I do not know why the centenary celebrations of Lal Bahadur Shastri's birthday were on a low key. They came to end on October 2, his birthday. The central government allocated Rs 100 crore for the celebrations but most of the amount remained unspent. No serious programme, except two speeches at Hyderabad and Bangalore and a few meetings were undertaken.
There was a proposal to have a documentary on his life. Books for children were also planned. Nothing seems to have taken off. This is still better from the time when his photograph like that of K. Kamaraj would not be displayed in the main pandal of the Congress session. The mistake was rectified when pointed out. Still he did not get much prominence because he did not get into the triumvirate-Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajvi Gandhi-the dynastic obsession.
However, Shastri's contribution to the nation has been outstanding, although his tenure was cut short due to heart failure The reason why he shied away from birthday celebrations was the presumption that he would look like a person trying to share the limelight which rightly belonged to Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday (October 2) was on everybody's lips.
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Lal Bahadur Shastri
Second Prime Minister of India, (1964-1966)
Born: October 2, 1904, Mughalsarai, United Province, India
Died: January 11, 1966, Tashkent, U.S.S.R.). Shastri is a title meaning "Scholar" or "Doctor," earned at Kashi Vidyapeeth, 1926.
Spent nearly 9 years in jail during freedom struggle.
Member, Indian National Congress. Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh, 1947. General Secretary of the Lok Sabha, 1951.
Elected to Raj Sabha. Union Minister of Railways, 1952-1956.
Union Minister for Transport and Communications, 1957.
Union Minister of Commerce and Industry.
Union Home Minister, 1961-1963. Minister without Portfolio, 1963-1964.
Prime Minister of India, June 9, 1964-January 11, 1966.
Died the day after signing a treaty with Pakistan in the city of Tashkent in today's Uzbekistan.
Posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna. |
"I am nobody," he told me. "I do not want to claim even an iota of glory which only Gandhiji epitomised." I was his press secretary when he became the Home Minister after Govind Vallabh Pant. I saw Shastri from close quarters and I can say without hesitation that his simplicity, modesty and transparency were the traits which only a few post-independent leaders possessed.
He hardly made two ends meet with the salary he got either as an MP or as a minister. He lost a daughter at an early age because he could not afford medical expenses.
I recall how frugally he lived when he resigned from ministership under the Kamaraj Plan. He switched off all the lights in his house, except the one in the sitting room and the other in the kitchen on the day he had quit the government. Once I asked him why he did so because as a former minister he was entitled to the expenses on the lawns and other parts of the bungalow. He said the expense on electricity and water was his and not that of the government which, no doubt, owned the bungalow.
I do not think such are the considerations with even former MPs, much less ex-ministers, some of whom continue to live in government accommodation and pay no electricity and water charges despite the government's notice to vacate the place.
Shastri never contemplated that the law makers would be one day the law breakers. However, Shastri had come round to accepting Jayaprakash Narayan's proposition that the voters should have the right to recall their MPs or MLAs if they found his or her performance lacking.
This is what Speaker Somnath Chatterjee has also suggested in a recent lecture. Shastri's views on foreign affairs, whether as Home Minister or Prime Minister, were pragmatic. What was there for India? This was the question he posed all the time. Maybe, he realised that after Nehru's voice in world affairs, his opinion would carry less weight.
Or, maybe, he felt that the public wanted something indigenous when the impression about Nehru was that he was lost in world problems. China and Pakistan were the two countries which drew his attention the most. He made no secret of the fact that he felt more comfortable with Pakistan. He would say that our friendship with Pakistan was possible but not with China which considered India an arch-rival. This is the reason why he preferred Swaran Singh to M.C. Chagla as foreign minister. Chagla, he feared, would be anti-Pakistan to prove his neutrality as a Muslim.
It is possible that Shastri would have brought the two countries closer because he sincerely believed that the two had buried the hatchet at Uzbekistan's capital, Tashkent, where he signed a declaration of peace and friendship treaty between India and Pakistan. He did not live to see the effect of the Tashkent Declaration because he died 10 hours after signing it.
I was still near the bed where Shastri's body was lying when General Ayub Khan came to pay his respects. He said: Here lay a person who could have made the two countries strike friendship if he had lived. Indeed, the news of Shastri's death had spread all over, including Tashkent. It was one of those beautiful sunless days which as Balzac said, were like a beautiful blind woman. People had lined both sides of the road leading to the airport.
Only a few days earlier they had cheered him but that day they wept for him. The overwhelming silence that enveloped the route was broken only by muffled drums as the funeral procession — with Ayub as one of the pal-bearers — inched through the streets of Tashkent. Friendly hands stretched towards us, the journalists, as we went along the road to catch a special plane. I could imagine there must be thousands of my countrymen waiting in Delhi to receive the coffin and have darshan, a last glimpse of the man who in 19 months left an imprint which was not very spectacular but was so very Indian.
To some he might have appeared as small a man figuratively as he was physically. To the Leftists, he might have been a man "without conviction." But to many others his tenure might have been only a "parenthesis in the Indian history," as T.T. Krishnamachari, then Finance Minister, put it.
But then as Shastri would himself say: "Nobody can succeed Nehru. We can only try to carry on his work in a humble way." However, it was during his time that the Indian army which had been humiliated by China in 1962, regained its self-confidence and rekindled national pride. It was during his period that pragmatism had precedence over ideology. But his was too short a period for any impact. For 16 out of 19 months of his tenure, he remained vulnerable to the pressures and pulls in and outside the Congress. And it was a pity that he died just when he had gained the stature to withstand them.
(The writer is a veteran Indian journalist and diplomat. He was also a one-time Rajya Sabha member) |
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