Again, I’ve had to wrestle with the pecking order. Who should come next in the exclamatory sequence? And once again, the re-choreography of memories has thrown up an unconventional name — the tad unlucky Yashwant Sinha.
Yashwant Sinha: The Workhorse Who Rode a Dirt Track
He was an ex-IAS officer from Bihar who did the unthinkable of quitting the civil service to hitch his political wagon with the maverick Chandrashekhar. He was the finance minister during that six-month aberration of governance in 1990, when the Kuwait War almost forced India’s economy to implode. Legend has it that he had authored large chunks of the emergency rescue act that destiny had willed for Dr Manmohan Singh, his successor in 1991, to unveil. While the authenticity of this myth shall forever be challenged, eight years later Yashwant Sinha did become a ‘regular’ finance minister in Prime Minister Vajpayee’s first NDA government in 1998, and kept the job when Vajpayee was re-elected in 1999.
Sinha…