Lal Bahadur Shastri

 

Lal Bahadur Shastri: Reemembering the leader whose  Slogan Became a National Mission.

October 2 is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. It is also the birth anniversary of Lal Bahadur Shastri. The coincidence is both appropriate and unfortunate. Appropriate, because Shastri was deeply influenced by Gandhi and carried into public life some of his most demanding values—simplicity, personal responsibility, restraint and service. Unfortunate, because the towering public memory of Mahatma Gandhi often leaves little space on this day for remembering the diminutive man who became India’s second Prime Minister.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was physically small, soft-spoken and outwardly unassuming. But beneath that unassuming exterior lay great inner strength. Replying to a Parliamentary debate on the railway accident, Shastri himself remarked that people were apt to mistake his small size and soft tongue for a lack of firmness. The Prime Minister’s Office biography records his remarkable journey from poverty and the freedom struggle to the highest office in the land, noting that behind his soft exterior was the firmness of a rock. 

That combination of humility and steel perhaps explains why his short tenure as Prime Minister, from 9 June 1964 to 11 January 1966, continues to occupy such a disproportionate place in India’s national memory.

A country facing two crises

Shastri inherited a deeply difficult India.

The trauma of the 1962 war with China had shaken the country's confidence and exposed serious weaknesses in India's defence preparedness. At the same time, India was confronting an acute food crisis. Agricultural production was inadequate, foodgrain imports were substantial and the spectre of food insecurity was a matter of national concern. Contemporary assessments of the period describe defence preparedness and food security as two urgent and interconnected national priorities. 

Shastri therefore confronted two battles simultaneously: one against an external threat and another against hunger.

His response was characteristically uncomplicated. He sought to mobilise the nation rather than merely administer it. This was the context in which the words "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" acquired their extraordinary force. The slogan was not simply a catchy political phrase. It connected two apparently different imperatives—national security and food security—and placed both within the framework of national duty.

The soldier defending the country's borders and the farmer feeding the country were, in Shastri's formulation, equal partners in nation-building. And there was something else implicit in the slogan. It was an appeal to citizens to participate in the national effort.

When food shortages became acute and India was heavily dependent on American PL-480 wheat shipments, Shastri appealed to citizens to observe restraint and even to voluntarily give up one meal a week. Importantly, he did not merely ask others to sacrifice. He first experimented with the idea within his own household. His appeal became popularly associated with the "Shastri vrat" (in practice, skipping a Monday evening meal), and his example helped convert an economic necessity into a collective moral exercise. 

This was leadership through example.

From "Jai Jawan" to a confident India

The 1965 India-Pakistan war tested Shastri in the most unforgiving circumstances. Pakistan's military leadership appears to have calculated that India, still recovering from the trauma of 1962, could be pressured militarily. The outcome did not conform to those expectations. India fought back, and the war ended with a ceasefire on 23 September 1965 and, eventually, the Tashkent Declaration of 10 January 1966.

The significance of 1965 was not simply military. It was psychological.

A country that had been deeply shaken by the events of 1962 had demonstrated that it could recover, reorganise and respond with determination. Recent scholarship on the period has also highlighted something less visible than battlefield operations: the institutional changes in India's handling of defence and foreign policy after 1962. Under Shastri, decision-making mechanisms involving the political leadership, defence establishment and foreign-policy apparatus became more coordinated, while the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet became an important forum during the 1965 crisis. 

Shastri therefore did not merely provide rhetoric during a war. He helped create the political conditions in which India's military leadership could operate with confidence.

His famous words—Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan—gave ordinary citizens a role in the national struggle.

The jawan would defend the nation.

The kisan would feed it.

Both were indispensable.

And then came the Green Revolution Perhaps the most consequential part of Shastri's legacy is one that is sometimes obscured by the drama of the 1965 war.

The second half of his slogan was not allowed to remain merely a slogan.

Shastri recognised that food security required science, technology, agricultural research, improved seeds, irrigation, fertilisers, extension services, appropriate pricing and, above all, the participation of farmers.

He also backed this with concrete steps. When senior colleagues declined the agriculture portfolio, Shastri persuaded C. Subramaniam to take it up, with an assurance of full political support. The Agricultural Prices Commission, which recommends minimum support prices to farmers, began work on 1 January 1965, and the Food Corporation of India was established the same year. The high-yielding varieties programme that transformed Indian agriculture took off in 1966–67, after Shastri’s death.

The Green Revolution did not, of course, happen overnight, nor can it properly be attributed to one individual. It was the outcome of the work of a large institutional ecosystem involving agricultural scientists, administrators, policymakers, international researchers and millions of farmers.

But Shastri's contribution was to make food self-sufficiency a national mission at precisely the moment when India was facing acute vulnerability. I have written about the Green Revolution in greater detail in my tribute to Dr M S Swaminathan on his birth centenary; the link is given below.  https://khened.blogspot.com/2025/08/birth-centenary-of-dr-ms-swaminathan-7.html

Shastri’s slogan – Jai Jawan Jai Kisan - became policy. Policy became an institutional effort led by many people, including C. Subramaniam, B. Sivaraman and Dr M. S. Swaminathan. They connected science with the farmer. And the farmer became an active participant in transforming India's food security. The results that followed are now history.

Integrity was not just a slogan

Shastri's most enduring legacy lies elsewhere—in the meaning he gave to public integrity.

The story of his resignation as Railway Minister after the railway accidents of 1956 is often recalled as an anecdote. It deserves to be remembered as something much more significant.

Shastri offered to resign twice in 1956. The first time was in early September, after the Mahbubnagar train accident in Andhra Pradesh in which 112 people died; Prime Minister Nehru refused to accept it. When a still deadlier accident occurred at Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu on 23 November 1956, killing over 140 people, Shastri again tendered his resignation, and this time Nehru reluctantly accepted it. Shastri resigned because he considered himself morally responsible for a disaster in a ministry under his charge, even though there was no suggestion that he had personally caused either accident. In Parliament, Nehru explicitly clarified that he was accepting the resignation to set an example of constitutional propriety, not to imply personal culpability on Shastri's part. 

This distinction is important. Shastri was not resigning because he was personally responsible for the accident. Shastri ji accepted the moral responsibility for the institution he headed.

That is a standard of public accountability which is difficult to imagine today.

There is another, quieter reminder of his personal integrity at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial in New Delhi. Displayed there is the 1964 Fiat car purchased by Shastri with a loan from Punjab National Bank. The Memorial displays it as part of its collection. As his son Anil Shastri has recalled, the loan was Rs 5,000 towards a car costing about Rs 12,000, and it was repaid by his widow, Lalita Shastri, from her family pension after his death.

The significance of the car is not the car itself. It is the fact that the Prime Minister of India did not simply acquire a car through the privileges of office. He took a bank loan to purchase one.

It is a small archival fact, but sometimes small facts illuminate character more powerfully than large speeches. The distance between public office and personal possession was clearly understood by Shastri.

For Shastri, simplicity was inextricably linked to his life and was never an image-management exercise. It was a way of life. What happened to that legacy?

 Some uncomfortable question.

Shastri's tenure lasted barely nineteen months. His life was cut short in Tashkent, in circumstances that continue to raise questions about the cause of his death.  Shastri ji did not live long enough to consolidate the ideas of Jai Jawan and Jai Kisan into a longer political programme.

His death in Tashkent on 11 January 1966, hours after the signing of the Tashkent Declaration with Pakistan, remains one of the unresolved episodes of independent India's history. The official account attributed his death to an acute myocardial infarction. A joint medical examination was conducted by his personal physician, Dr R. N. Chugh, and Soviet doctors.

However, according to the Ministry of External Affairs’ later response to an RTI query, no post-mortem was conducted in the USSR; a separate RTI reply indicated that none was conducted in India either.

That unresolved question of the cause of Shastri ji’s death should not, however, be allowed to overshadow the extraordinary record of the nineteen months that preceded it.

 From Jai Jawan Jai Kisan to Jai Vigyan and Jai Anusandhan

There is perhaps a lesson here for India today.

Shastri's great slogan subsequently acquired new dimensions. Jai Vigyan was added by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee after the Pokhran tests of 1998, and the expression Jai Anusandhan was added by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Indian Science Congress in January 2019 to emphasise the importance of research and innovation. The four together—Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyan, Jai Anusandhan—can be read as a continuum: security, food, science and research.

But the real Shastri lesson is not in adding words to a slogan.

It is in translating a slogan into a mission. That is what made Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan different and enduring.

The soldier was backed by defence preparedness. The farmer was backed by agricultural research, improved technology, institutions, policies and eventually the Green Revolution. Perhaps this is precisely what Jai Vigyan and Jai Anusandhan require today.

India has no shortage of slogans. What Shastri demonstrated was something much harder: the conversion of a national aspiration into a sustained mission, supported by institutions, science, policy, public participation and personal example.

The challenge before us is to ensure that Jai Vigyan and Jai Anusandhan do not remain additions to a memorable phrase, but become measurable national missions in the same way that Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan helped mobilise a country confronting war and hunger. This will be the true and befitting tribute we can pay to Shastri. 

Jai Jawan Jai Kisan

Gandhi Jayanti 2026

 

Gandhi Jayanti 2026

Looking at the Lesser spoken aspects of Mahatma: His brief love for Stars & some things that he got Wrong

On every Gandhi Jayanti 2^nd October, tributes will pour in, as will new books written or planned and so also new films and documentaries, rightly so for a man who we call the father of the nation.

On this Gandhi Jayanti, I would like to remember him differently this year: as a man who looked up at the night sky with wonder, and who was also fallible, as every great person is.

Gandhi’s Love for Stars

We usually picture Gandhi with the spinning wheel, not a telescope. Even in the Gandhi and science debate, he is often cast as the man who warned against machines and modernity. Yet during his imprisonment in Yerwada Central Jail, Pune, between February and May 1932, he fell in love with astronomy.

Kaka Kalelkar, a philosopher and devoted follower who shared the jail with him, kindled the interest. With a telescope, sky charts and books, Gandhi began reading and observing seriously. He slept in the open yard and shared the sky with his fellow prisoners. Two large telescopes in that bare prison yard struck visiting reporters as an unusual sight.

He told them that astronomy had always interested him and had now become a passion. He devoted every free minute to it. To lie on your back on a starry night and regard universe after universe, he said, is to become a worshipper.

He wrote two articles titled "Watching the Heavens" for the inmates of Sabarmati Ashram. In them he sketched the Orion constellation and noted that sky charts differ with the observer's location. He suggested that the changing position of the Saptarshi could be used to tell time. He urged beginners to observe from a fixed place at a fixed hour and to draw what they saw for themselves. He also called the mythological creatures of the constellations "beautiful fancies", not real figures in the sky.

He wanted lucid books written on the lives of great astronomers, men of courage and noble character, and he knew that physics underlies the stars. To a friend he wrote that he had woken up late in life, but that it did no harm to wake up even on one's deathbed if watching the stars gave a glimpse of the soul.

For Gandhi, sky observation was spiritual, a lesson in humility. For Meghnad Saha, the same sky led to the hidden laws of nature and the ionisation equation. Both are valid ways of looking up.

Gandhi was not anti-science. He announced a ₹1 lakh prize for a better spinning wheel. He wanted technology to serve the last person in the queue, not widen the gap between the haves and have-nots. He also admitted to contradictions, writing that he had never made a fetish of consistency and was a votary of truth. That is a scientific temperament in its own way, since it means being willing to revise your position.

The fallible Mahatma

This brings me to the other side of Mahatma. The man who stargazed with such wonder was also capable of serious error, and his own willingness to admit his errors is part of what makes him great.

In January 1934, a devastating earthquake struck Bihar and killed thousands. Gandhi declared it divine chastisement for the sin of untouchability. Rabindranath Tagore, a rationalist in thought and deed, publicly and firmly disagreed. He feared that such a statement would strengthen superstition and cause real damage in a country where it was already widespread. Earthquakes, Tagore argued, are caused by natural forces, not by our social sins.

Tagore's critique has not aged; Gandhi's explanation has. A man who studied the heavens and urged others to question and observe had, that day, replaced evidence with moral causation. The cause of untouchability was just and Gandhi's concern for it was real. His reasoning about the earthquake was misplaced/wrong.

There are other chapters that historians still debate, where Gandhi arguably went wrong. His support for the Khilafat movement and his remarks on the Malabar violence of 1921 remain contested. His late experiments with brahmacharya troubled even his admirers. Gandhi was no stranger to confessing error. He openly called one of his own political miscalculations a "Himalayan blunder."

Why Gandhi’s Fallibility matters now

There is no perfect human, and there never was. The real measure of a leader is how they respond to being wrong: whether they listen to critics, own the error and correct course.

We should extend the same measure to those who govern us today. In recent years, I have seen every honest mistake by a politician or administrator become an occasion to bay for blood. Often the response comes from political rivals and vested interests, not from any search for accountability. A flawed decision taken in good faith is treated like a crime.

I am not pleading for leniency toward corruption, malice or deliberate wrongdoing. Those deserve scrutiny and consequences. But we must distinguish an honest error from a dishonest act. If we cannot, no capable person will take the risk of deciding anything, and public life will fill with those who do nothing and so never err.

If we can hold the Mahatma's greatness and his fallibility together, we can accept that a person may be admirable and mistaken at once. That is a rare kind of respect: for the person, for the truth and for the process of learning.

This Gandhi Jayanti, I am tempted to remember Mahatma Gandhi looking up at Orion in a prison yard, humbled by the vastness of the universe and, I hope, willing to be humble about his own errors too.

Jai Hind.

My earlier blog on Gandhi and science:

https://khened.blogspot.com/2020/10/commemoration-and-culmination-of-150th.html