Morarji Desai

Biography

Morarji Desai was born in 1896 in Bhadeli, in the Bulsar district of Bombay Presidency (now Valsad, Gujarat), the eldest of eight children of a schoolteacher. He was educated at schools in Savarkundla and Valsad and at the University of Bombay, and served as a deputy collector in Godhra, a post he gave up in 1930 to join Gandhi's civil disobedience movement. He was jailed several times during the independence struggle.

A Congress leader in Gujarat, he served as revenue and home minister of Bombay Presidency and from 1952 to 1956 as chief minister of Bombay State, where he opposed the campaigns for separate Marathi and Gujarati states; police on his orders fired on Samyukta Maharashtra demonstrators at Flora Fountain. He was finance minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet from 1958 to 1963.

Passed over for Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1964 and defeated by Indira Gandhi in the 1966 leadership vote, he served as her deputy prime minister and finance minister until 1969, when he resigned and joined the Congress (Organisation) in the party split. Jailed during the Emergency, he was chosen to lead the Janata alliance after its 1977 victory and became, at 81, India's first prime minister from outside the Congress.

His government restored relations with China and Pakistan, cut back the external intelligence agency and reversed Emergency-era amendments to the constitution, but factional quarrels brought it down and he resigned in July 1979. He then retired from electoral politics, received Pakistan's Nishan-e-Pakistan in 1990 and the Bharat Ratna in 1991, and died in Bombay in 1995 at the age of 99.