Yashwant Sinha (born November 6, 1937, Patna, India) is an Indian bureaucrat, politician, and government official who rose to become a leading figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India and twice served (1990–91 and 1998–2004) as a cabinet minister in the Indian government. In the 2010s he found himself increasingly at odds with the BJP leadership, and in 2018 he left the party.
Sinha was raised in a middle-class family in Patna, in what is now west-central Bihar state in eastern India. In 1958 he completed an M.A. degree in political science from Patna University and stayed at the university to teach that discipline for two years. In 1960 Sinha joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS; civil service), and, in a career that lasted 24 years, he held several posts in Bihar as well as in New Delhi (the national capital) and overseas. Among his positions were two in what was then West Germany—as first secretary (commercial) in the Indian embassy in Bonn (1971–73) and then as Indian consul general in Frankfurt am Main (1973–74)—and, back in India, joint secretary in the Ministry of Transport and Shipping (1980–84).
During his years as a bureaucrat, Sinha learned of the political theories of the Indian socialist leader Jaya Prakash Narayan. By 1984 Sinha had decided to leave the IAS and to involve himself in politics as a member of the Janata (People’s) Party (JP), of which Narayan had been a mentor. Within two years Sinha was the party’s general secretary, and three years later he was named general secretary of the Janata Dal (JD), after that party had been formed from the JP. In 1990 Sinha joined the Janata Dal (Socialist) of Chandra Shekhar, following a split in the JD, but within a few years he had shifted his loyalties to the increasingly successful BJP. In June 1996 he was appointed a national spokesperson of that party, and he served in that capacity until June 2005.
Sinha’s legislative career was launched with his election to a seat in the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament) in 1988. He served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Shekhar’s short-lived government (November 1990–June 1991) as the minister of finance. In 1995 Sinha was elected to the Bihar state legislative assembly as a BJP candidate, and he served there as the leader of the opposition until 1996.
In 1998 Sinha won a seat in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) and was appointed finance minister in the cabinet of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. He was reelected to the Lok Sabha in the 1999 polls and continued as finance minister until 2002. During his tenure in the ministry, Sinha’s initiatives included lowering bank interest rates, introducing a tax deduction for mortgage interest, and deregulating the petroleum industry. He remained in the NDA government in 2002–04 as the minister for external affairs, but he lost his seat in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. He soon returned to the parliament, however, by winning reelection to the Rajya Sabha later that year. He served in that chamber until 2009, when he regained a seat in the Lok Sabha.
By 2009, however, Sinha had found himself on the margins of the BJP’s affairs. Following the party’s overall poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections that year, he resigned as the BJP’s vice president, a post he had held for two years. Considered close to BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani, Sinha was sidelined by the party president Nitin Gadkari. In 2012, in a sign of rebellion, Sinha supported Pranab Mukherjee, the candidate of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), for the post of the country’s president. He found himself excluded from the BJP’s core team in 2013, although he continued to be a member of the BJP’s 80-member National Executive Committee. Sinha chose not to contest the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, instead making way for his son Jayant Sinha, who was elected from his old constituency in Jharkhand. In 2018 the senior Sinha left the BJP, claiming that the party’s leadership, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was threatening democracy. Following years of criticizing Modi’s government from the sidelines, he was selected in 2022 by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance to run as the opposition candidate for president.
Yashwant Sinha was the author of Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer: My Years as Finance Minister (2007).