State leaders seen as prime ministerial material have rarely succeeded in getting the top post. In fact, it has gone to leaders who had a national image, perspective, maturity and the capacity to take along everybody.
While Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, a product of the freedom movement, was the obvious choice for the top post, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi were leaders in their own right. They were national leaders. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee too had appeal across the country. They were neither caste leaders nor state leaders.
Among former chief ministers, Morarji Desai (Bombay state) had spent several years at the Centre working in a different capacity. He became the Prime Minister in 1977 which saw people of different ideologies came together under the banner of the Janata Party.
But neither he nor Charan Singh (1979) or V.P. Singh (1989), the former Uttar Pradesh chief ministers, could complete their terms.
But P.V. Narasimha Rao and Mr H.D. Deve Gowda, the former chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, respectively, got the top posts without lobbying.
While Rao became the Prime Minister (1991) when he was planning to retire from active politics and return to Hyderabad, Mr Deve Gowda (1996) did not have PM ambitions. He got the post because the CPI(M) had opposed veteran Marxist and the then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu. He later described this as a “historic blunder”.
The “Young Turk” Chandra Shekhar and Inder Kumar Gujral were never seen as state leaders. Former Karnataka chief minister R.K. Hegde was seen as PM material.
Now, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is lobbying hard to become the PM with a calculation that his Gujarat model of development would create a wave in his favour.