Singh, Vishwanath Pratap (1931-2008), was prime minister of India from 1989 to 1990. He succeeded Rajiv Gandhi. Singh won voter support with his stand against government corruption.
V. P. Singh, as he was known, was born on June 25, 1931, in Allahabad during the British colonial period. His father was the maharajah (ruler) of a small state. When Singh was 5 years old, his father’s cousin, another maharajah, adopted him. In 1941, his adoptive father died, and Singh became maharajah. Singh continued as maharajah until India’s independence in 1947, when the maharajahs were peacefully deposed and their territories became part of the new country. Singh entered politics in the 1960’s.
During the early 1980’s, he was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, then India’s most heavily populated state. From 1984 to 1987, he served as minister of finance and then minister of defense in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet. In 1987, he resigned, charging that Gandhi’s government was corrupt. He formed the Janata Dal (People’s Party).
In 1989, Singh’s party ran against Gandhi’s Congress-I Party, largely on an honesty-in-government platform. The Janata Dal alone did not win enough seats in Parliament to form a government. But it gained the necessary majority with the support of several other parties, and Singh became prime minister. However, in November 1990, Singh lost a vote of confidence in Parliament and was succeeded as prime minister by Chandra Shekhar of the Janata Dal (Socialist), a party formed by a split in the Janata Dal earlier that year. Following the elections of June 1991, the Congress Party formed a minority government. Singh’s Janata Dal was the third largest party in Parliament. Singh died on Nov. 27, 2008.
See also Shekhar, Chandra.
