Chennai/New Delhi, Sep 25 (IANS) Former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president K. Jana Krishnamurthy died after a prolonged illness at a private hospital in Chennai Tuesday. He was 79.
Krishnamurthy, who is survived by his wife, two sons and three daughters, was also India’s law minister briefly.
He had been suffering from renal failure for sometime and was admitted to a private hospital where he slipped into coma a month ago. He never regained consciousness and died this forenoon, said BJP leaders in New Delhi.
“BJP president Rajnath Singh and former party president M. Venkaiah Naidu are going to Chennai later in the day to participate in the last rites of their departed leader in Chennai Wednesday,” said party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is in charge of Tamil Nadu.
He said, “I and Advaniji (Leader of Opposition L.K. Advani) have only recently been to Chennai and called on him while he was hospitalised.”
Krishnamurthy’s body has been kept at his house for people to pay their last respects. The funeral will be held at the electric crematorium Wednesday, family sources said.
Born May 24, 1928, to a lawyer’s family in Madurai, he studied in the same city and then went to Law College, Chennai. He practiced law in Madurai for 12 years.
He joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1940 and was a ‘pracharak’ in Madurai until 1951, and rose to be the ‘pranth baudhik pramukh’ of Tamil Nadu.
Krishnamurthi joined the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1965 as state secretary of the party.
In 1968 he gave up his law practice and became a full time political activist and soon rose to the position of the party general secretary (organisation) in Tamil Nadu. In 1975, he played an active role in opposing the Emergency.
In 1977, when the Jana Sangh merged with the Janata Party, he was chosen member of the national executive of the Janata Party and general secretary of that party’s Tamil Nadu unit.
He was one of the founding secretaries of the BJP in 1980 and was largely responsible for the party becoming known in the southern state, otherwise a bastion of the Dravidian movement.
In 1985, he was the vice-president of the party. From 1980 to 1990, he was in charge of the four southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, looking after the build-up of the party in the south.
He was an orator and a good writer.
Krishnamurthy was also the spokesperson of the party. In March 14, 2001, he became the president of the BJP.
He was given charge of the party when it suffered a major embarrassment over the tehelka.com expose that showed then party president Bangaru Laxman allegedly accepting a bribe from a reporter pretending to be a defence equipment agent.
After a while, however, party insiders considered close to Advani felt uncomfortable with Krishnamurthy’s “independent” style of functioning. And by June 30, 2002, he was persuaded by the BJP to relinquish office and become the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s law minister.
But sections within the BJP were still not happy with Krishnamurthy’s “intellectual aloofness” and in the next reshuffle he was dropped from the ministry.
He continued to be a member of the Rajya Sabha till he died.