By the end of May 1996, the BJP government had to resign. Everyone wanted to avoid elections, and regional political satraps formed an alliance to put together a coalition front of smaller parties, leaving out the Congress and the BJP. At a meeting of the regional parties in Delhi, Karnataka chief minister H.D. Deve Gowda wasn’t the most attentive – in fact, many believe he slept through most of it. So great was the political turmoil of the time that the meeting elected this untested man as India’s next prime minister. Gowda, a farmer and a wily politician who had not until then sought his
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