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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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