India adopted a Westminster style Parliamentary system of government, just like most Dominions and other colonies of Britain did. Under this system, the leader of the majority in the Lower House of Parliament is designated the Prime Minister and is the actual head of the government. A head of state must act purely as a rubber stamp for all decisions made by the PM.
In India, the lower house is called the Lok Sabha (People’s Chamber) and the leader of the majority party or coalition is designated as the Prime Minister or Pradhaan Mantri (transliteration of Prime Minister into Hindi).
India has had quite a few interesting and colorful characters, who have held the position of Prime Minister.
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Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru 1947 - 1964
Lal Bahadur Shastri 1964 - 1966
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi 1966 - 1977 and 1980 - 1984
Morarji Desai 1977 - 1979
- Morarji Desai was born to a poor Brahmin family in Gujarath, Bombay Presidency, British India. His father, an impoverished school teacher died when Morarji was young, plunging the family into financial trouble. The young boy was a studious sort who worked very hard and passed\ the notoriously difficult Indian Civil Service Exam. He was appointed Deputy Collector (of taxes and revenue) for the district in Gujarath that he hailed from. However, he soon recognized the injustices of the colonial system and sought to correct as much as he could, from within the system. He was however, fired from his position after not coming down hard enough on the local Hindu population during some communal tensions in 1927. After being fired, he became a staunch disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and plunged into the freedom struggle. Desai was particularly receptive to Gandhi’s pacifism; a belief that would cause great harm to the country during his Prime Ministership.
- Desai served in Nehru’s cabinet, holding many portfolios and always striving to be a staunch socialist. He was also somewhat of a Moral Guardian, working to keep out foreign media that he felt was too vulgar, offensive, sexualized or otherwise corrupted India’s youth. The peculiar sexual mores exhibited by Bollywood can largely be attributed to him. That said, he didn’t do much to build up any political capital. This led to him being sidelined for the Prime Ministership twice - losing out to Lal Bahadur Shastri upon Nehru’s death, and once more losing out to Indira Gandhi after Shastri’s death. Although he was given cabinet positions under Indira Gandhi, he chafed under her various policies. When disagreements over the extent of company nationalization came to a head, Desai left the Indian National Congress with his numerous followers, and started his own political party.
- Desai and his party started to openly challenge Indira Gandhi from 1972. When Indira declared an Emergency and assumed dictatorial powers, Morarji Desai was among several political opponents she had imprisoned. This left him with a deep distrust of the overall security apparatus - distrust that would cause a lot of damage.
- In 1977, when the Emergency was repealed, Indira went to jail and fresh elections were called, Desai’s party merged with Jayprakash Narayan’s political movement and the Hindutwa aligned Jana Sangh to form a new party - the Janata (People) Party. This was a coalition of politicians with views as diverse as their backgrounds - United only by the desire to keep the Congress out of power. They succeeded and Morarji Desai finally achieved his dream of becoming Prime Minister.
- Governing though, proved to be a lot more difficult than Desai imagined, mostly because no one could agree on what needed to be done.
Rajiv Gandhi 1984 - 1989
Vishwanath Pratap Singh 1989 - 1990
- In 1989, all of V P Singh’s protestations about the corruption in the Congress and the Rajiv Gandhi government paid off. Although the Congress won a plurality, they couldn’t get an absolute majority. And no other party wanted to form a coalition with them. VP Singh however, had combined his “party” of disgruntled Congress defectors with Jayprakash Narayan’s Janata Party to form a new party - the Janata Dal or People’s Group. This new Janata Dal formed a coalition with both left parties such as the Communist Party and the right wing BJP to form the National Front. V P Singh initially wanted Haryana statesman Devi Lal Chautala to become Prime Minister, but Devi Lal refused, believing he didn’t have the same popularity that V P Singh did. With Devi Lal’s support, V P Singh beat out Janata Party stalwart Jayprakash Narayan’s handpicked man Chandra Shekhar to become Prime Minister.
- That said, the Janata Dal led National Front struggled with the same infighting that the Janata Party did in the late seventies. The left parties demanded rollbacks of all the privatization based reforms Rajiv Gandhi had carried out. The caste based parties wanted many different things for their vote banks, while the BJP agitated on the Ram Temple issue. However, the greatest challenge to V P Singh would come from his once biggest supporter - Devi Lal. Devi Lal’s son Om Prakash Chautala had secured a victory in the Haryana state election and was all set to become Chief Minister. But when allegations of ballot stuffing, booth capturing and election rigging emerged, the honest to a fault V P Singh cracked down hard. And lost the support of Devi Lal in the process.
- To shore up support elsewhere, V P Singh offered as many handouts as he politically could. This included Sikh radicals in Punjab and Islamic radicals in Kashmir. This unfortunately backfired as those groups happily accepted all concessions given to them and stepped up the ferocity of their separatist campaigns. This lead to a deteriorating security situation in the whole of North India. A desperate Singh then tried a political Hail Mary play - the endorsement of the Mandal Commission Report.
- The Mandal Commission was a multi-year study headed by retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Mandal, which sought to determine whether backward castes still needed Affirmative Action style reservations in schools, colleges and government jobs, or if three decades of reservations had sufficiently uplifted the castes. The commission determined that although “creamy layers” existed in all backward classes, that were economically well off enough to not require reservations, the castes as a whole were still reeling from millennia of under-privilege and therefore needed reservation quotas to continue. V P Singh agreed with the report publicly and pledged to implement its recommendations. Unfortunately, while this won him the support of the various caste based parties, upper caste middle class people, particularly students began violently protesting the continuation of reservation quotas. They started to drift towards the BJP, which espoused caste-blind pro Hindu policies. The BJP withdrew from the coalition and decided to just do their own thing. BJP leader L K Advani launched a traveling campaign on a chariot known as a Rath Yatra (Journey by Chariot) that would terminate at Ayodhya and demand the demolition of the Bahri mosque. This galvanized support from many upper caste Hindus. When V P Singh ordered Advani’s chariot stopped and Advani arrested, this spelled doom for his own Prime Ministership.
K Chandra Shekhar 1990 - 1991
- When the BJP withdrew support to V P Singh, he lost a No-Confidence vote and had to resign. Waiting in the wings was his rival K Chandra Shekhar - Jayprakash Narayan’s protege and chosen successor. Instead of trying to stitch together an anyone except Congress coalition, Chandra Shekhar sought the Congress party’s support. The Congress, shrewdly pledged “outside support” i.e. voting in support of Chandra Shekhar’s government, but not actually joining it. They were, in actuality, giving Chandra Shekhar enough rope to possibly leap great bounds - or hang himself.
- Chandra Shekhar had no time to congratulate himself, as the country faced multiple crises. The Gulf War appeared to be imminent, with Kuwait occupied and Saudi Arabia staring down the barrels of Saddam’s tank guns. Oil prices spiked, putting immense pressure on the already fragile Indian economy. The law and order situation in Punjab and Kashmir had gone from bad to worse, thanks to V P Singh’s shortsighted appeasement policies. And although Advani was neutralized, agitations over the Ram Temple issue in Ayodhya were only getting worse.
- When Chandra Shekhar was informed that the country had only about a month’s worth of forex reserves (foreign exchange currency, specifically US dollars) left with which to import oil and other essential goods into the country, he knew he had to set aside his strong socialist leanings, and act. He asked the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India for advice, but that man was retiring shortly and pointed him to former Delhi School of Economics Professor and renown economist Dr. Manmohan Singh. Dr. Singh advices Chandra Shekhar to provide the entirety of India’s gold reserve as collateral for a hefty IMF loan. This would buy them time until they figured out a more permanent solution. Problem was, the IMF was a largely US influenced organization at that time, so if the IMF were to be appeased, the US will have to be appeased.
- The US was in the process of moving all their air, ground and naval assets into position before air strikes would be launched on Jan 17 1991. Aircraft stationed at Japan or Diego Garcia needed to refuel somewhere before landing in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. The Pakistanis; long time Allie’s of the US, had denied them refueling facilities due to anger over legislation introduced by Senator Larry Pressler, which forbade Pakistan from receiving any more F-16 fighters, due to them not shutting down their nuclear weapons program. Therefore, the US reached out to India. And the desperate Chandra Shekhar government agreed. US ships and aircraft were secretly refueled in Mumbai and in return, India received a favorable IMF loan, that staved off economic ruin for another few months.
- In March, the Congress party found out about the secret deal to refuel American aircraft, and went livid. They tore into the Chandra Shekhar government for “supporting Pakistan’s biggest enabler” and for “going against the tenets of socialism”. In actuality, the Congress party was looking for any small excuse to withdraw their support from this government and force fresh elections. Therefore, knowing full well that Chandra Shekhar’s action saved India, they still rewarded him by bringing down his government. Chandra Shekhar would remain on as a lame duck “caretaker PM” for about three more months, just like Charan Singh had, in ‘79.
P V Narasimha Rao 1991 - 1996
H D Deve Gowda 1996 - 1997
Inder Kumar Gujral 1997 - 1998
Atal Bihari Vajpayee 1996, 1998 - 2004
Dr. Manmohan Singh 2004 - 2014
Narendra Modi 2014 - present
