Lal Bahadur Shastri, a man of slight stature, took a larger-than-life stand as India's prime minister. A man of few words, his correspondence was to the point, his speeches succinct. His silence, which some understood as willingness to acquiesce, was both a strength and a weakness. But in fact, during his short term of just about eighteen months, he established institutions that brought India on the path of self-sufficiency and helped defend against external aggression.
Prime Minister Shastri galvanized the nation with his slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan', recognizing the farmers for contributing to both food and national security. He is credited with laying the foundation of the Green Revolution, providing an institutional format to the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices and the Food Corporation of India, and establishing the National Dairy Development Board.
Shastri is also strongly etched in public memory as the first Indian prime minister to direct the army to cross the border. To his leadership therefore goes the credit for the first 'surgical strike'. He established key national and domestic security organizations like the Border Security Force and the Central Bureau of Investigation.
In The Great Conciliator, Sanjeev Chopra draws on meticulous research to turn the spotlight on an often overlooked figure in Indian politics and makes a case for reassessing the legacy of India's unassuming second prime minister.
Sanjeev Chopra superannuated the director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, after serving for thirty-six years in the Indian Administrative Service. He is on the Academic Council of the National Centre for Good Governance and the National Institute of Disaster Management. He is also a columnist for The Print. He lives with his wife, Rashmi, in Dehradun, from where they jointly curate the Valley of Words Literature and Arts Festival.
This is a multipurpose prologue.
It is a confessional statement to the reader who may like to know about the motivation, process of discovery, challenges. excitements, limitations and disappointments in the five-year journey of writing these 150,000 words. As an executive summary of sorts, it is an invitation to join this journey and an acknowledgement of all those who helped. It also lists expectations from the next set of researchers.
The first day of January 2019 was one of the most significant days of my life. I was about to accomplish what I had set my sight on thirty-four years ago on 26 August 1985-when I first entered the institution in Mussoorie named after my current inspiration. The directorship of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration had been my dream job ever since I joined the IAS. This was reinforced by my earlier stint here as a deputy director, from December 1994 to January 2002, which was one of the best periods of my life, both personally and professionally.
Before taking charge as director, I offered floral tributes at the statue of Lal Bahadur Shastri in the Academy lawns and then at the bust of Sardar Patel, which bears the inscription, "You will not have a united India if you do not have a good All India Service that has the independence to speak out its mind.'
After signing the joining report in the wood-panelled director's office, with its majestic view of the snow-clad Himalayas, I stepped into the Gandhi Smriti Library. In addition to an original copy of the Constitution of India, this building houses nearly 200,000 titles on public policy, administration, governance, law, political economy, management, geography, international relations and literature in all languages, besides of course writings on and by pillars of the freedom movement from the eponymous Mahatma to Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Aurobindo, Veer Savarkar, M.N. Roy, Subhash Bose and Dr B.R. Ambedkar. There were, however, not more than a dozen books on the person whose name helms the institution. This did strike me as odd, and I immediately issued three books on him by three stalwarts: LP. Singh from the ICS and C.P. Srivastava and Rajeshwar Prasad from the IAS.
A few weeks later, I requested my colleagues Gauri Parasher Joshi (then in charge of the library) and Siva Prasad Senapati (library and information officer) to establish contact with the National Archives and procure all available records of Shastri's correspondence, speeches and interventions in the Parliament. I received 800-odd pages which showed his extraordinary clarity of thought. Later in the year, I visited the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial in New Delhi and saw the simplicity and elegance which marked his abode as the prime minister. Here I met his son, Anil Shastri, who encouraged me to continue my research on the life of his father.
In February 2020, while studying changes in the state boundaries of national maps issued from 1947 to 2019 by the Survey of India (Sol), I began to appreciate the role Shastri had played in the reorganization process of the Indian states. In particular, as home minister, he played a decisive role in the formation of the Border Security Force which finally knocked off the argument of the State Reorganisation Committee (SRC) against reorganizing Punjab on account of its long frontier with Pakistan. And his famous 'Shastri Formula' of making three languages official had eased difficult reconciliations in Assam and Madras.
Post my superannuation, at the end of the second phase of COVID-19, I took membership of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library-now the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library (PMML) to access papers relating to Shastri's incarcerations, his correspondence with Nehru, the details of the Congress Legislative Party meetings and other information about relevant businesses and social organizations. My batchmate Indivar Kamtekar from the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU introduced me to Ravi Mishra, now joint director at the PMML, who helped locate, scan and photocopy a multitude of materials, including Shastri's Hindi translation of Marie Curie's biography and microfilms of Hindustan Times and Indian Express from January 1964 to January 1966. This was also the library where I sought texts on Lala Lajpat Rai and the Servants of the People Society (SoPS), Acharya Narendra Dev, Sampurnanand, S. Nijalingappa, K. Kamaraj Nadar, Acharya Kripalani, Aruna Asaf Ali, B.C. Roy, J.B. Patnaik and other contemporaries of Shastri.
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