MThe first column in 2023 is a tribute to India’s second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose 57th death anniversary is on the 11th. January. Even though his name is the originator of the institution where I trained for two years – from 1985 to 1987 – and served for almost nine years, first as Deputy Director from 1994-2001 and then as Director from 2019-2021 , Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Uttarakhand, his name is not in the list of Ramchandra Guha maker of modern india, V. Krishna Anant’s India since independence gives him eight paragraphs, while Meghnad Desai’s Rediscovering India Gives him three pages. Among the memoirs and biographies of Shastri’s political contemporaries, only S. Nijalingappa, independence activist and former Chief Minister of Karnataka, holds him in high esteem. Morarji Desai and Vijayalakshmi Pandit, however, were not very charitable.
Except for Kuldeep Nayyar, who devoted three chapters on Shastri in his books between the lines And beyond the linesGiving a fair and forthright assessment of his life and politics, most other English-language journalists in India and abroad always regarded him as a shadow of his former mentor Jawaharlal Nehru, who had a 17-year tenure as prime minister. is the editor of Mainstream And seminar—Nikhil Chakraborty and Romesh Thapar were too enamored by Nehru to give Shastri an agency of his own.
Civil servants with whom he worked, LP Singh, CP Srivastava and Rajeshwar Prasad, have written their reminiscences about the man and his clear and forthright working style, but that’s about it. Three years ago, author Sandeep Shastri (Koi Rishta Nahi) wrote a slim book called Lal Bahadur Shastri: Politics and Beyond, This stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of books written on Nehru and Indira Gandhi – not only because they had long tenures in office, but also because it was part of a conscious effort to create the myth and mystique of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Compared to Teen Murti Bhavan and the Indira Gandhi Memorial, where foreign dignitaries often make their presence felt, visits to the LBS Memorial were few and far between. In fact, when I went there in 2019 after taking over as director of the LBS National Academy, I was the first—and probably the only—visitor that day.
Read also:
a vocal silence
Unlike his immediate predecessor, Shastri was a man of few words, his tenure was much shorter – about 18 months. Their correspondence was not as extensive, and their speeches—in Parliament as well as on public occasions—were sharp, precise, and to the point. He was not known to stray and often used silence as a language to communicate. His silence, which some misinterpreted as a willingness to concede, was both a strength and a weakness.
However, he is firmly etched in public memory as the first Indian Prime Minister who directed the army to cross the border and advance towards Lahore during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. And thus the course of the battle changed, as this was the area from where Indian troops advanced to the Ravi River, which was close enough to threaten Pakistan’s capital, Punjab.
It is true that Lahore was the capital of the Sikh Empire, but according to the 1808 Anglo-Sikh Treaty of Amritsar, Maharaja Ranjit Singh had to accept two conditions. The first condition prohibited him from expanding his eastern frontier beyond the Sutlej River, while the second condition forced him to revoke the support of the Marathas. The positive outcome of this treaty was that his generals marched beyond the Kashmir Valley in 1842 to capture key areas of Gilgit, Baltistan, Ladakh and Tibet, including the much-desired Aksai Chin region.
after the victory 1962
In 1962, territorial competition with China led to India’s humiliating surrender of the Northeast Frontier Agency or NEFA (as Arunachal Pradesh was then called) at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). By 1965, the generals in Pakistan were of the view that they could ‘walk in’ to Kashmir, as the PLA had done three years earlier. However, this time, the decision making process was swift and clear. Shastri took the bold decision to open the Punjab border, reversing Pakistan’s calculation that the engagement would be limited to Kashmir and the Rann of Kutch.
Thus he reversed the humiliation of the 1962 war with China when the PLA captured the whole of NEFA. While it is true that both India and Pakistan had to withdraw their troops to their respective positions, this point was well established: the Indian Army was no walkover, and if its troops had the backing of the political leadership, So he was second to none in terms of bravery. Shastri had a very capable Defense Minister in Yashwantrao Chavan who, unlike his predecessor VK Krishna Menon, kept his ear to the ground, and concerned himself with the troops on the border. He gave freedom to his generals and field commanders to plan the war strategy.
Read also:
Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan
Which nation did his slogan inspire Jai jawan jai kisan (Jaiwan ki Jai, Kisan ki Jai). Through this, he credited farmers for contributing not only to food security but also to national security, as most of the soldiers came from farmers. He is credited with establishing the Border Security Force (BSF), which took over the responsibility of guarding the country’s international borders from the state-armed police.
It may be mentioned that one of the reasons for the delay in the formation of the state of Punjab was the apprehension that a smaller Punjab would not be able to protect its border, which extended to Lahaul-Spiti in modern Himachal Pradesh in 1965. The border states should be administratively compact and financially viable, this was also an argument of the States Reorganization Commission (SRC), which accepted the linguistic reorganization of Andhra Pradesh for Telugu, Mysore (later) Punjab, Bombay And refused to change the boundaries of Assam. Karnataka) for Kannadigas, Madras (later Tamil Nadu) for Tamils, and Kerala for Malayalam speakers.
Shastri was introduced in 1965 by the then Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) chief MS Swaminathan and Agriculture Secretary B.K. Sivaraman’s remarkable team is also credited with laying the foundation of the Green Revolution by giving political support to it. He agreed to set up the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), then known as the Agricultural Prices Commission (APC), to ensure that farmers get the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for their crops , and they were responsible for setting up. Food Corporation of India (FCI) This marked a major departure from the Nehruvian policy of privileging industry over agriculture and keeping food prices ‘affordable’ in urban areas and industrial townships, while giving farmers the opportunity to stabilize the price situation. suffered the brunt of the mandatory charges.
Shastri’s Dream Team clearly understood that there would be no real success unless farmers got remunerative prices, and unless agricultural production was driven by better seeds, fertilisers, irrigation and market support. His views on agriculture were closer to those of Chaudhary Charan Singh—the fifth Prime Minister of India—than Nehru, who gave priority to agriculture. Shastri’s farmer-led strategy helped India recover from the humiliation of America’s PL-480, or Food for Peace program, under which the Lyndon Johnson administration was giving its food aid to India.
Therefore, the time has come for us to re-evaluate the legacy of the second Indian Prime Minister. Readers are probably aware that much more has been written about the circumstances of his death in Tashkent, just after the signing of a ceasefire agreement with Pakistan, than about the institutional innovations during his premiership. His relentless fight against corruption and his statesmanship in resolving the language issue in 1965 deserve recognition. Indeed, it would be a true tribute to the man who steered the ship of state at a very crucial juncture in history.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was the director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweeted @ChopraSanjeev. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)