Morarji Desai: Fiscal conservative who repeatedly saved India
By Prasenjit K. Basu When I was 12+ years old, I borrowed both volumes of Morarji Desai's "The Story of My Life" from my school library a few days before the March 1977 election. I was fascinated by this 81 year old who had been denied the prime ministership repeatedly in the 1960s despite being the best man for the job. He had rescued India from its first Balance of Payments crisis in 1958 (caused by Nehru's inability to finance his quixotic ambitions for industrialisation in the Second Five Year Plan, starting 1956). Two years later, Nehru (and his cabal of fiscally-profligate acolytes, including YB Chavan and C Subramaniam) launched a determined attempt to loosen the budgetary purse-strings to finance another quixotic Five Year Plan. Morarjibhai stood firm in the face of their collective pleading, and got his way. So it was little surprise that, after Jawaharlal Nehru was humiliated by Mao in October-November 1962 in the Himalayan military debacle, Congress p