Chandra Shekhar

Chandra Shekhar was born in 1927 and died on 8 July 2007 at Apollo Hospital in Delhi, aged 80, of multiple myeloma (Arab News). He was Prime Minister of India for about seven months, from November 1990 to June 1991, heading a minority government of a breakaway Janata Dal faction that relied on outside support from Rajiv Gandhi's Congress (Wikipedia). In that time his government let American aircraft refuel in India during the Gulf War and approved pawning the country's gold to shore up its foreign exchange reserves (Arab News).

In the record of Punjab he is the Prime Minister who tried to talk during the years of the Kharku Sangharsh.

• Late 1990 and early 1991: his government held its first formal talks with Simranjit Singh Mann. Nikhil Chakravartty, writing in Mainstream (5 January 1991), supported the initiative and called Punjab the gravest crisis since independence, with over ten thousand deaths in about twelve years. He said many parties attacked or warned against the talks, mainly over the involvement of armed groups and the Fatehgarh Sahib statements upholding the Sikh right to self-determination.
• The journalist Balraj Puri recalled meeting him after he became Prime Minister, having just met the Panthic Committee and obtained its commitment to stop killing innocent people. In Puri's account Chandra Shekhar agreed to instruct security forces to avoid killing innocent Sikhs in fake encounters or in custody, and saw Punjab as needing immediate attention.
• 21 June 1991: the Election Commission postponed voting for Punjab's parliamentary and Assembly seats, saying a free and fair poll was not possible. The President had named P.V. Narasimha Rao to form the next government hours earlier (UPI).

In 2017 Captain Amarinder Singh said he felt betrayed by Chandra Shekhar after "21 Khalistani militants" he had arranged to surrender at the Prime Minister's residence were killed about six months later. That is Amarinder Singh's claim, reported by IANS without a response from Chandra Shekhar or independent confirmation.

He is remembered in this history as a short-lived prime minister whose government opened talks that its critics and its supporters read very differently. How far those talks went is told here only from the two commentaries above, and neither is an official record.