V.P. Singh: Politician, messiah, painter...
New Delhi : Former prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who completed 75 years Sunday, is a rare Indian politician who combines his passion for weaker sections with his love for the arts. But much of the middle class despises him, just because he doggedly implemented caste-based job quotas.
The storm V.P. Singh unleashed when he ruled the country for about 11 months in 1989-90 is still felt. And just no one, not even the courts, have gone against the quota system - although the upper castes simply hate it.
And 16 years after he resigned in November 1990 as prime minister after being decisively defeated on the floor of parliament, he says he remains in "rajniti" (politics) but distinguishes it from "vote niti" (politics of votes).
This writer once asked him: "How does it feel to be perceived as the country's most hated public figure?" His reply was equally blunt: "I don't care. I am never going to seek votes and power."
Unlike most politicians, the man has kept his word. Not just that. Despite failing health, he takes active interest in issues close to his heart: economic reforms, minimum nuclear deterrence, urban poor, rural indebtedness and, most important from his point of view, communalism/secularism.
Unapologetic about the turmoil his caste-based job quotas caused, Singh today speaks about caste-based reservations in education and employment with far greater conviction, even as the Manmohan Singh government struggles to implement the policy in institutions of higher learning.
Singh's National Front government had in 1990 ordered the implementation of a voluminous report authored by B.P. Mandal that prescribed reservations for India's socially and economically classes that are estimated to form 53 percent of the country's population.
Singh's radical path despite a feudal lineage, cemented with morality, has been a gradual process.
A product of the Congress school, he was supposed to be a nominee of Sanjay Gandhi, the controversial younger son of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, for the job of chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's politically crucial province.
He resigned after failing to end the menace of bandits, who killed his own brother. On moving to the national scene, his economic policies as finance minister, preceding the reforms of the 1990s, came to be applauded in the West. His annual budgets were termed "India's New Deal".
Singh sparked a virtual revolution in Indian politics when he took on his own prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, by alleging corruption in the purchase of artillery guns from Sweden's Bofors company.
His campaign against Rajiv Gandhi virtually killed the latter's political future. Gandhi lost the 1989 parliamentary elections, and Singh became prime minister in December that year.
His regime was short-lived. As he unleashed the reservation policy, his ally Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) plunged into the campaign to build a temple at the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, triggering a war of words between him and the BJP that ultimately toppled him.
In the years to follow, his health slipped. Today, between his visits to the hospital for dialysis for his ailing kidney (he needs blood transfusion every week), he addresses even small crowds of 500 or 1,000 or courts arrest over issues dear to him.
Singh is a rare public figure in India who does not conceal his ailments, to the extent of providing medical reports to the media.
Though he was instrumental in eroding the political dominance of the Congress, he supported its chief Sonia Gandhi when she came under attack over her foreign origin. So much so that he campaigned for the Congress in 2004 on his own. The veteran today has built bridges with Sonia Gandhi.
In the present times, Singh has joined hands with former Samajwadi Party leader Raj Babbar to build a coalition that seeks to unseat Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh. "Politics is in my blood," he says.
The former prime minister also has a passion for poetry though he has not published his works -- unlike Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Politics and poetry combine with a third "P" - painting.
Singh is again a rare politician whose works adorn art galleries. Whether they will ever adorn the drawing rooms of India's upper class elites, the chief patrons of art, is a moot question.
