Many biographical tributes have been written this week to the man who, more than being an accidental prime minister, will be remembered as one of the last great titans of the Indira era who was both a destroyer and conciliator at the same time. I am not qualified to write another. I wasn’t covering national politics in his heyday and had got to know him a little only lately, because he had more time, and if you were curious to learn more about Indian politics and its history there wasn’t a better tutor. For years now he had a detached view of politics, with no stakes of his own except his Lok Sabha seat in Ballia which, it seems, all other parties conspired to leave alone for him. He was too much of a character, too warm and individual and, more recently, too harmless a politician to have been kept out of Parliament.

He had seen India’s evolution from socialism to a free market economy. In fact he started that process, in a manner of speaking, as he had inherited a bankrupt exchequer from V.P. Singh and mortgaged India’s gold by the plane-load to avoid a default. He knew socialism of the kind he had believed in, closer to JP’s rather than Indira’s, was now passe. But he was never bitter about it. He acknowledged the fact that all old socialists, including committed Lohiaites, had accepted that reality now. But only if Mulayam, Lalu, Mayawati and Nitish would somehow come together! The last time I called on him, he joked about how times had changed with India’s economy. There was a time, he said, when foreign exchange was so short, he had to mortgage India’s gold reserves. Now they say they have too much foreign exchange, so much that they don’t know what to do with it, so will they send it out by the plane-load, or what? But not for a moment did he see this as some kind of defeat for his long-held socialist beliefs. Chandra Shekhar was probably the last of the greats in our politics who had seen the picture from all sides, and represented a generation of very tough, but very flexible leaders that fought yet networked with everybody.

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