Ibrahimpatti, a village in the Ballia district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, produced one of independent India's most persistently independent politicians. Chandra Shekhar was born there on 17 April 1927, into a farming family in what was then the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh under British rule. He never severed the connection. Ballia elected him to Parliament again and again over three decades, he returned to the district throughout his life, and the plain rural idiom of eastern Uttar Pradesh remained audible in his speech long after he had reached the highest office in the country.

Village beginnings and a socialist education

He grew up among cultivators, and the agrarian questions of tenancy, land, credit and rural poverty were not abstractions to him. He took a bachelor's degree and then a master's in political science from Allahabad University, completing it in 1950 — at that time one of the most politically charged campuses in India, where the debates of the freedom movement were being converted into arguments about what kind of republic should follow.

Chandra Shekhar emerged from those years a convinced socialist. He was drawn to the Praja Socialist Party and worked in its ranks in Uttar Pradesh, absorbing a tradition that combined parliamentary politics with agitation and a deep suspicion of concentrated power. That suspicion never left him, and it made him an uncomfortable colleague in every party he ever joined.

The Young Turk

He entered the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, in 1962, and served there until 1977. During this period he moved into the Indian National Congress, then the dominant force in Indian politics, and quickly became identified with a group of restless members who pressed the leadership for radical economic measures — bank nationalisation, curbs on monopoly, the abolition of princely privileges, and a genuine redistribution of land. The press called them the Young Turks, and Chandra Shekhar was their most conspicuous figure.

What distinguished him was that his dissent was directed upward as readily as outward. He criticised his own party's leadership in public when he judged it to be drifting towards personal rule, and he did not moderate that criticism when it became dangerous to hold it. When the Emergency was proclaimed in June 1975 and civil liberties were suspended, he was arrested and imprisoned — an extraordinary situation, since he was at the time a member of the ruling party's own highest body. He spent much of the Emergency in detention.

That imprisonment defined his standing for the rest of his career. When the Emergency ended and the opposition coalesced into the Janata Party, which swept the general election of 1977, Chandra Shekhar was elected its president, a post he held into the 1980s. In the same year he entered the Lok Sabha from Ballia, the constituency he would represent for the greater part of his remaining life.

The Bharat Yatra

In 1983, out of office and out of favour, he did something no other Indian politician of his rank had attempted. He set out on foot from Kanyakumari, at the southern tip of the peninsula, and walked north to New Delhi — a padayatra of roughly 4,260 kilometres undertaken over about six months. His stated purpose was neither electoral nor ceremonial: he wanted to see rural India at walking pace, to sleep in villages, and to understand for himself the conditions that policy documents described at a distance.

The Bharat Yatra became the best-remembered episode of his public life. It established him, in the popular imagination, as a politician who had actually looked at the country he proposed to govern, and it seeded a network of contacts in small towns and villages along the route. It also fitted the man: austere, physically stubborn, more comfortable in a village courtyard than in a drawing room.

Prime Minister

The turbulent politics of 1990 brought him to office by an unlikely route. When the Janata Dal government split, Chandra Shekhar led a breakaway group that formed the Samajwadi Janata Party, and he was sworn in as the eighth Prime Minister of India on 10 November 1990, governing with outside support from the Congress. It was a minority administration commanding the smallest bloc of members ever to head a government in India, and its authority was precarious from the first day.

The period was nonetheless consequential. His months in office coincided with the Gulf War, which disrupted oil supplies and remittances from Indians working in West Asia, and with the deepening of India's balance-of-payments crisis, as foreign exchange reserves fell towards the point at which the country could no longer finance its imports. His government took emergency measures to stabilise external payments, and the reckoning that followed under his successor — the liberalisation of 1991 — began from the position his administration had held.

Support was withdrawn in March 1991 and he tendered his resignation, remaining in office in a caretaker capacity until a new government was formed in June 1991. His premiership had lasted a matter of months.

Later years and legacy

He did not retire. He returned to the back benches and continued to represent Ballia in the Lok Sabha until his death, becoming one of the most experienced parliamentarians in the house and one of the few senior figures willing to speak against his own side's positions when he disagreed with them. He was formally honoured as an outstanding parliamentarian, a recognition that reflected the regard in which members across party lines held his command of debate and procedure.

He died in New Delhi on 8 July 2007. Assessments of his career tend to note the brevity of his premiership, but that is an incomplete measure of the man. His significance lies in a longer record: a village boy who argued for land reform inside the most powerful party in India, went to prison rather than accept the suspension of the constitution, walked the length of the country to find out how its people lived, and never quite belonged to any establishment, including the ones he led. Ibrahimpatti remains the point from which that record begins.