NEW DELHI, Nov 30: Former Indian prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral, lauded and reviled as a friend of Pakistan, died in a private hospital in the neighbourhood of Delhi on Friday following complications from a lung ailment. He was 93.

Press Trust of India said Mr Gujral passed away at 3.27pm after a multi-organ failure. He was admitted to a hospital in Gurgaon on November 19 with a lung infection.

The former prime minister was on ventilator support and had been unwell for some time, PTI said. He was on dialysis for over a year and suffered a serious chest infection some days ago. He will be crematedin Delhi on Saturday.

Mr Gujral migrated from Pakistan after partition and rose to become the prime minister with a big slice of luck after he came up through the ranks, which included a pivotal stint as ambassador to Moscow.

A lover of Urdu, Mr Gujral led a path-breaking commission in 1972 to promote the language in India and to rescue it from political and cultural oblivion. His `Gujral Doctrine` enunciated five principles for maintaining good neighbourly relations with smaller South Asian countries, but it was his pitch to qualitatively, and in terms of visa relaxation even unilaterally,improve ties with Pakistan that was to become his lasting legacy.

He supported the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led initiative to reset ties with Pakistan, a move that climaxed as the Lahore Declaration of February 1999.

He left the Congress to join the Janata Dal in the late-1980s and became Minister of External Affairs in the V.P. Singh-led National Front government in 1989.

As the external affairs minister he handled the fallout of the Kuwait crisis following Iraqi invasion that displaced thousands of Indians.

Mr Gujral had a second stint as external affairs minister in theUnited Front government under H.D. Deve Gowda, whom he later replaced as prime minister after the Congress withdrew support in 1997.

He emerged as the consensus candidate after serious differences developed among the UF leaders, including Lalu Prasad, 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.

Born in Jhelum, Pakistan, Gujral`s family migrated to Indiaafter the Partition in 1947. He was active in the struggle for India`s independence from British rule and was jailed during the Quit India Movement in 1942.

An avid lover of Urdu poetry and literature, Gujral graduated from DAV College, Haily College of Commerce and Forman Christian College, Lahore. He first entered Parliament as a Rajya Sabha member in 1964, courtesy Indira Gandhi.

At the time of the emergency in 1975, Gujral was information & broadcasting minister in Indira Gandhi`s cabinet. He was eased out after he questioned the locus standi of Sanjay Gandhi the `all powerful` son of the then prime minister.