A Biographical Sketch
RAFIQ ZAKARIA,
M.L.C.
WHAT sort of man is Yeshwantrao Chavan? There are millions both inside and outside India who are anxious to know the answer, until five years ago, however, his was hardly a name to be conjured with. His rise to power and fame has indeed been meteoric. It has, moreover, raised such expectations that not a few look upon him now as the man of the future. His friends and admirers apart, even a journal of the status and standing of the Manchester Guardian while discussing the question: After Nehru, Who?' opined: "Another year or two and at least one more General Election may produce a Chavan after all."
Rise to Power
To say that Chavan is a good man is hardly enough; it cannot explain the secret of his success. True, as he rose to power he showed more charity to all and bore malice to none; but the task that he faced in 1956 as the Chief Minister of the then bilingual State of Bombay was stupendous; it would have broken a smaller man. But somehow Chavan mastered the situation; the phenomenon surprised him as much as others. Moreover, in less than five years he came on top of it. How did he achieve it? For that one must necessarily go back to his past!
Yeshwantrao is a son of the soil. Born in a village he is of a peasant stock. He was brought up in poverty. His place of birth is Deorashtre, an obscure village typical of the semi-human conditions that prevailed in the India of those days, about ten miles from Karad, a small town in the District of Satara. He was born on March 12, 1914, just on the eve of the First World War. About his childhood Chavan has said, "I am a typical product of village life and hence during our boyhood days when we compared urban life with village life we found it rather oppressive. That paved the road to the demand of equality on our partin the sense that we yearned for equal opportunities. There were no facilities of education in our village and their absence together with many other necessities of life made us more and more hungry for them."