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Every political era keeps one figure whom colleagues describe with the same half admiring word, and for the UP of the seventies the word was chanakya and the figure was a Garhwali Brahmin with a labour organiser’s past and a chess player’s patience. Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, chief minister at the Congress system’s twilight, serial founder and leaver of parties, kingbreaker of the Janata years, and loser of the most famous electoral duel the state ever staged, was the master tactician of the churn era, and his career, brilliant, restless, and finally unhoused, is the era’s own biography, told through one man’s moves.
The formation was Allahabad’s, as this batch’s formations tend to be. Born in 1919 in the Garhwal hills the state then held, Bahuguna came down to Allahabad University, rose through its student politics into the freedom movement’s underground, a wanted man of the Quit India years with a price on his head, and built his post independence base in the city’s labour lines, the mill unions of Naini, an unusual foundation for a Brahmin politician and the source of his lifelong fluency across class lines. His Urdu was courtly, his Hindi rally craft famous, and his networks, from the mosque committees to the mill gates, made him the Congress’s specialist in the coalitions others found unreachable, above all the Muslim electorate, whose confidence he cultivated so successfully that his critics coined the era’s barbed compliments while his elections banked the returns.
His summit was the chief ministership, and its manner defined him. Appointed in 1973 after the provincial armed constabulary’s own mutiny had broken his predecessor, Bahuguna stabilised the state with a blend of conciliation and manoeuvre that became his signature, governed with a modernising energy the era’s accounts credit, and built, within the Congress, a personal following that Delhi read, correctly, as autonomy. The collision with the Emergency’s court was therefore scripted, and in November 1975, months into the era the previous articles described, he resigned the chief ministership, his frictions with Sanjay Gandhi’s circle having made his position untenable, the tactician choosing exit over service in the machine, one of the era’s few departures on something like principle, and the credential on which his second career was built.
The second career was the churn incarnate. In 1977 he cofounded, with Jagjivan Ram, the Congress for Democracy, the defection that helped tip the wave, merged into Janata, served as a union minister, and then, as Janata consumed itself, executed the return the era never forgave or forgot, rejoining Indira’s Congress in 1980, taking office, and leaving again within months as the arrangement soured, the tactician thereafter leading his own Lok Dal fragment through the eighties opposition, each move individually explicable and the sequence, his critics held, dissolving the very asset, credibility, on which tactics ultimately draw. The duel that ended the run came in 1984, in his own Allahabad, when the Congress, choosing its weapon with theatrical cruelty, fielded the film star Amitabh Bachchan, Allahabad’s own famous son, against the old master in the sympathy wave after Indira’s assassination, and the result was annihilation, the tactician buried under a landslide of glamour and grief, a defeat the state’s political lore still cites as the moment the old politics met television. He fought on briefly, and died in 1989 in an American hospital, the heart the era had exercised so hard failing under surgery.
The ledger records the assets and the estate. Bahuguna’s craft held the state together in an ungovernable decade, his Muslim outreach kept a wounded community inside constitutional politics through years that offered it little else, and his hill origins made him, posthumously, a founding icon of the Uttarakhand this series watched depart, the new state’s politics led for a season by his own children, Vijay Bahuguna’s chief ministership across the new border and Rita Bahuguna Joshi’s career on this side, the tactician’s line, with the era’s full irony, ending in both successor states and, eventually, in the party his whole career had fought. The estate’s lesson, his contemporaries drew and this series records, is the churn era’s own, that in a politics of permanent manoeuvre the greatest manoeuvrer wins every game and loses the era, tactics compounding into a strategy’s absence.
For the UP Files, Bahuguna is the indispensable minor key of the batch, the figure through whom the period’s music actually moved, and his defeat by a film star in 1984 is the batch’s perfect closing image but one, the old Congress world losing its last master a step before the world itself, in the next article, loses the state.
