C.K. Jaffer Sharief, former Union minister, seven-time Lok Sabha member and veteran Congress leader from Karnataka, died at a private hospital in Bengaluru on Sunday of a heart attack. Sharief is survived by two daughters and a son.The Congress leader’s eventful career as a politician saw him occupy top government and party positions. Coming from a modest background, Sharief started by running errands for the towering Lingayat leader S. Nijalingappa who served as Karnataka chief minister and AICC president. This is where he put his information-gathering skills to good use.A group of Congress chief ministers and Congress Working Committee members known as the ‘Syndicate’ were conspiring to dislodge Indira Gandhi from prime ministership.Sharief’s primary loyalties rested with Gandhi and not his boss Nijalingappa, who was heading the Congress. Gandhi had prior and inside knowledge of every move the Syndicate was making, courtesy Sharief who used to prolong his stay each time he entered the assembly of elders or Syndicate members carrying sherbet, chai or samosas. As a part-time driver of the AICC chief, Sharief was also privy to conversations that Nijalingappa had at the rear seat of his ambassador.When Nijalingappa expelled Indira Gandhi from the Congress in 1969, leading to a split in the grand old party, an emotional Gandhi insisted that Congress membership was her ‘birthright’.“Nobody can throw me out of the Congress. It is not a legal question, nor one of passing a resolution to pronounce an expulsion order. It is a question of the very fibre of one’s heart and being,” she had remarked. Gandhi managed to win the support of 310 of the total 429 members of parliament belonging to the Congress.Sharief was ready with his inputs again in 1983 when Gandhi was fighting a battle against N.T. Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh. The assembly polls in 1983 were a watershed in Indian politics as Gandhi and Congress were handsomely trounced by a new political outfit – Telugu Desam Party led by actor N.T. Rama Rao. Both Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi’s home minister Buta Singh were confident of victory and giving prime minister Indira Gandhi a daily “feedback” of party’s bright prospects. Sharief was the minister of state for railways.Apparently acting on his own, Sharief instructed Railway Protection Force (RPF) to give inputs about Andhra polls. The RPF had its own network of spies and agents that were informally used for the protection of railway properties.In addition to regularly passing on confidential information to Gandhi, Sharief is said to have shared RPF inputs with two senior journalists, Shubhabrata Bhattacharya and Louis Fernandez who were writing for Sunday magazine and The Telegraph.On the day of the result, Indira Gandhi was not surprised when Rama Rao stunned the nation, winning 201 out of 290 assembly seats and becoming the first non-Congress chief minister of the state.As minister of state for railways, Sharief had a running feud with A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhury who had scant regard for his junior’s humble background. When Sharief became cabinet minister for railways under P.V. Narasimha Rao, he started using his ministerial saloon in goods train instead of passenger trains, perhaps preferring privacy and slow pace.He subsequently had a feud with the prime minister and it was said then that Rao used to wonder why Sharief was turning into a ‘Mir Jafar.’Like he did during the Gandhi era, Sharief carried many tales to an otherwise apolitical Sonia Gandhi. Towards the fag end of his prime ministerial tenure, Rao had reduced him as a minister without a portfolio. By then, Sharief’s loyalties lay firmly with Sonia Gandhi.Rasheed Kidwai is a noted political commentator and talking head on Indian tv news channels. He is a visiting fellow at the ORF and the views expressed here are his own.