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Sikhs
lose a good friend in Chandrashekhar as former premier dies at 80
WSN Bureau
 New Delhi: Of the very very few friends
that the Sikh community had among the non-Sikh leaders at the
federal level, former Prime Minister Chandrashekhar's name had
always been consistently on the top. Naturally, the community
received the news of the death of this man, known as a Young Turk
with innate powers to stand up for his principles irrespective of
who is on the other side, with extreme sadness.
Chandrashekhar passed away at a New Delhi hospital on Sunday morning
at the age of 80 after remaining a lifelong socialist. He battled
against multiple myeloma or cancer of the plasma cells. He is
survived by his two sons.
India declared a seven day mourning for him. Chandra Shekhar stood
against politics of personality and stoutly opposed policies of
liberalisation, reflecting the socialist ideology he strongly
espoused. He chose to become pure and simple ‘Chandra Shekhar' after
having been ‘Thakur Chandra Shekhar Singh' for years, after he
decided that a socialist must not use such casteist appellations.
Sikhs remember him as the modern day avtar of the Nawab of
Malerkotla who had protested against the bricking alive of the
Sahibzadas of the tenth Sikh Guru. Chandrashekhar, reacting to
Operation Bluestar in 1984, had said the Government of India had
taken a lead in murdering the soul of humanity by sending forces
inside the Golden Temple and mounting the attack on the holiest
shrine of the Sikhs. Later, when the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress party
inserted huge advertisements in the newspapers depicting the Sikhs
as terrorists, Chndrashekhar had denounced the campaign as
anti-national.
At one time, the former premier was deeply involved in getting the
militant Sikh groups to the negotiating table and had made
considerable efforts to open the communication channels blocked by
the narrow vision of the Congress.
He was elected MP eight times from Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, but in
his long political career, the Young Turk had never bothered about
how many feathers he ruffled. So respected was the man that even V P
Singh, whose government fell because of Chandrashekhar's success in
splitting the Janata Dal, described his death as a "personal loss"
and said the country had lost its biggest upholder of democratic
values.
Sharad Yadav, with a history of love-hate relationship with
Chandrashekhar, also condoled the death.
So blunt were his views that he incurred the wrath of his party
leader late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who jailed him during
Emergency in 1975 along with other leading lights of the Opposition
like Morarji Desai, Jayaprakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L
K Advani.
Born on July one, 1927 in a farmer's family in Ibrahimpatti in
Ballia in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Chandra Shekhar was attracted to
politics from student days and was known as a firebrand idealist.
After his student days in Allahabad University, he joined the
socialist movement in the early 1950s. An associate of Acharya
Narendra Dev, Chandra Shekhar was with the Praja Socialist Party for
long and was elected to Rajya Sabha in 1962. He joined the Congress
party three years later and was elected General Secretary of the
Congress Parliamentary Party.
11 July, 2007
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