Yashwant Sinha (born 6 November 1937) is an Indian politician and former civil servant who was Finance Minister of India in 1990–91 and from 1998 to 2002, and External Affairs Minister from 2002 to 2004. He left the Indian Administrative Service after twenty-four years to enter politics, became a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party and later one of its sharpest critics. In 2022 he was the joint opposition candidate in the presidential election.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Yashwant Sinha |
| Born | 6 November 1937, Patna, Bihar, India |
| Age | 88 |
| Profession | Politician, former IAS officer |
| Offices held | Finance Minister (1990–1991, 1998–2002); External Affairs Minister (2002–2004) |
| Constituency | Hazaribagh (Lok Sabha) |
| Education | Patna University (M.A. Political Science) |
| Spouse | Nilima Sinha |
| Children | 3, including Jayant Sinha |
Early Life
Sinha was born into a Kayastha family in Patna. He took a master’s degree in political science at Patna University in 1958 and taught the subject there for two years before joining the Indian Administrative Service in 1960.
Civil Service
He was allotted the Bihar cadre and served as a sub-divisional magistrate and district magistrate, and later in the state’s finance department. He was posted to the Indian embassy in Bonn as first secretary for commercial affairs and then as consul general in Frankfurt in the early 1970s. In 1977 he was principal secretary to the Chief Minister of Bihar, Karpoori Thakur. He was a joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Surface Transport when he resigned from the service in 1984.
Political Career
He joined the Janata Party, became its general secretary in 1986 and entered the Rajya Sabha in 1988. When Chandra Shekhar formed a government in November 1990, Sinha was made Finance Minister. He inherited a balance-of-payments crisis, with foreign exchange reserves down to a few weeks of imports, and took the decision to pledge gold from the country’s reserves to raise emergency loans. The government fell before he could present a full budget.
He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in the early 1990s, was Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly, and won the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat in 1998. As Finance Minister in the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee he presented five budgets. He ended the colonial-era practice of presenting the budget at five in the evening, moving it to eleven in the morning in 1999; opened insurance to private companies; funded the national highways programme through a cess on fuel; and began the dismantling of administered petroleum prices. Higher taxes on the middle class and several reversals of budget proposals earned him the nickname “Rollback Sinha”, and a crisis at the Unit Trust of India hurt his standing. In July 2002 he exchanged portfolios with Jaswant Singh and was External Affairs Minister until the government lost office in 2004.
He lost Hazaribagh in 2004, won it back in 2009 and did not contest in 2014, when his son Jayant Sinha won the seat and became a minister. From 2017 he publicly attacked the government’s handling of the economy, demonetisation and the goods and services tax, and in April 2018 he left the party. He joined the Trinamool Congress in 2021 as a vice-president. In July 2022 he resigned to stand as the common opposition candidate for President and lost to Droupadi Murmu, who received about 64 per cent of the vote.
Personal Life
He is married to Nilima Sinha, a writer of children’s books. They have two sons, Jayant and Sumant, and a daughter, Sharmila. His memoir, Relentless, was published in 2019.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Yashwant Sinha born?
Yashwant Sinha was born on 6 November 1937 in Patna, Bihar, India and is 88 years old.
Featured image: Yashwant Sinha at the World Economic Forum on East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, 2008. Photo by World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
