Tiruvallur Thattai Krishnamachari, famously called TTK (1899-1974), whose 125th birth anniversary will fall in two months, has a strange record of having resigned from the post of Union Finance Minister twice. He is not the only person to hold the post more than once — Morarji Desai (1958-63 and 1967-69); Pranab Mukherjee (1982-84 and 2009-12); Jaswant Singh (1996 and 2002-04); Yashwant Sinha (1990-91 and 1998-2002); and P. Chidambaram (1996-98, 2004-08, and 2012-14) were the others. Nirmala Sitharaman, who had become Finance Minister in 2019, is now in her second term.
There were also Union Finance Ministers who resigned for one reason or the other. TTK’s resignation from the Union Cabinet in 1958 is well known, but what is not much discussed is his second exit in 1965.
TTK’s second entry into the Cabinet began in a subdued way. In June 1962, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru re-inducted him into the Cabinet, he was a “Minister without portfolio”, though he was ranked no. 5. Five months later, he was given the portfolio of Economic and Defence Coordination. In September 1963, he was brought back to the Finance Ministry where he remained till the end of 1965.
Fielded in Tiruchendur
His first spell began initially as the Commerce and Industry Minister in May 1952 and later as the Finance Minister in August 1956. He quit the post in February 1958 following the controversy over the Mundhra affair. As TTK enjoyed the confidence of Nehru and the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, K. Kamaraj, the Congress fielded him in 1962 in the Tiruchendur constituency, though he was elected from Chennai in the previous two elections. In Tiruchendur, he was elected unopposed, thanks to the backing of Kamaraj. So long as Nehru was alive, TTK had a smooth sailing. Nehru’s death in May 1964 and Lal Bahadur Shastri’s ascension to power disturbed the equations between the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister.
In November 1965, a group of Opposition MPs, including those from the Swatantra Party, the Jan Sangh, the Samyukta Socialist Party, and the DMK, submitted a memorandum to President S. Radhakrishnan, calling for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into certain allegations of favouritism. In fact, Gauri Murahari of the SSP had even alleged in the Rajya Sabha that TTK, during his foreign trips, had secured the sole agency rights of foreign companies for his sons’ companies.
‘His policies hurt our group’
In an interview, published on June 17, 2018, to Vinay Kamath of The Hindu Businessline, a sister paper of The Hindu, TTK Group Chairman T.T. Jagannathan, a grandson of the former Union Finance Minister, explained how the policies of his grandfather had hurt the very group he had founded. Though the company was founded to import consumer goods from the U.K. and sell them in India, “the first thing he did was to stop import of consumer goods, saying India faced a foreign exchange problem. Finished!” Mr. Jagannathan observed, adding that his father T.T. Narasimhan was banned by TTK from visiting New Delhi and talking to Union government Secretaries.
On January 1, 1966, a report of The Hindu, while announcing the resignation of TTK, mentioned that the Finance Minister had expected his Prime Minister to make a statement in the Winter Session of Parliament on the charges, as he could attend to important matters — the preparation of the Budget for 1966-67 and assistance for the Fourth Plan. There was a difference of opinion between the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister as to who should go into the charges. While TTK wanted the Prime Minister or any Cabinet colleague to investigate the matter, Shastri “preferred an impartial third person”. Eventually, the Prime Minister requested Chief Justice of India M. Hidayatullah to make an informal inquiry.
However, on hearing the decision, TTK immediately resigned. He was increasingly getting isolated within the Cabinet as he did his best to enforce “rigorous fiscal discipline”, which was “not relished” by many of his colleagues. More than anything else, it was a question of confidence that the Prime Minister should have in his or her Finance Minister. This paper, in its editorial on January 4, 1966, stated: “The allegations were by no means new and had been answered by Mr. Krishnamachari in Parliament. It was natural for him to feel, when they were revived by a group of Opposition MPs, that the Prime Minister should come out with an open expression of confidence in him by taking a positive stand...” Shastri, while accepting his resignation, pointed out that the TTK’s move “causes me distress and anguish”.
Pressure to liberalise
The resignation of TTK was not merely an outcome of the dynamics of internal politics. India was under pressure from other countries to liberalise its economy. It was against this context that a journalist asked him at his farewell press conference in New Delhi in January 1966 whether a foreign ambassador had played any role in the episode. TTK replied: “I have got too high an opinion of myself and my country to think that a foreign ambassador can influence us,” according to a report in The Hindu. However, Time, in its issue of January 14, 1966, stated that “he was sacked for possessing a personality incompatible with those of Shastri and his other Ministers”.
TTK returned to Chennai to quit active politics, while Shastri, on his visit to the Soviet Union, died on January 11, 1966 in Tashkent after signing an accord with Pakistan to end the 1965 war.
Published - September 19, 2024 11:49 pm IST
