First Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh

Education and Family

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy About this sound pronunciation (help·info) (19 May 1913 - 1 June 1996) was the sixth President of India, serving from 1977 to 1982. Over the course of a long political career, Reddy held several key offices, as the first and two-time Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, a two-time Speaker of the Lok Sabha and Union Minister. He remains the only person to be elected to the office of the President of India unopposed

Reddy was born in Illur village in Madras Presidency in the present day Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. He had his primary education at the High School run by Theosophical Society Adyar, Madras.
He joined the Government Arts College at Anantapur, then an affiliate of the University of Madras for his higher studies. Much later, in 1958, the degree of Honorary Doctor of Laws was conferred on him by the Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati. Reddy was married to Neelam Nagaratnamma. The couple had one son and three daughters

Freedom Fighter

Reddy joined the freedom struggle following Mahatma Gandhi's visit to Anantapur in July 1929. In 1931, Reddy gave up his studies to become an active participant in the nationalist struggle. He was closely associated with the Youth League and participated in a student satyagraha.
In 1938, Reddy was elected Secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Provincial Congress Committee and he held that office for 10 years. During the Quit India Movement, he was imprisoned and was mostly in jail between 1940 to 1945. Released in March 1942, he was arrested again in August of that year and sent to the Amraoti jail where he served time with T Prakasam, S. Satyamurti, K Kamaraj and V V Giri till 1945

Political career

Reddy was elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly in 1946 and became the Secretary of the Madras Congress Legislature Party. He was also a Member of the Indian Constituent Assembly which framed the Constitution of India. From April 1949 till April 1951, he served as the Minister for Prohibition, Housing and Forests of the then Madras State

Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh

In 1951 he was elected President of the Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee. When the Andhra State was formed the following year, T. Prakasam became its Chief Minister and Sanjeeva Reddy the Deputy Chief Minister. When the state of Andhra Pradesh came into being by incorporating Telengana with Andhra State, Sanjeeva Reddy became its first Chief Minister serving from November 1956 to January 1960.
He was Chief Minister for a second time from March 1962 to February 1964 thus serving in all for over 5 years as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.
Reddy was MLA from Sri Kalahasti and Dhone respectively during his stints as Chief Minister. The Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam multipurpose river valley projects were initiated during Reddy's tenure as Chief Minister.
In 2005, the Chandrababu Naidu led government of the Telugu Desam Party renamed the Srisailam project as the Neelam Sanjiva Reddy Sagar in his honour. The Congress governments under Reddy placed emphasis on rural development and agriculture and allied sectors.
The shift towards industrialisation remained limited however and was largely driven by the central government's investments in large public sector enterprises in the state.
Reddy first term as Chief Minister ended in 1960 after he resigned as Chief Minister on being elected President of the Indian National Congress while in 1964 he resigned voluntarily following adverse remarks made against the Government of Andhra Pradesh by the Supreme Court in the Bus Routes Nationalisation case.

Congress President and Union Minister

Reddy was elected President of the Indian National Congress thrice consecutively at its Bangalore, Bhavnagar and Patna sessions from 1960 to 1962.[7] He was elected to the Rajya Sabha twice.
From June, 1964 Reddy was Union Minister of Steel and Mines in the Lal Bahadur Shastri government. He also served variously as Union Minister of Transport, Civil Aviation, Shipping and Tourism from January 1966 to March 1967 in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet

Speaker of the Lok Sabha

In the general elections of 1967, Reddy was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh. On 17 March 1967, Reddy was elected Speaker of the Fourth Lok Sabha. He thus became only the third person to be elected Speaker of the house on serving his first term as its member.
Upon his election as the Speaker, he resigned from the Congress Party, to underline the independence of his office. As Speaker he admitted, for the first time, a No-Confidence Motion to be taken up for discussion on the same day as the President's address to a joint sitting of the Houses of Parliament.
It was during his tenure that the House for the first time sentenced a person to imprisonment for Contempt of the House.
The establishment of the Committee on the Welfare of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was another achievement of Reddy's speakership.
Although he described himself as the 'watchman of the Parliament' and conducted himself with dignity and handled parliamentary business in an orderly and effective manner, he had several hostile encounters with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the House that proved costly when he became, two years later, the Congress Party's nominee to succeed Zakir Hussain as President.

Presidential Election of 1969

In 1969, following the death of President Zakir Hussain, Reddy was nominated as the official candidate of Congress party. In particular he was seen as the candidate of the old guard of the Congress. Although she had nominated Reddy as the Congress party's presidential candidate, the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was opposed to Reddy's candidacy.
She asked Congress legislators to "vote according to their conscience" rather than blindly toe the Party line, in effect giving a call to support the independent candidate V V Giri. In a tightly contested election held on August 16, 1969, V V Giri emerged victorious, winning 48.01 per cent of the first preference votes and subsequently getting a majority on counting the second preference votes. In the final tally, Giri had 4,20,077 votes against the quota of 4,18,169 votes required to be elected President and Reddy 4,05,427 votes.
The election led to much discord within the Congress Party and culminated in the historic split of 1969 and the subsequent rise of Indira Gandhi in Indian politics.
The 1969 Indian presidential election remains the most closely fought in independent India's history. Subsequently, Reddy, who had resigned as Speaker of the Lok Sabha to contest the election, retired from active politics and moved back to Anantapur where he took to farming

Return to active politics

In response to Jayaprakash Narayan's call for a Total Revolution, Reddy emerged from his political exile in 1975. In January 1977 he was made a member of the Committee of the Janata Party and in March of that year, he fought the General Election from the Nandyal constituency in Andhra Pradesh as a Janata Party candidate.

He was the only non-Congress candidate to be elected from Andhra Pradesh. Reddy was unanimously elected Speaker of the Sixth Lok Sabha on 26 March 1977. However he resigned four months later to contest in the presidential elections of July 1977. Reddy's second term as Speaker remains the shortest tenure for anyone to have held that post.

Presidential Election of 1977

Although Prime Minister Morarji Desai wanted to nominate danseuse Rukmini Devi Arundale for the post, Reddy was elected unopposed, the only President to be elected thus, after being unanimously supported by all political parties including the opposition Congress party. At 65, he became the youngest ever person to be elected President of India.

He was also the only serious presidential candidate to have contested twice - in 1969 against V V Giri and in 1977. 37 candidates had filed their nominations for the presidency of whom 36 were rejected by the returning officer.

Following these disqualifications, Reddy remained the only validly nominated candidate in the fray which made elections unnecessary. Reddy thus became the first person to be elected President of India without a contest. He was the fourth President to be elected from South India and the third from Andhra Pradesh.

President of India

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy was elected, unopposed, on 21 July 1977 and was sworn in as the sixth President of India on 25 July, 1977. During his term of office, Reddy had to work with three governments under Prime Ministers Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi.

Relations between Reddy and Desai soon soured over the latter's promotion of his son, Kanti Desai, in politics and over Desai's communication with Chief Ministers Vengala Rao and Channa Reddy on the issue of land ceilings in Andhra Pradesh. As President, he appointed Charan Singh as Prime Minister following the fall of the Morarji Desai government with the condition that he prove his majority on the floor of the House.

Charan Singh was sworn in on July 28, 1979 but never faced Parliament to prove his majority when the President convened it on August 20. This convention of appointing a Prime Minister in a hung House but with conditions on time to prove majority was later adopted by President R Venkataraman.

Following Charan Singh's resignation, Reddy summoned Chandrashekhar and Jagjivan Ram to Rashtrapati Bhavan to look into the possibility of forming an alternate government but convinced that they would not be able to form one, he went along with Charan Singh's advice and dissolved Lok Sabha, calling for mid term polls which the Congress Party won handsomely.

Retirement and Death

Following his Presidential term, the then Chief Minister of Karnataka Ramakrishna Hegde invited Reddy to settle down in Bangalore but he chose to retire to his farm in Anantapur. He died of pneumonia in Bangalore in 1996 at the age of 83. His samadhi is at Kallahalli near Bangalore. Parliament mourned Reddy's death on June 11, 1996 and members cutting across party lines paid him tribute and recalled his contributions to the nation and the House.

The Postal Department of India released a commemorative stamp and special cover in honour of Reddy on the occasion of his birth centenary.The Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy College Of Education in Hyderabad has been named after him. As part of the centenary celebrations of his birth, the Government of Andhra Pradesh has announced that it will rename the Andhra Pradesh State Revenue Academy, Reddy's alma mater the Government Arts College, Anantapur and the Government Medical College, Anantapur after the former president.

Reddy authored a book, Without Fear or Favour : Reminiscences and Reflections of a President, published in 1989.In 2004, a statue of his was erected at the Secretariat in Hyderabad. The character of chief minister Mahendranath in former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao's novel, The Insider, draws on Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy's career in Andhra Pradesh and his political rivalry with Kasu Brahmananda Reddy.