An Indian Political Life: Charan Singh and Congress Politics, 1937 to 1961

Of all his politician contemporaries in Uttar Pradesh, Chaudhary Charan Singh is the only one who stands out as a character. The others, Chandra Bhan Gupta, Kamalapati Tripathi and Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, were merely politicians. Two others of the time come to mind: the socialist leader, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, and his maverick follower, Raj Narain. Each was a character in his own right but the first was a national leader and in every way a class apart from Charan Singh; the second, though remarkable, was in a totally different category.

Measured by his political mission, Charan Singh was largely a success. Measured by his political ambition, he was an utter failure. Opportunity knocked three times and he even grasped it but then failed to hold on. Twice, in 1967 and 1970, he became Chief Minister and once, in 1979, he ascended to the office of the Prime Minister but on all three occasions he fell flat on his face in a matter of months. His first term as Chief Minister lasted 11 months, the second just eight. He lasted a mere 170 days as Prime Minister, from July 28, 1979 to January 14, 1980 and then slipped off the high chair rather disgracefully – becoming the first and only Prime Minister so far to have never faced Parliament. An even dearer ambition of his was to occupy the office his hero, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, had once adorned – that of Union Home Minister – but there too his tenure was fleeting: just four months.

Every time he fell from office, Charan Singh blamed his fall on the machinations of his factional rivals. Sometimes, he moaned that he had fallen because he was the only straight man amidst so many crooks. But his disappointed followers blamed his unbending nature. Political correspondents who knew him well cited his failure to build a faction of his own within the party. His opponents blamed his casteist image, which, they said, had reduced him to being a mere Jat leader. There is some truth in every one of these statements. At the end, it was basically his simple inability to make friends. He was too much of a moralist and disciplinarian, too stern, too cut and dry, too stubborn and too demanding of his followers, utterly lacking in the dirty necessities of politics. He was, therefore, never able to create a substantial following or build a faction within the party or outside. For most of his life, he was forced to plough a lonely furrow. Charan Singh was born to a reasonably well-off Jat peasant family in 1902 in a village in Meerut district of western UP. He studied law, practised as an advocate at the local district court, joined the Indian National Congress in 1927, participated in the freedom movement, went to jail on several occasions like everybody else of his generation and finally won a seat in the UP Assembly in the first election held before independence in 1937.

Until then, there was nothing remarkable about him. He was one of many such emerging leaders thrown up in the mass movement for freedom under Mahatma Gandhi. He first drew notice when he introduced a Bill in the Assembly in 1939 to protect farmers from the practices of foodgrain dealers or arhtis. The Bill outlined the contours of the concerns and causes he would espouse and despise lifelong. Paul Brass has dealt with these concerns in good detail, drawing a vivid and, by and large, fair and unhesitant portrait of Charan Singh as a vigorous champion of all the peasant causes of his time. I must use this opportunity to admit that I owe a debt of gratitude to Brass. It was his Factional Politics in an Indian State, published in 1965, that first gave me a glimpse into the intricacies of the many-sided and complex politics of UP where I began my career as a political correspondent in the late 1960s. I used his book as a primer in politics and learnt much from it.

This latest work of his is in a way a continuation of that first book on UP politics. The book tracks Charan Singh’s career up to 1961 and is only the first part of a multi-volume project on the politics of northern India. As far as Charan Singh is concerned, a second volume will take the readers through the remaining years of his career up to 1987. I am sure those interested in UP and the national politics of these years and Charan Singh’s role in those tumultuous events will await the second volume.

Brass’s portrayal of Charan Singh is sympathetic, even appreciative, but never over the board. He has admitted his admiration for his subject. Yet he does not gloss over Charan Singh’s failures or shortcomings or his lack of sufficient concern for landless agricultural labourers and caste groups placed lower in the social hierarchy than the landowning backward peasant castes whose causes he championed throughout his life. In that respect, his portrayal is honest. Although, during his life, Charan Singh was portrayed as a kulak and casteist leader, he was really not a champion of rich or large farmers. Nor was he casteist. The charge of casteism was thrust upon him by the Leftists. At the most, he could be called a reluctant caste leader. At the end, he became one against his best wishes. He strongly resented being called a Jat leader. “How can you say that?” he would often rail. “I am a champion of all peasants and of no particular caste.” There is, no doubt, much to show for his championship of peasant causes like his role in abolition of zamindari and consolidation of land holdings.

Charan Singh had an abiding interest in the welfare of tiller peasants. He was a Gandhian in the tradition of Sardar Patel, strongly opposed to almost everything that Jawaharlal Nehru represented ideologically – capital-intensive big industry, cooperative farming, westernized English-speaking urban middle class, Muslim appeasement and Sanatani Hinduism. He was against caste, too, and suggested several measures to eliminate caste from public life. He stood for simplicity, honesty and sobriety in personal life, integrity and probity in the public sphere, Hindu Arya Samaj values, stringent enforcement of law and order, and a strong but highly disciplined bureaucracy in administration. He was equally robust in his advocacy of causes and in criticism of those he despised such as moneylenders, foodgrain dealers and lower-level babus in government, especially those connected with revenue administration like tehsildars and patwaris. What did him in at the end was his intolerance of those who disagreed with him and his total lack of understanding of modern currents in science and technology.