Yashwant Sinha

Trivia

• Yashwant Sinha resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in 1984 and joined active politics as a member of the Janata Party.
• He was appointed All-India General secretary of the party in 1986 and was elected Member of the Rajya Sabha Upper House of the Indian Parliament in 1988.
• When the Janata Dal was formed in 1989, he was appointed General Secretary of the party.
• He worked as Minister of Finance from November, 1990 to June 1991 in Chandra Shekhar's Cabinet.
• He became the National Spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party in June, 1996.
• He was appointed finance minister in March, 1998. He was foreign minister from that date until May 22, 2004, when a new government took office after the parliamentary elections.
• He represented the Hazaribagh Constituency in Bihar (now Jharkhand), in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament.
• However, in an amazing development, Yashwant Sinha was defeated from Hazaribagh seat in the elections of 2004. He re-entered the Parliament in 2005. On June 13, 2009, he resigned from the post of vice president of BJP.
• Yashwant Sinha was the finance minister until July 1, 2002, when he exchanged jobs with foreign minister Jaswant Singh.
• Sinha, during his tenure, was forced to roll back some of his government's major policy initiatives for which he was much criticised .

Quotes

• "Any departure from the earlier stance will be disastrous for India. Our position has been that India will not accept any legally binding caps and that measures India would take would be in consonance with our growth and development plans. A confident nation should not be scared of protecting its national interests"
• "Let the party implement its own Kamraj Plan under which all office-bearers of the party and the Parliamentary Party should resign from their posts which should then be filled up through the process of election laid down by our constitution."
• “There were very few leaders of his dynamism, energy and of his presence.”
• “Therefore the future path is of sharp curves and involves many dangers...I urge the government to tread cautiously, and not get caught in difficult conditions without bargaining to the maximum possible position.”
• “There is absolutely no scope for any third party intervention or role in as far as the Jammu and Kashmir dispute is concerned between Pakistan and India.”
• “India and China are too large and too strong to be tamed or intimidated - even by the other side.”
• “The veil is off. India is now firmly in the US camp.”
• “A government that came to power vowing to follow an independent foreign policy has surrendered its independence to the US.”