Vishwanath Pratap Singh:VISHWANATH PRATAP Singh, who has died aged 77, was an unusual Indian politician, renowned for his obsession with honesty and his willingness to sacrifice office.
He was coalition prime minister of India for less than a year, from December 1989 to November 1990, yet during that time he took a number of crucial decisions.
VP Singh, as he was always known, decided to end the Indian army's unsuccessful operation in Sri Lanka where Rajiv Gandhi, his predecessor, had sent it to combat the Tamil separatist movement.
Then, when LK Advani, the then deputy leader of the rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), was travelling across India drumming up support for the campaign to destroy a mosque in Ayodhya, in the northeast, he challenged Singh to arrest him.
The BJP claimed the mosque stood on the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama. Advani was eventually arrested as he was approaching Ayodhya, where later events resulted in violence. The rivalries within Singh's loose-knit party, the Janata Dal, erupted and he was ousted.
However, the decision that many commentators maintain changed the course of Indian politics was Singh's implementation of a 10-year-old report advocating quotas in jobs and educational opportunities for those known as other backward castes.
They are castes which do not suffer the social discrimination of Dalits, formerly known as Untouchables, but come low down the economic scale. There was an immediate backlash from the upper castes, with students even burning themselves to death. Singh's action is seen as having been responsible for the rapid expansion of parties based on caste, particularly in northern India.
Singh was the youngest of five brothers and was adopted by a neighbouring Raja who had no sons. When quite young he showed the first signs of his future as a politician renowned for honesty, by giving away the land that he inherited. He followed an elder brother into Indira Gandhi's Congress Party and rose to be chief minister of his home state, from 1980 to 1982. That involved getting elected to the state assembly, and during that campaign he insisted his workers had to move about on cycles or motorcycles. Singh travelled by bus.
As chief minister he promised to eliminate the criminal gangs that plagued the state. The police had considerable success, but when 16 people, including six Dalits, were killed in two attacks by gangs, Singh declared himself a failure and resigned.
His rise to the highest office began with a dispute over honesty. Rajiv Gandhi had appointed him finance minister, and he used his position to deal with tax evasion. But some of the evaders proved embarrassing to Gandhi and the Congress Party, so Singh was moved to the defence ministry.
Singh was a lonely man in politics. He was neither liked nor trusted by his colleagues because he went against the grain. Inevitably, he was accused of hypocrisy.
There were those who said he had resigned as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh because Indira Gandhi was about to sack him - something he always denied.
He confounded his critics by never seeking office after he was ousted, but remained in public life by campaigning for causes he believed in.
His wife Sita Kumari and his two sons survive him.
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Vishwanath Pratap Singh: born June 25th, 1931; died November 27th, 2008