Former PM Chandra Shekhar passes away
New Delhi: Former prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, who headed a shaky coalition government installed by the outgoing Congress regime for just seven months in 1990-91, died at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in New Delhi yesterday, where he hadf been battling bone marrow cancer.

The former PM was 80. He is survived by two sons and will be cremated in the capital on Monday.

A diehard socialist by heart, Chandra Shekhar was born on July 1, 1927, in Ibrahimpatti of Uttar Pradesh's Ballia district, he graduated from the Allahabad University.

He was one of the five Young Turks of the undivided Indian National Congress Party that spearheaded a revolt against the old guards that split the Congress for the first time in 1969 and brought Indira Gandhi to power at the head of her Congress (I) party.

Disillusioned with Mrs Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar forged together the first non-Congress government in the country in after the repressive Emergency regime and as the president of the the coalition Janata Party was instrumental in bringing Morarji Desai to power from March 1977 to July 1979.

Later, during his brief stint as prime minister for 224 days from November 1990 to June 1991, in a controversial decision he allowed American planes to refuel in India on their way to aerial missions in the first Gulf War, keeping aside his personal anti-American views.

After the Congress that had initially propped him up toppled the Chandra Shekhar government, he retired to his sprawling farmhouse at Bhondsi, at the edge of New Delhi where he brainstormed with intellectuals and the declining band of committed socialists on the problems before the country.

He could never return again to the political mainstream because of his strong ethical values and unbending views on political propriety that also led to the respect and statutr that he commanded.
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