Born on the leap year day of 1896 Morarji Desai was in some ways as unique as his birthday of February 29. He believed in the cut and thrust of debate as a parliamentarian and was ever keen to hold a press conference which was a monthly feature with him during the short two years and four months that he was the prime minister (March 1977 to July 1979).He had started his career as a civil servant during the raj, chucked up his comfortable job to join politics and the freedom movement, held various ministerial offices at the state and the Union government (his first ministerial office was in the erstwhile Bombay State in 1937 when the Congress formed Ministries under the Government of India Act, 1935) culminating in his becoming the prime minister in 1977.Throughout his career he was known as a principled politician. It would be appropriate in this piece to focus on this aspect of his personality as well as some important features of his long innings in public life on his birth anniversary on 28 February.The spirit of the democratic way of life was at the core of Morarjibhai’s thought and action. He kept an open house and it is said that he was very accessible even as the PM. I met him when he was out of power in the 1980s and 1990s. I can vouch for the fact that he was available to all and sundry. Another aspect and principle he adhered to was transparency in government and belief in a free press. During his prime ministership, the press used to report critically against the government and quite often hit out at the him personally, I remember the weekly Blitz to be leading this campaign. But no pressure was ever put on the editor Russi Karanjia in any form by the then government. At his monthly press conferences, no question was banned and no answers held back. He had a knack of answering questions with counter.Once asked why he answered questions often with counter questions, he shot back, “why not”?It is a part of history that the damaging elements of the 42nd Amendment of 1976 were removed from the constitution by the 44th Amendment of 1978 sponsored by the Janata government. The type of Emergency imposed in June 1975 could now never again be repeated and the fundamental rights strengthened. It is true that Morarji’s prime ministership was short lived and the party he headed was a coalition of parties subscribing to varying ideologies, from Congressmen to left wing Socialists to Right Wing Jan Sanghis. But the achievements it made were commendable in such a short period.I have already mentioned Morarji’s role in restoring the rule of law by bringing back the lost glory to the constitution. In matters of foreign policy too, his government shone. The best relations India had with Pakistan was during this period. Both Morarji and the Foreign Minister Vajpayee were respected in Pakistan and the relationship was almost normal. Indo- Pak Cricket matches started in 1978 and obtaining a Visa in both countries was just a formality.He is the only Indian to have received the Nishan-e-Pakistan, that country’s highest civilian honour. In a conversation with me, the late Kuldip Nayar, the veteran journalist who covered the Morarji government, said that the Pakistanis were convinced that Morarji was not hawkish in his attitude towards that country. Former bureaucrat and governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes in his memoir The Undying Light, “It is, I believe, a fact that bilateral relations between India and Pakistan were as normal and friction free as can be during Morarji Desai’s prime ministership.”Who knows, had the Janata government continued for a full term, the Kashmir question may been closer to solution if not solved. It has to be recorded in this context that the Indira Gandhi government which assumed office in 1980 took an unnecessarily harsh line towards Pakistan, a very short-sighted approach to relations with our neighbor. It did not build on the good-will the Janata government had created.Apart from Pakistan, the Janata administration had cordial relations with our other neighbours like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. The prices of essential commodities also went down during Desai’s prime ministership and the public had stopped visiting ration shops.In Parliament, Morarji firmly believed in the dictum “government must have it’s way, and the opposition must have it’s say”. The late Madhu Limaye once mentioned in an article when Morarji was in the Congress and he (Limaye) in the opposition, and Congressmen repeatedly barracked him while speaking in Parliament, Morarji would come to his rescue chiding these Congress parliamentarians by saying, “Meet logic and argument with logic and argument, not with shouting.”The Janata government also introduced the practice that the leader of the opposition (LoP) would broadcast to the nation whenever the Prime Minister broadcast to the nation. Something which no future government followed.He believed in promoting Khadi and cottage industries. For those of us who went to meet him in the morning hours, one would find him busy at the spinning wheel. He used to spin the Khadi yarn for about 1 hour every day.The late Sir Mark Tully who made a BBC Documentary on Morarji Desai in 1978, said of him in 2019 that of the achievements of Morarji’s government which stand out were giving freedom to the fourth estate in every possible way, setting a committee under B.G. Verghese, the well known journalist, to free the electronic media from government control and giving Kashmir its first really free state assembly election in 1977, as prior to that the elections in that state had been controversial.Having taken over as prime minister after the hurricane win of the Janata Party in the election of 1977 held after the infamous emergency, Desai was the fittest candidate for the job, having been chief minister of the erstwhile Bombay state, finance minister twice and deputy prime minister, apart being known as an able administrator. Jagjivan Ram, the other candidate, had been in the government throughout the emergency prior to his defection to the opposition just on the eve of the elections and was therefore bypassed by Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharaya Kripalani who made the choice.In one of those unfortunate turns of history, Charan Singh, who was deputy prime minister in the Janata Government pulled down the government half way through its term in order to be a short term lame duck prime minister, thus denying India it’s only chance to have a genuine two party system.What is the legacy of Morarji Desai on his 130th birth anniversary year? Writing on his idea of India, one of his early biographers, D.F. Karaka wrote in 1965, “He has a vision of the India of the future in which he sees this country become democratic in the real and fullest sense of that word with no one poor and also no one extremely rich. He believes if we work for such a purpose it can be achieved.”These lines aptly sum up the philosophy and life of Morarji Desai.Arvindar Singh is the author of the book Morarji Desai: A Profile in Courage.