Former Prime Minister I K Gujral died at 92

Gurgaon: Former Prime Minister Indra Kumar Gujral died on Friday after a brief illness.
The 92-year-old left-leaning liberal breathed his last in a private hospital here at 3.27 PM after a multi-organ failure, family sources said. He was admitted to the hospital on November 19 with a lung infection.
The former Prime Minister, who was on ventilator support, was unwell for sometime. He was on dialysis for over a year and suffered a serious chest infection some days ago.
Gujral leaves two sons, one of whom Naresh Gujral is a Rajya Sabha MP and an Akali Dal leader, and brother Satish Gujral, who is a prominent painter and architect. His wife Sheila, who died in 2011, was a poet.
The body will be kept for public to pay respects at his residence in Janpath in central Delhi on Saturday morning and will cremated at 3 PM near Samata Sthal, the memorial of late Jagjivan Ram.
President Pranab Mukherjee, Vice President Hamid Ansari, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Union Ministers and political leaders were among those who paid glowing tributes to the late leader.
“In his passing, the country has lost an intellectual, a scholar-statesman and a gentleman politician whose liberal and humanist vision was rooted in the teachings of the leaders of our freedom movement,” the Prime Minister said in his message.
“I personally have lost a friend of long standing, whose wisdom, idealism and deep concern for social equity left a great impression on me and whose counsel and opinion I often sought and valued greatly,” Singh said.
He emerged as the consensus candidate after serious differences developed among the UF leaders including Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh and others as to who will become the Prime Minister.
It was another matter that his government survived only for a few months as Congress again became restive in the wake of Jain Commission report on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and toppled the government.
Born on December 4, 1919 in Jhelum town now in Pakistan, Gujral belonged to a family of freedom fighters and had actively participated in the freedom struggle at a young age and was jailed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement.