Lal Bahadur Shastri (born 1904) succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister of India in 1964. Though eclipsed
by such stalwarts of the Congress party as Kamaraj (the Kingmaker) and Morarji
Desai, Finance Minister in Nehru's government, Shastri emerged as the consensus
candidate in the midst of party warfare. He had not been in power long before he
had to attend to the difficult matter of Pakistani aggression, as represented by
India, along the Rann of Kutch; and though a cease-fire under the auspices of
the United Nations put a temporary halt to the fighting, the scene of conflict
soon shifted to the more troubled spot of Kashmir. While Pakistan claimed that a
spontaneous uprising against the Indian occupation of Kashmir had taken place,
India charged Pakistan with fomenting sedition inside its territory and sending
armed raiders into Jammu and Kashmir from Azad Kashmir. Shastri promised to meet
force with force, and by early September the second Indo-Pakistan war had
commenced.
Though the Indian army reached the
outskirts of Lahore, Shastri agreed to withdraw Indian forces. He had always
been identified with the interests of the working class and peasants since the
days of his involvement with the freedom struggle, and now his popularity agree.
But his triumph was short-lived: invited in January 1966 by the Russian Premier,
Aleksei Kosygin, to Tashkent for a summit with General Muhammad Ayub Khan,
President of Pakistan and commander of the nation's armed forces, Shastri
suffered a fatal heart attack hours after signing a treaty where India and
Pakistan agreed to not meddle in each other's internal affairs and "not to have
recourse to force and to settle their disputes through peaceful means. Shastri's
body was brought back to India, and a memorial, not far from the national
memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, was built to honor him. It says, in fitting
testimony to Shastri, "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" ("Honor the Soldier, Honor the
Farmer"). He is, however, a largely forgotten figure, another victim of the
engineering of India's social memory by Indira Gandhi and her clan.
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