Shankar Dayal Sharma was an Indian lawyer and politician from the state of Madhya Pradesh who served as the ninth President of India, from 1992 to 1997. Born in Bhopal, Sharma studied at Agra, Allahabad and Lucknow and received a doctorate in constitutional law from the University of Cambridge and was a bar-at-law from Lincoln's Inn and a Brandeis Fellow at Harvard University. In 1948-49, Sharma was one of the leaders of the movement for the merger of Bhopal State with India, a cause for which he served eight months' imprisonment.