Inder Kumar Gujral

I.K. Gujral was born at Jhelum in 1919, was jailed in the Quit India movement in 1942, came to India in 1947, and served as Prime Minister from April 1997 to March 1998.

As foreign minister he formulated what became known as the Gujral Doctrine: that India should offer its smaller neighbours concessions without expecting reciprocity, on the ground that a large country's security is served by settled neighbours rather than by leverage over them.

He was Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union and information minister during the Emergency, from which he was moved after resisting instructions on censorship.

He returned to Jhelum in 1997 as Prime Minister and visited the house he had grown up in, which was one of very few such visits by anyone at that level in either direction.

His brother Satish Gujral was the painter who produced the Partition series in the 1940s.

Two brothers from Jhelum, one who painted 1947 and one who ran the country's foreign policy on the principle that neighbours should be conciliated.

He was Prime Minister of India in 1997 and 1998 and had been ambassador to Moscow and minister for external affairs before that.

The Gujral Doctrine, that India should not ask for reciprocity from its smaller neighbours, is the policy he is remembered for and it was applied most seriously to Bangladesh and Nepal.

He was born at Jhelum and his family came east in 1947. His brother was the painter and sculptor Satish Gujral.

What we don't know

  • Nothing central.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Parliamentary records and Gujral's own writings.

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How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 69 accounts in The Crossing, the chapter of this site covering 1947 and what it did.