REMEMBERING FARMER’S PM, EPITOME OF ETHICS, INTEGRITY, HONESTY, HARD-WORK, SIMPLICITY & AUSTERITY – LAL BAHADUR SHASTRI (2 OCTOBER 1904 – 11 JANUARY 1966) Between erasure and revival lies a vast land beclouded by the fog of history—the inclosure of oblivion. As the controversy rages over the appropriation of one Congressman and the diminishing hallowed Congress family, one Congress PM remains just a footnote in independent India’s chronicles. His name is Lal Bahadur Shastri. Was Shastri’s name deliberately allowed to lapse into gentle obscurity? Is it because he succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru, who played India’s patron saint to Mahatma Gandhi’s divinity? They have been portrayed as Free India’s Power Couple, with no other freedom fighter—not Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lokmanya Tilak or Sarojini Naidu to enter the equation. Shastri became the PM with support from the Syndicate comprising Kamaraj, Sanjiva Reddy, SK Patil, Atulya Ghosh and Nijalingappa. The contrast between Shastri and Nehru was sharpest in dealing with India’s enemies. Nehru’s dreamy socialism, tempered by Gandhian pacifist dogma made a mess of defence and foreign policy. Respected bureaucrat BS Raghavan remembers a conversation with Nehru who saw India greeting the world waving a perennial olive branch. In an article, Raghavan quoted Nehru as saying that Gandhi “was for disbanding the armed forces and for India to stand forth with only trust and faith in humanity as its shield. We could not go that far, but the sheer grandeur of his ideas left its mark on my personality”. In various histories of the Indian Army, it has been mentioned that Nehru wanted to scrap the Army. He supposedly told General Sir Robert Lockhart, who approached him with a plan to boost the capabilities of the Army, “We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. You can scrap the Army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs.” This thinking perhaps led to his Utopian decisions that lost parts of India to Pakistan (in 1947) and China (in 1962)—the only PM to have done so. In contrast, Shastri was a decisive PM. On August 31, 1965, he interrupted dinner and walked across to his 10 Janpath office where the three service chiefs waited with the news that the Pakistan army had invaded Jammu and that Kashmir would fall into enemy hands if they succeeded. Shastri ordered immediate retaliation, and the Indian Army was asked to march towards Lahore. During his Independence Day speech, he warned Pakistan, “Hathiyaron ka jawab hathiyaron se denge (force will be met with force).” In peacetime, Shastri was equally decisive in promoting the Green Revolution, which made India self-sufficient in food, for which Indira later took credit. Inspired by the Army’s victory against Pakistan in which 3,000 Indian soldiers died fighting for a country that needed urgent agricultural reform, Shastri coined the slogan, ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’. The idea behind the famous war cry, ‘Garibi Hatao’ was borrowed from this. Indira was determined to claim all of India’s victories for the dynasty. The one war she fought against Pakistan in 1971 she won, earning her the sobriquet Durga from her generous opponent Atal Bihari Vajpayee, thus atoning for her father’s dismal military failures. An important reason why the Soviet-friendly Nehru and Indira destroyed the Syndicate was that its leaders were staunchly Right Wing. Anti-Left, it opposed government control of economic activity, and was for dilution of state planning, private industry over public sector, FDI, and an open political and economic relationship with the West during the Cold War. The Congress today is protesting the celebration of Patel as a ploy to end the exclusive Gandhi-Nehru appropriation of India. They are glossing over the inconvenient fact that some prominent freedom fighters like Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee were Congressmen—at least once. In the rearrangement of Indian iconography, it is important to make corrections, acknowledge heroes downgraded by a dynasty and perhaps even rename prominent roads named after despots like Aurangzeb and Babur. But in the narrative of historical memory, forgetting a PM like IK Gujral may not be a great national loss, but restoring Lal Bahadur Shastri to his rightful place as India’s first decisive PM is the first step to doing justice to our national heroes. newindianexpress/columns/ravi_shankar/Reviving-a-Hero/2014/11/02/article2504113.ece Photo: guruprasad.net/posts/lal-bahadur-shastri-farmers-pm-epitome-of-ethics-integrity-honesty-hard-work-simplicity-austerity/
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 06:13:37 +0000
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