Bureaucrat-turned-politician Yashwant Sinha has been unanimously declared as its candidate for the presidential election by the opposition. In 1993, senior BJP leader LK Advani, in a press conference announcing Yashwant Sinha’s joining the BJP, called it a “Diwali gift” for the party.
Considered a close aide of LK Advani, Yashwant Sinha headed the prestigious finance and external affairs ministries in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government from 1998 to 2004. Meanwhile, he revolted after the rise of Narendra Modi and quit the BJP and revamped his political profile. The former bureaucrat has come a long way since then.
Leaders of opposition parties in a joint statement appealed to the BJP and its allies to support Yashwant Sinha “so that we can elect a deserving ‘President’ unopposed.”
Born on 6 November 1937, Sinha attended school and university in Patna. In 1958, he completed his Masters in Political Science from Patna University and taught Political Science in his own college from 1958 to 1960. He joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in 1960 and held several positions during his 24-year tenure.
Sinha resigned from the IAS in 1984 and joined active politics as a member of the Janata Party. He was appointed All India General Secretary in 1986 and was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1988.
When the Janata Dal was formed under the leadership of VP Singh, Sinha was made its general secretary. He served as finance minister in Chandrashekhar’s cabinet from November 1990 to June 1991, which split the Janata Dal and formed the Samajwadi Janata Party. Sinha became the national spokesperson of the BJP in June 1996 and was again made the Finance Minister in March 1998 under the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet.
He used to contest the Lok Sabha elections from his parliamentary constituency Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. In 2014, the BJP had fielded his elder son Jayant in his place. Subsequently, in 2018 Yashwant Sinha announced his retirement from active politics, but in 2021, just before the West Bengal assembly elections, he joined Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and became the party’s vice-president.
Announcing his resignation from the Trinamool Congress on Tuesday, Sinha tweeted, “I am grateful to Mamata ji for the respect and prestige she gave me in the Trinamool Congress. Now the time has come when for the larger national interest, I have to work for greater opposition unity outside the party. I am sure she will accept the move.”