Arjun Singh [in his posthumously published autobiography ‘A Grain of Sand in the Hourglass of Time’] that moved him ‘to enter public life and redeem the honour of the family’. He did so with commendable determination, beginning his career as a member of the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assemble to become, in due course, the State’s Chief Minister, later to be appointed Governor of Punjab and a Minister in the Union Government.”

Between 1957 and 1985 Arjun Singh was a member of the Madhya Pradesh Legislative. Between 1963 and 1967 he served as Minister of State for Agriculture, General Administration Department and Information and Public Relations. In 1967 he became Minister of Planning and Development in the state government.   

Between 1972 and 1977 he was MP’s education minister. In 1977 he became Leader of Opposition in the state Legislative Assembly and in 1980 the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. He reportedly had the support of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi for the chief minister’s chair.

It was towards the end of his tenure as MP chief minister that India suffered its deadliest man-made disaster, the Bhopal gas leak. His role in managing the crisis in the state’s capital was controversial.

A quarter of a century later, in a statement he read out in the Rajya Sabha in August 2010, he appeared to point a finger at Narashima Rao, who was the union home minister in the Rajiv Gandhi cabinet at the time of the Bhopal gas tragedy, for allowing former Union Carbide Corporation chairman Warren Anderson to leave India in December 1984.

“The chief secretary informed me that there have been persistent calls for granting bail to Mr Anderson from home ministry officials in Delhi,” Arjun Singh said his statement to the House, adding that the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had no role to play in the matter.

In 1985 Arjun Singh was made governor of Punjab, a crucial position as the state was in flames due to militancy. He was again chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in 1988-89. Between 1991 and 1994 he was the union Minister of Human Resource Development in the cabinet of Narashima Rao, a man he had major differences with.

In Arjun’s Singh’s autobiography his version of the events after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 as well as leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 make fascinating reading. About Rao’s response when Arjun Singh and other Congress leaders approached him with the suggestion that Sonia Gandhi be made Congress president in the wake of Rajiv’s death, Arjun Singh wrote: “On hearing our suggestion, Rao kept quiet for a few minutes with a grave expression on his face. Suddenly, he burst out in anger and virtually yelled out words to the effect whether it was essential that the Congress party should be treated like a train where the compartments have to be attached to an engine belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi family or were there other alternatives? I was dumbfounded by Rao’s outburst but kept quiet.”

And about the fateful days before 6 December 1992, Arjun Singh wrote: “I reached Delhi [from Lucknow] on 4 December evening. The next morning I met Narasimha Rao and reported verbatim the details of my conversation with [the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister] Kalyan Singh. Rao pretended to be listening attentively, but I got the impression that he was not taking the entire issue very seriously…I then told him very frankly that the Babri mosque was going to be demolished. This news definitely shook him and he wanted to dispute my claim, but, on second thoughts, he kept quiet.”

Arjun Singh again occupied the ministry of Human Resource during 2004-09 in the Manmohan Singh cabinet, but he “repeatedly ran into opposition — first for setting out to de-saffronise the education system and then for proposing reservation for Other Backward Castes (OBC) in higher education,” the senior journalist Vidya Subrahmaniam wrote in The Hindu after his death. “He refused to allow foreign universities to enter the country and wanted the IITs and IIMs to toe his line on fee structuring.”

On 4 March 2011 the very day he died, the Congress had dropped him from its highest decision-making body. The journalist Seema Chishti wrote in The Indian Express: “The quintessential family loyalist, the 81-year-old leader was possibly 21st century’s last link to the Congress of the 20th century, somewhat struggling and lost in the old party’s new style…[Arjun] Singh till his last days flaunted his progressive credentials and portrayed himself as a true-blue product of the old socialist Congress.”

Also on this day:

1886 — Bulusu Sambamurti, Indian lawyer, nationalist and president of Madras Legislative Council, was born  

1925 — Jyotirindranath Tagore, Bengali playwright, musician, editor and artist, passed away

1980 — Rohan Bopanna, Indian tennis player, was born

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