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Indian politics has produced no figure more paradoxical than the small landed prince from the Allahabad countryside who dismantled, in succession, the corruption consensus of the eighties and the caste order of the centuries, and was rewarded with eleven months of power and thirty years of blame. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Raja of Manda, chief minister of UP, finance minister who raided his own patrons, and the prime minister who unlocked Mandal, is the hinge on which this series’ next batch turns, and his UP grounding, too often skipped in the national tellings, is where his two revolutions were actually learned.
The learning began with the state’s oldest curses, land and dacoity. Born in 1931 into the small principality of Manda, adopted heir to its title, educated through Allahabad and Pune, VP Singh entered the state’s Congress politics as the idealist of his cohort, donating family land to the Bhoodan movement in his youth, and rose through the union ministries of the seventies to the chief ministership of UP in 1980, where the era’s defining plague, the dacoit gangs of the ravine country this series meets in its crime batches, met an administrator who took the war personally. His tenure’s encounters and surrenders broke several of the great gangs and prefigured, students of the state’s policing note, the encounter raj debates of a later era, and its cost arrived with biblical directness, the Behmai massacre of villagers falling in his term and drawing his offer of resignation, and dacoits murdering his own brother, an Allahabad judge, in 1982 in declared revenge, the raja leaving Lucknow with the state’s violence written into his family’s ledger.
The first revolution was fiscal rectitude weaponised. As Rajiv Gandhi’s finance minister from 1984, VP Singh turned the enforcement machinery on the licence era’s untouchables, the raids on the great business houses scandalising a party financed by them, and his transfer to defence proved no quieter, his pursuit of the era’s arms commissions, the Bofors affair breaking in 1987, ending in his expulsion from the Congress and his conversion into the opposition’s clean hands standard, the Jan Morcha and then the Janata Dal assembling around his Allahabad by election triumph, and the 1989 general election, fought on the corruption issue with the Bofors gun booming from every UP stage, making him prime minister at the head of a minority government supported, in the era’s doomed geometry, by the BJP from one side and the left from the other.
The second revolution detonated in August 1990. Confronting his coalition’s internal rival, and honouring, his defenders note, a manifesto commitment both Janata generations had carried, VP Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s decade old report, twenty seven percent reservation for the other backward classes in central services, and North India ignited, the upper caste student self immolations, the campus risings, and the counter mobilisation that followed reshaping the political landscape within months, the BJP answering Mandal with the Mandir, Advani’s rath rolling toward Ayodhya that autumn, VP Singh ordering the rath’s arrest in Bihar, the BJP withdrawing support, and the government falling in November 1990 after eleven months that had redrawn Indian politics twice. The heartland’s next thirty years, the Mandal parties against the Mandir party, this series’ entire next act, were scripted in that single season, and the script’s author retired from its stage almost at once, refusing office thereafter with a consistency his critics called sulking and his admirers called the point, spending his last years as painter, poet, and patron of the social justice generation, dying in 2008 of the cancers he had outlasted for a decade.
The ledger on VP Singh is the era’s own quarrel, and this series states both columns. The indictment holds him the cynic who split society to save a government, the raja playing caste chess, the destroyer of the centre whose fragments never reassembled. The defence holds him the one upper caste politician who spent power on the powerless knowing the bill, the man who chose the backward classes over his own class and his own office, Mandal’s justice delayed forty years and delivered by a raja. What is beyond the quarrel is the consequence, that after him the heartland’s majority entered the room, and the room was never resealed. His two revolutions, probity and Mandal, made him the most consequential single figure between Indira and the present, and the least commemorated, a man with no samadhi politics, no dynasty, and no party, only a fault line with his name on it, running directly into this series’ next batch.
