'Rollback Finance Minister' Yashwant Sinha, neither tired nor retired

More than three decades ago, or, to be more precise, in December 1989, when V P Singh was about to be sworn in as the Prime Minister, he offered Yashwant Sinha, then a Janata Dal general secretary, to join his government.

Yashwant was, however, offended on being offered the Minister of State (MoS) rank to a ‘senior’ leader like him. He point-blank refused to join the V P Singh’s regime, although V P could not understand his ‘seniority’ as Yashwant barely a year back had become a member of the Rajya Sabha for the first time (as Janata Party MP in 1988) after quitting as IAS officer in 1984.

The same Yashwant Sinha, now 83, who earlier served as Union Finance Minister and External Affairs Minister, is now ready to play second fiddle to a much junior Mamata Banerjee who, on Monday, appointed him as TMC vice-president.

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Yashwant, who snapped all the ties with the BJP and took retirement from active politics at a function in Patna in 2018, is known to ‘reverse’ his own decisions. “I will not accept any post in any party or the government, come what may,” Sinha had vociferously averred in 2018 while hanging his boots. But the man who earned the sobriquet of ‘Rollback Finance Minister’ (during Vajpayee regime) for his rollback on any or every hike, has ‘rolled back’ his own decision to retire from politics.

“The attack on Mamata Ji made me decide that I should work with her...,” said Yashwant at the TMC Bhawan in Bengal, while clarifying why he has ‘rolled back’ his decision to quit active politics.

Born in Patna in November 1937, Yashwant completed his Master’s in Political Science before cracking the prestigious UPSC examination and becoming an IAS officer in 1960. He served as a bureaucrat for 24 years, including his short stint as an aide to former Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur in the 70s before joining the hurly-burly of Indian politics.

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A hardcore Socialists, he became a Rajya Sabha member as a Janata Party candidate in 1988 before joining the Janata Dal in 1989 and eventually Chandrashekhar’s Samajwadi Janata Party (SJP) in 1990. Chandrashekhar rewarded Yashwant for his loyalty in November 1990 when he made him his Finance Minister in the short-lived Union Government (1990-91).

Adept at swimming against the tide, Yashwant soon joined the BJP and contested as a BJP candidate during the 1995 Bihar Assembly polls from Ranchi (then in undivided Bihar). He was made Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. Yashwant, however, quit from the post in 1996 after his name figured in the Hawala case (along with L K Advani).

After his name was cleared, he contested the Lok Sabha election from Hazaribagh in 1998. This time, he was made Union Finance Minister where he continued till 2002 before he was shifted to External Affairs after the UTI scam, where lakhs of people lost their crores, rocked the nation.

Post-2004, Yashwant became politically irrelevant and remained mostly in oblivion... Often remaining in news either for slamming Narendra Modi or crossing over the fence for greener pastures.