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Wow
Super!
Nice post!🙌👌
The lighting in this photograph!
this is awesome 👏
Phenomenal!
Chanakya
Very powerful during Indira Gandhi's time
nice read
Here is a photo memoir of Makhan Lal Fotedar, the late Congress leader who was called 'Chanakya' by many of his party colleagues.
Fotedar was born on 5 March 1931 at Matan in Anantnag district of Jammu & Kashmir and passed away on 28 September 2017 at his residence in Gurgaon at the age of 85.
India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had spotted his political acumen in 1950s.
Fotedar went on to serve two former Prime Ministers as their political advisor - first Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi and later grandson Rajiv Gandhi - and was described as a link between the Congress party and the Prime Ministers.
It is said that he was one of the signatories to Indira Gandhi's will.
Rajiv Gandhi inducted him in his cabinet and he was among the Congress leaders who prompted Sonia Gandhi to take a plunge into politics after he was assassinated in 1991 and later played a key role in installing her as the party president in 1998.
Sonia Gandhi would often call him 'Clever Brahmin' for his statecraft.
In the interim, after Rajiv Gandhi’s death and Sonia Gandhi’s reluctance to join politics, Fotedar worked to install PV Narasimha Rao as the Prime Minister.
But some years later, he fell out with Rao over the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. At a cabinet meeting later in the day, Fotedar blamed Rao for not taking sufficient steps to prevent the demolition.
He resigned from the Rao cabinet and engineered a split in the Congress. In this, he was backed by Arjun Singh, ND Tiwari and Sheila Diskhit and the breakaway party came to be known as Congress (Tiwari).
Fotedar rejoined the Congress after Sitaram Kesri became the party president in 1996.
Though Fotedar remained a member of the powerful Congress Working Committee, he felt sidelined in the later years of his life.
The isolation was widely attributed to his 2015 political memoir, 'The Chinar Leaves' in which he questioned Rahul Gandhi's leadership and claimed that Indira Gandhi had wished to see granddaughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra join politics given that she was the rightful heir to her legacy.