Inder Kumar Gujralਇੰਦਰ ਕੁਮਾਰ ਗੁਜਰਾਲ

Inder Kumar Gujral (4 December 1919 to 30 November 2012) was an Indian statesman and diplomat from Jhelum district in undivided Punjab who became the 12th prime minister of India, serving from April 1997 to March 1998. He is best remembered for the Gujral Doctrine, his rule that India should give generously to its smaller neighbours without asking for anything in return.

Early life in Jhelum district

Gujral was born in the village of Pari Darveza, in Sohawa tehsil of Jhelum district, into a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family. His parents, Avtar Narain Gujral and Pushpa Gujral, both took part in the freedom struggle, and politics was part of the household from the start. His younger brother Satish Gujral became a noted painter and sculptor. Gujral was active in politics before he was in his teens, and as a student he joined the All India Students Federation and the Communist Party of India.

He studied at D.A.V. College, Hailey College of Commerce and Forman Christian College in Lahore, all linked to the University of the Punjab. In 1942 he was jailed for taking part in the Quit India movement. In 1945 he married Sheila Gujral, a poet, and the couple had two sons, among them Naresh Gujral, who later became a Rajya Sabha member.

Partition and a new life in Delhi

Partition in 1947 cut Gujral off from the land of his birth. During that year he was in Lahore and then Karachi, where his father sat in Pakistan's Constituent Assembly. When rioting rose in Karachi, the family moved to Delhi, losing their home and property in Jhelum. Gujral later said the experience shaped how he saw Pakistan: not as an enemy country, but as a place full of kin. That memory stayed with him for the rest of his public life and helps explain the warmth of his later diplomacy.

In Delhi he rebuilt his life in public service. He became vice-president of the New Delhi Municipal Committee in 1958, joined the Indian National Congress in 1964 and entered the Rajya Sabha the same year.

Minister, ambassador and the break with Congress

Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Gujral held a run of union ministries through the late 1960s and 1970s: Communications and Parliamentary Affairs, Works and Housing, Information and Broadcasting, and Planning. As information and broadcasting minister during the Emergency, he was in charge of the media at a time of censorship, and accounts of the period describe friction with Sanjay Gandhi over demands to vet news before broadcast. In 1976 he was moved out of the cabinet and sent to Moscow as India's ambassador to the Soviet Union, a post he held until 1980, serving under three prime ministers.

In the 1980s Gujral left the Congress and joined the Janata Dal. The move restarted his career at the very top of Indian foreign policy, the field where he would leave his deepest mark.

Foreign minister twice over

Elected to the Lok Sabha from Jalandhar in 1989, Gujral became external affairs minister in Prime Minister V. P. Singh's government. The term was dominated by hard cases: he was sent to Srinagar to negotiate after the kidnapping of the home minister's daughter, and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 he worked to bring home the large number of Indians stranded in the Gulf.

After the 1996 election he became external affairs minister again, this time in H. D. Deve Gowda's United Front government. It was in this second term that he set out the ideas that carry his name.

What is the Gujral Doctrine?

The Gujral Doctrine is a set of five principles for India's relations with its neighbours, which Gujral set out in 1996. Its first principle is the famous one: with smaller neighbours such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, India does not ask for reciprocity, but gives all it can in good faith and trust. The other four principles say that no South Asian country should let its territory be used against another country of the region, that none should interfere in another's internal affairs, that all must respect each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, and that all disputes should be settled through peaceful bilateral talks.

The logic, as Gujral wrote in his autobiography, was that India faced hostile neighbours to its north and west and so needed total peace with all its other immediate neighbours. Critics later argued that his order, as prime minister, to close a Pakistan operations desk of India's external intelligence agency weakened the country's intelligence reach. Supporters answer that the doctrine remains a landmark in Indian foreign policy, and it is still taught and debated today.

Prime minister, 1997 to 1998

When the Congress withdrew support from Deve Gowda in April 1997, the United Front chose Gujral as its new leader to avoid a mid-term election, and he was sworn in as prime minister on 21 April 1997. He governed from the Rajya Sabha, only the third prime minister to do so, and kept the external affairs portfolio himself. His government resisted signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and he had a standing practice of meeting members of the public on Friday mornings.

The government lived on borrowed support. In November 1997 the Congress demanded that Gujral drop ministers of the DMK, a coalition partner, after a commission report on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Gujral refused, the Congress withdrew support on 28 November, and he resigned, staying on as caretaker until March 1998. In the 1998 election he won the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat with Akali Dal support, then retired from active politics.

Later life, honours and legacy

In retirement Gujral wrote his autobiography, Matters of Discretion, published in 2011, still described as the only autobiography by an Indian prime minister. His foreign honours included Russia's Order of Friendship and the Bangladesh Liberation War Honour, given in October 2012. He was admitted to hospital in Gurgaon (now Gurugram) with a lung infection and died there on 30 November 2012, aged 92. The Government of India declared seven days of state mourning, and he was cremated with a state funeral near Samata Sthal in Delhi on 1 December.

Punjab kept his name in public life. In 2015 the state government renamed Punjab Technical University as I.K. Gujral Punjab Technical University in his honour. A commemorative postage stamp followed in 2020. For Punjab, his story carries a particular weight: a boy from a small village in Jhelum district, made a refugee by Partition, rose to lead India, and spent his career arguing that the peoples divided in 1947 were kin, not enemies.