Remembering Lal Bahadur Shastri’s Madras connect

Tall leader: The Lal Bahadur Shastri memorial in Tashkent is in a park at the intersection of Mahatma Gandhi and Shastri Streets.

“Why do you want to go there?” asked our guide. “Nobody ever visits the place.” He also added that there was no way our group of 45 people could alight from our bus as “traffic would be heavy”, by which he meant it would be akin to midnight on a Sunday at Poes Garden. The weather was below freezing to make matters worse, but I was adamant. And so we went to see the Lal Bahadur Shastri memorial in Tashkent. It is a bust on a red granite pedestal in the midst of a park at the intersection of Mahatma Gandhi and Shastri Streets. We paid our tributes to the Prime Minister of India who passed away suddenly in that city on January 11, 1966. He had gone there to sign the peace treaty with Pakistan.

And as is a habit with me, I began mulling over Shastri’s Madras connections. We would probably remember him best, particularly these days, for the outbreak of the second anti-Hindi agitation, which was during his tenure as Prime Minister, in 1965. The N. Gopalaswami Aiyangar-K.M. Munshi pact on India’s official language policy was due for review and matters began to flare up. Shastri did not live to see its culmination in 1967. At the same time, we need to remember him as the Railway Minister who resigned in 1956 when a horrific accident took place at Ariyalur, in Madras State, an incident that is still spoken of. Shastri took moral responsibility for it — a high stance that very few successors have cared to emulate.

He was also the man who made it clear that individual States need to make arrangements for housing refugees from Burma when they began fleeing the Ne Win regime. And it was at his insistence that the Madras government began setting up Burma Colonies and Burma Bazaars, all of which we still have.

The other interesting connection that Lal Bahadur Shastri had with Madras was his son Hari Krishna. In his interview to The Hindu dated November 18, 2016, L. Lakshman, former Chairman of the Rane Group, spoke on how the sudden death of Lal Bahadur Shastri affected him personally. The latter had become a family friend because he was a frequent visitor to Madras as his son Hari Shastri was working at Ashok Leyland in the city. He lived in Mylapore diagonally opposite the house that Lakshman’s father L.L. Narayanan lived in.

That had me scurrying to S. Muthiah’s book on Ashok Leyland, titled Moving India on Wheels and co-authored with K.N. Gopalan in 2008. It had a picture of Hari Shastri at an automobile exhibition in the U.K. in 1961 and noted that he was with the sales force of Ashok Leyland at that time. And that led to a further interesting find. Hari Shastri was apparently trained at Albion Motors, U.K. Founded in 1899, it had become a part of British Leyland in 1950 and so its team was very active in the setting up of Ashok Leyland in Madras. In fact, it was Albion’s Jimmy Pollock who, as factory manager in Madras, was responsible for the commissioning of the entire plant. The news that the father of the rather diminutive young man who had trained with them was now the Prime Minister of India was received with some surprise in 1964 at British Leyland. The Commercial Motor Vol. 119 of London noted that while My Old Man’s a Dustman was a song made popular by Antony James ‘Lonnie’ Donegan, the singer, Hari Shastri could certainly sing “My Old Man’s a Prime Minister”!

(V. Sriram is a writer and historian.)