[4] "Tobacco is universally regarded as one of the major public health hazards and is responsible directly or indirectly for an estimated eight lakh deaths annually in the country.

He first contested the Lok Sabha polls from Bombay South constituency in 1980 but lost to the Janata Party's Ratansingh Rajda though, in the subsequent election, Deora defeated BJP's Jayawantiben Mehta by a huge margin.

[5] In the Congress re-election in 2009, Deora retained the portfolio of Petroleum and Natural Gas in the second government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"[10] Finance Minister Arun Jaitley penned a front-page tribute to Deora in The Times of India, calling him "extremely helpful" and someone whose "strength lay in the fact that he never criticized even those he did not like".

"[12][13] Pranay Gupta, for The Huffington Post, noted that, "at a personal level, he was incorruptible", and that, "perhaps more than any Indian politician of his generation, Murli was genuinely liked in public and private.

"[14] Shankar Aiyar spoke about Deora's humble beginnings, about "the Murli who wore the same set of clothes — washed at night and ironed "with a lotta with coal in it"; the Murli who hung outside the neighbour's window to listen to songs and studied under the street lamp at Babulnath", and how, as a powerful politician, he used his contacts to help the poor and needy.

How "every new billion-dollar acquaintance was converted into a philanthropist — convinced to donate a heart lung machine to a municipal hospital, pay for an eye camp, fund the computer literacy for jobs programme at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, and more.