Madhavsinh Solanki

His social coalition strategy won a record election victory. Weeks later, that same reservation policy triggered riots that ended his government.

Madhavsinh Solanki. GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons.

📑 Contents

A Journalist’s Four Terms as Chief Minister Need to Know

Madhavsinh Solanki was born on 30 July 1927, in Piludara village, then part of Baroda State.
Before politics, he worked as a journalist, with the Gujarati newspaper Gujarat Samachar.
He was first elected as an MLA in 1957, from the undivided Bombay State. Gujarat became a separate state only in 1960.
He was elected president of the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee in 1975.
He served four separate terms as Chief Minister of Gujarat, not the three sometimes reported. His first ran 24 December 1976 to 10 April 1977, cut short within weeks of Congress’s rout in the March 1977 Lok Sabha election.
His second term began 7 June 1980. He resigned once already, in March 1985, amid renewed anti-quota unrest just before that year’s state election.
He was then sworn in for a third term, after Congress’s landslide win in that election. This term ended when he resigned for good, on 6 July 1985.
His fourth term ran 10 December 1989 to 3 March 1990. Congress’s poor showing in the February 1990 state election forced his resignation.
He served as India’s Union Minister of External Affairs, from 21 June 1991 to 31 March 1992, under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.

He devised the KHAM strategy — an electoral coalition of Kshatriyas, Harijans (Dalits), Adivasis, and Muslims. Together, these groups made up roughly 75% of Gujarat’s population.
The strategy deliberately looked past Gujarat’s traditionally dominant Patel, or Patidar, community.
Acting on the Baxi Commission’s recommendation, his government introduced reservations for socially and economically backward classes, in 1981. The policy sparked protests that same year.
Under the KHAM strategy, Congress won a then-record 149 of 182 seats, in Gujarat’s 1985 state election.
The reservation conflict escalated after that win, into sustained, often communal rioting through mid-1985. This was a renewed, expanded phase of the same 1981 policy fight, not a separate new order.
Some historians link the backlash against KHAM to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s later rise in Gujarat, as an alternative to Congress’s caste coalition.

In early 1992, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he personally handed Switzerland’s Foreign Minister, Rene Felber, a written note. It stated that Indian investigations into the Bofors scandal had produced no results.
The note was widely read as an attempt to help stall the Swiss end of the Bofors probe. He admitted delivering it to Parliament, then resigned as External Affairs Minister under pressure, on 31 March 1992.
He faced a long-running CBI legal battle over the note, which continued well into the 2000s and 2010s. The Delhi High Court eventually dismissed his plea against the FIR against him.
His KHAM coalition strategy predated the Mandal Commission’s national rollout of OBC reservation, by nearly a decade. The Commission’s own report, though, was submitted in 1980, not long after KHAM’s launch.
His son, Bharatsinh Solanki, also later became a Union Minister, continuing the family’s political career.
He died on 9 January 2021, in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, at the age of 93.