Yashwant Sinha as the opposition’s common candidate in the presidential election; A journey from his IAS career to his political career
Sourav Roy Barman
Yashwant Sinha: Ex-IAS, former minister, BJP rebel, now Opp joint candidate for President: At a press conference in 1993, senior leader LK Advani announced that Yashwant Sinha had joined the BJP. The gift, ”he explained. Yashwant Sinha, a former government official, has traveled a long way in politics, just like the party he belongs to and the party he has long grown up with.
Yashwant Sinha, who was brought up by Advani and was a prominent finance and foreign minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government from 1999 to 2004, has left the BJP under Narendra Modi to change his political profile and is now the opposition’s consensus candidate in the presidential election.
While it is considered that there will be no major setbacks for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the presidential election except for a few setbacks, Yashwant Sinha’s candidature bears great symbolism for both his former party and the opposition, which expects a moral stance against the Modi government.
Also read: Presidential election; The election of the President of our contemporaries
Announcing his resignation from the Trinamool Congress on Tuesday, Yashwant Sinha said on his Twitter page, “I am grateful to Mumtaz for the respect and honor he has bestowed on me at the Trinamool Congress. Now is the time for me to leave the party and work for the unity of the opposition for a greater national cause. I hope Mamta approves of this move, ”he posted.
Yashwant Sinha’s first political career began in the Janata Dal after he resigned from the IAS in 1984, and he became a member of the Rajya Sabha in 1988. Yashwant Sinha’s marginalization of the BJP began in 2005 after his mentor, Advani, called for the resignation of the opposition leader for praising Mohammad Ali Jinnah during his visit to Pakistan. Having been in the BJP opposition for 10 years, Advani himself was disqualified by the inability to seize power, and Yashwant Sinha disappeared into politics.
Yashwant Sinha’s final breakdown followed Modi’s rise to the BJP leadership, with Sinha publicly criticizing Modi, before finally leaving the party in 2018, in its current form, calling it a “threat to democracy.” Since then, Sinha, 84, a three-time Lok Sabha MP from Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh constituency, has failed in his attempt to renew his political career and has joined the ‘Rashtriya Munch’ with like-minded leaders on issues like Kashmir. Before finally taking refuge in the Trinamool Congress, he wrote an autobiography, Relentless, in 2019.
It was Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee’s lead in mobilizing the opposition around the joint candidate that finally led to the election of Yashwant Sinha. After the denials of Sarabjit Pawar, Farooq Abdullah and Gopalakrishna Gandhi, Sinha may have been a regressive choice, but Sinha will welcome this new breath of life.
Sinha was born into an influential family. His father Pipin Bihari Sharan was an excellent lawyer. Yashwant Sinha graduated with a Masters Degree in Political Science in 1958 and then taught Political Science at the University of Patna from 1958 to 1960 before joining the IAS.
Sinha has served in various capacities in Bihar for many years and was also the government representative abroad before joining the Union Cabinet. Between 1971 and 1973, he was the first Secretary (Commerce) at the Indian Embassy in Germany. Subsequently, he served as Consul General of India at Frankfurt from 1973 to 1974. Prior to resigning from the IAS, he served as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Transport.
In the Janata Party, Sinha served as All India General Secretary and was appointed Finance Minister in Chandra Sekhar’s short-lived cabinet between November 1990 and June 1991. Going to other parties, Sinha always refers to Chandra Sekhar as his “political guru”.
In his autobiography, Sinha wrote that he had joined the BJP against Chandrasekhar’s advice. He says Chandrasekhar warned that the BJP was likely to “use and reject” him because he had no RSS background. Sinha added: I have never been a member of the RSS. Out of curiosity I never wore khaki shorts or a black hat or went to Shaka. Therefore, I cannot place even a small claim on this unique patriarchy (RSS) of the BJP.
Sinha, who has distanced himself from the party where he served for 25 years, calls Jawaharlal Nehru a great influence and mentions meeting him as a young IAS coach. “Many of my decisions and answers in my later life are based on what he (Nehru) said in Delhi that day.”
Aside from his abandoned political career, even opposition leaders acknowledge Sinha as a capable minister. Former President Pranab Mukherjee once said that if the Chandrasekhar government had not fallen, Sinha would have been “the first reformist finance minister, but he was prevented from presenting a budget that could change the country’s economy.”
In Vajpayee’s cabinet, Sinha was finance minister twice between 1998 and 2002. In 2002, he exchanged portfolios with Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh. Coincidentally, Sinha’s father named him Rajput warrior Jaswant Singh Marwar.
Sinha often mentions his good relations with former US Secretary of State Colin Powell when talking about his mission, and wrote in an article in The Indian Express that he was the only Indian foreign minister to invite the US President (George Bush) to the Oval Office.
Although Sinha may have moved away from the BJP and radical politics, his son remains a member of the Jayant party and is the father of his father’s former constituency Hazaribagh MP. Jayant was the Union Minister during the last Modi regime.
What can Sinha aim for with this latest political leap? As he writes in his autobiography Relentless, “this habit of taking calculated risks lives on today.”
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