India's Prime Ministers Survivor - Lal Bahadur Shastri is our Survivor !

[minionofmidas]

Gulzarilal Nanda (who?)

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Gulzarilal Nanda (who?)

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Morarji Desai

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Crying shame.

Desai

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Morarji Desai

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Desai dammit!

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Idiot Brahman who belonged in the BJP but wasn't.

And unlike Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Deve Gowda and IK Gujral, compromise choices who really didn't ever have a chance (but like VP Singh), he actually had a mandate and might not have been the failure he was if he'd been a better politician.

[minionofmidas]

Idiot Brahman who belonged in the BJP but wasn't.

And unlike Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Deve Gowda and IK Gujral, compromise choices who really didn't ever have a chance (but like VP Singh), he actually had a mandate and might not have been the failure he was if he'd been a better politician.

Haven't most Indian leaders been Brahmins?

But not necessarily idiot ones.

(And actually, no, not "most" of India's leaders have been Brahmins. Very few of those a-year-or-so interim PMs have been, although Manmohan Singh was the first non-Brahman to last a term. If you count Rajiv. Who came from an intercommunity marriage.)

[minionofmidas]

Just for self-amusement, I'm researching everybody's caste now.

2. Gulzarilal Nanda (1964, 1966) - Gujjar
3. Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964-1966) - Kayasth (this took minimal research. Wiki says that Lal Bahadur dropped his original surname because it betrayed his (fairly high but not quite Brahman, just as I guessed when I read that) caste and he was opposed to the caste system. Wiki doesn't mention the original surname, but some other google result did... and that surname, Srivastava, led to the caste on Wiki. Shastri is a honorific.)
5. Morarji Desai (1977-1979) - Brahman
6. Chaudhary Charan Singh (1979-1980) - Jat
8. Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1989-1990) - Rajput
9. Chandra Shekhar (1990-1991) - Thakur (this too took research, found some lengthy German-language obituary that mentions it.)
10. Narasimha Rao (1991-1996) - Brahman
11. Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1996, 1998-2004) - Brahman
12. Deve Gowda (1996-1997) - Vokkaliga
13. Inder Kumar Gujral (1997-1998) - (Hindu) Khatri
14. Manmohan Singh (2004-...) - Sikh (Khatri)

[minionofmidas]

Same with Thakur and Rajput 

Thakur and Rajput are basically regional terms for the same macro-caste. And yeah, quite high caste. But not Brahmin.

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. Yes. Not sure why the family were called "Thakur", they weren't Thakurs.

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Solid, middling ground, regionally dominant farmer castes both. Certainly not "high caste", certainly not "low caste" either though certainly Shudra in any ultra-traditionalist classification (but then the same is really true of almost everybody who claims to be Kshatriya).

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Er, in a sense. And in another sense it's not. A class system with a twist.

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A total FF.

[minionofmidas]

It's more complicated than that... though there's a lot of that. Basically if you live outside of your and your caste's homeland, people will judge you by whether you look like a rich man or like a peasant more than what, exactly, they know about your caste. To add another layer of confusion, any touchable (for want of a better word) Shudra caste assembled in sufficient numbers in one area usually becomes perfectly respectable there... but might not be elsewhere where it exists in lower numbers. Especially if their religious customs are somewhat inorthodox from a brahmanic standpoint. This goes for Lingayats for example.

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Yeah. But what percentage of the people is that, exactly?

The servant class certainly does not think of itself as one unified servant class...

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And as may be guessed from something I said earlier in this thread...

I proudly cast my next vote for VP Singh.

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They are sort of "sun will rise" type predictions... and I'm not certain that the sun will, indeed, rise.

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VP SIngh

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Narasimha Rao

Corrupt Old Bastard. Rajiv next!

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Rajiv

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Charan Singh

Why is he still here?

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Manmohan Singh.

There seems to be a working majority coalition in this survivor at present.

Hopefully it will fall apart for the last round.

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He didn't survive Tashkent, but maybe he can survive here.

Off with Nehru. For partition.

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I vote to kick off Man-oh-man Sing and keep Jawaharlal Nahroo.

Singh is off already. The choice is between Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri.