The man who resigned more than he stayed; Image Source: Zee News

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Politics is a dirty game and being honest and secular in a country as different as India is as hard as carving a hole in an iron wall with a wooden stick. Yet, some stood distinct, more true towards the people of the country than towards the politics of the nation. In 1931, in Allahabad to the Raja of Daiya was born one such boy. Situations, however, were not very favourable for him. He was named Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

When he was five, he was given to Raja Bahadur of Manda to be adopted. The foster father was mostly unavailable and the lonely boy was brought up by a Scottish couple who took care of him. Once separated from his birth parents, he was never allowed to meet them again. 

> Singh never let emotions come in the way of his career and took arts in college and pursued a career in law. While in college, he joined student politics.

This opened a completely new door for him, one that he would never let close now. No matter what! Post-independence, Vishwanath Pratap became an activist of the Bhutan movement and donated his property for the same. His wife Sita Kumari distressed at the same filed an affidavit challenging the donation because it was done in a fit of madness.             

> More than his participation in politics, Singh became famous for a rather peculiar thing. He resigned a lot!

 In 1969, he joined Indira Gandhi, a step that made his political stand at the national level rather short-lived. Opposite of what one would anticipate about his resignations, they never deterred his political stand but propelled his career only forward opening further doors of political success for him.      

In the beginning, he resigned from student politics to protest against the principal of his school. He also resigned from the position of Chief Minister of UP which gave him the title of tsar, the folk hero of the common man. Then he resigned from the position of Defense Minister of India. This pushed him further up the ladder. Many thought that this was the true politics of VP Singh as his eyes were on the prime spot.              

Post-emergency he resigned from Gandhi's cabinet because investigations conducted by him around arms-procurement fraud were squelched. Following this, he even resigned from Congress launching a movement against corruption.            

At this point, he was seen as an alternative to India's prime position. He however declined any such ambitions and went on to find his own party, the Janata Dal. In the 1989 elections the loosely knit coalition, the National Front emerged victorious, under the leadership of Singh. Thus, it was just like that, Vishwanath Pratap Singh became the Prime Minister of the country.             

> "I believe whoever is in power, people should fight the establishment over issues. This is the weakness of our democracy. We vote, then for five years we remain dormant. The farmers' movement will remain but we need a formal political party to fight elections." - VP Singh.

The factions of the National Front were formed of parties on the extreme ends and totally antipathetic to each other. While Singh stood for secularism and equality, the factions of the front had their own ideas of India. When the Ayodhya issue boiled in the country, Singh stood in opposition to it. The right-wing Hindu party BJP then drew its support from the coalition. The government fell just like the Babri Masjid.                

Another hit on his governance was his sponsoring of the Mandal Commission which invited the outrage of upper-caste Hindus. This pandering of the lower castes brought huge criticisms even from his own party members who eventually started deserting him. Finally, in 1990, Singh resigned from the post of Prime Minister after a no-confidence vote.             

And that's how his political life came to an end, forever. A man of high virtues and ethics was put down by dividend politics and selfish - motives of the politicians of India who play better at dividing and ruling the people of a single nation.

With no family to belong to and no job that seemed fit for him, VP Singh kept jumping from one post to another until he landed on the post of Prime Minister. Even there controversy never left his side.