Inder Kumar Gujral

Biography

Inder Kumar Gujral was born in 1919 in the Jhelum district of Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. He studied at colleges in Lahore, including Forman Christian College, and as a student joined the All India Students Federation and the Communist Party of India. He was jailed in 1942 for his part in the Quit India Movement.

After independence he became vice-president of the New Delhi Municipal Committee in 1958, joined the Congress party in 1964 and entered the Rajya Sabha the same year. A confidant of Indira Gandhi, he was information and broadcasting minister when the Emergency began in 1975, but was soon moved to the planning ministry after clashing over press censorship. From 1976 to 1980 he was India's ambassador to the Soviet Union.

He left Congress in the 1980s for the Janata Dal and was elected for Jalandhar in 1989. As external affairs minister under V. P. Singh he flew to Srinagar during the 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed. He held the same ministry again from 1996 in H. D. Deve Gowda's United Front government, where he set out the Gujral doctrine of generous, non-reciprocal relations with India's smaller neighbours.

When Congress forced Deve Gowda out in April 1997, the United Front chose Gujral as prime minister. His minority government fell in November 1997 after Congress withdrew its support over the Jain Commission report, and he stayed on as caretaker until March 1998. He left active politics in 1998 and died in Gurgaon in 2012.