Prime Ministers of India: Complete List and Records

The Prime Minister is the head of the Government of India, the real executive who heads the Council of Ministers while the President remains the head of State. The office is not described at length in the Constitution, yet everything about the working of the Union Government turns on it, and a list question on the Prime Ministers of India appears in almost every general awareness paper. This note gives the office as the Constitution builds it, the complete list of the holders with their terms, the acting Prime Ministers, and the firsts and records a paper setter returns to year after year.

The office in the Constitution

Article 74 says there shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President, and that the President shall act in accordance with such advice; the Forty-second and Forty-fourth Amendments settled that the President may ask for reconsideration once but must then accept the advice tendered. Article 75 carries the mechanics of the office. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President, and the other Ministers are appointed by the President on the advice of the Prime Minister. By convention the President summons the leader of the party or coalition commanding a majority in the Lok Sabha. Article 75(1A), inserted by the Ninety-first Amendment Act of 2003, caps the total number of Ministers, the Prime Minister included, at fifteen per cent of the strength of the Lok Sabha. Article 75(3) makes the Council of Ministers collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha alone, which is why a Prime Minister who loses the confidence of that House must resign. Article 75(5) allows a Minister who is not a member of either House to hold office for six months only. Article 78 lists the duties of the Prime Minister towards the President: to communicate the decisions of the Council of Ministers, to furnish information the President calls for, and to place before the Council any matter on which a Minister has decided alone. There is no bar on a Prime Minister sitting in the Rajya Sabha, and there is no limit on the number of terms.

Prime Ministers of India: the full list

Acting Prime Ministers and the shortest tenures

The Constitution does not provide for an acting Prime Minister, so when Nehru died in May 1964 and when Shastri died at Tashkent in January 1966 the senior most Minister, Gulzari Lal Nanda, was sworn in to hold the office until the ruling party chose a leader. Each of his two spells lasted thirteen days, the shortest time anyone has held the office. Among Prime Ministers who formed a government of their own, the shortest tenure belongs to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose first government of 1996 lasted sixteen days and resigned before the confidence vote. Charan Singh holds a stranger record: he resigned before the Lok Sabha met, so he never once faced the House as Prime Minister. Three Prime Ministers have died in office, Nehru, Shastri and Indira Gandhi, the last by assassination on 31 October 1984.

Firsts, records and the Prime Minister at work

Indira Gandhi was the first woman Prime Minister and the first to be a member of the Rajya Sabha on taking office; Manmohan Singh is the only Prime Minister to have remained a member of the Rajya Sabha for the whole of his tenure. Rajiv Gandhi, at forty, was the youngest; Morarji Desai, at eighty one, the oldest to take office. Nehru held the External Affairs portfolio along with the office, and Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi are the three from one family to have held it. Beyond the Constitution the Prime Minister is the Chairperson of NITI Aayog, heads the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet and the Cabinet Committee on Security, advises the President on the appointment of Ministers, allocates portfolios, and is the channel between the Cabinet and the President. Writers on the office have given it familiar labels: Lord Morley called the Prime Minister primus inter pares, the first among equals, Sir Ivor Jennings the keystone of the Cabinet arch, and Harold Laski the pivot of the whole system of government.