In 19 Months as Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri Led India Through the 1965 War, Backed the Dairy Board That Spread Amul's Model Across the Country, and Gave It Jai Jawan Jai Kisan

Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s second Prime Minister, is credited with the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan, “hail the soldier, hail the farmer”, which he used in 1965 when a war with Pakistan and a failed harvest fell in the same year. In the Reserve Bank of India’s table of Ministry of Agriculture figures, India’s foodgrain output went from 89.36 million tonnes in 1964-65 to 72.35 million in 1965-66, a fall of about a fifth.

He held office for 19 months, from 9 June 1964 to his death on 11 January 1966, at the age of 61.

The slogan and the harvest it answered

Accounts differ on where Shastri first said it. The Quint says he coined it at a public rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi in 1965 and gives no day. Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, in a speech the Press Information Bureau (PIB) released on 11 October 2021, placed it in the context of the food crisis and the armed conflict with Pakistan. tuput could not find a dated transcript of the first use among the sources it could open, so the venue and day stay open.

The need behind the second half is easier to document. Wheat output was 12.26 million tonnes in 1964-65, 10.40 million in 1965-66 and 11.39 million in 1966-67, in the same Reserve Bank series. On 6 January 1966, writing to President Lyndon Johnson from Tashkent, Shastri thanked him for help with “the critical shortage of foodgrains which we in India are facing due to the extremely poor monsoons that we had last year”, and said India was seeking assistance from other countries too.

Naidu’s speech also carried an anecdote about the appeal for sacrifice. He said Shastri first asked his wife not to feed their children for a day, to see whether they could bear it, and only then asked the country to fast for one day a week. The speech was given with Shastri’s son Anil Shastri in the audience. Contemporary documentation of the appeal was not among the sources tuput could open, so treat the detail as a retelling.

The 1967 film Upkar, which Shastri asked Manoj Kumar to make, takes the slogan as its theme; tuput’s article on Manoj Kumar sets out where the sources differ on when and why he asked.

From Mughalsarai to the railway ministry

Shastri was born on 2 October 1904 at Mughalsarai, a railway town near Varanasi. The Prime Minister’s Office profile says his father, a school teacher, died when he was a year and a half old, and that his mother took the three children to her father’s house. The PMO says he walked miles to school without shoes, even when the streets burned in summer.

At 16 he left school to join Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and enrolled at the Kashi Vidya Peeth in Varanasi, a nationalist institution set up in defiance of British rule. “Shastri” was the bachelor’s degree it awarded him, and it stuck as part of his name. The PMO says he spent seven years in British jails. Paul Brass, the political scientist, in a biographical entry on his own site, puts it at more than nine years across several terms between 1921 and 1941. The two figures are not reconciled in either source.

From 1946 he served in the Uttar Pradesh government, and in 1951 he moved to Delhi. Brass writes that Nehru called him to become general secretary of the Congress and organise its first general election campaign, in 1952. He then entered the Rajya Sabha and the Union government as minister for railways and transport.

In 1956 two rail disasters tested him. According to Sandeep Shastri’s biography, as excerpted by ThePrint, he offered to resign after an accident near Mahbubnagar that killed about 112 people and Nehru persuaded him to withdraw the offer. After the Ariyalur accident in Tamil Nadu in November, which the book says killed 144, he wrote that it would be good “if I quietly quit the office I hold”. Nehru told the Lok Sabha he was not holding Shastri responsible, and accepted the resignation as a matter of constitutional propriety. About thirty MPs had asked Nehru to keep him, the book says. The PMO’s profile calls the resignation unprecedented.

He was back in the cabinet in 1957 and became home minister in April 1961. Under the Kamaraj plan he left government in 1963, and he returned as minister without portfolio after Nehru’s stroke. On Nehru’s death he was chosen unanimously, though Brass notes “not without some discontent among rival contenders”, and was installed on 9 June 1964.

A night in an Anand village

On 31 October 1964, ThePrint reports, Shastri visited Anand in Gujarat and spent the night at the home of a dairy farmer, Ramanbhai Punjabbhai Patel. Verghese Kurien, who ran the Amul dairy cooperative there, gave his own account in a lecture in New Delhi on 9 March 1988. He said Shastri stayed overnight in a village in Kaira district, talked with farmers about milk production, services and incomes, and concluded that Amul’s success came from farmer ownership, elected leaders and hired professional managers.

Kurien said Shastri was “instrumental in the creation of the National Dairy Development Board in 1965”, asked him to head it, and told it to “transplant the spirit of Anand in many other places”. The board, known as the NDDB, then planned Operation Flood, the national programme that began in 1970. By the end of its second phase, in 1985, the NDDB says, 43,000 village cooperatives covering 4.25 million milk producers were in place. Our profile of Verghese Kurien has the milk-output figures and what economists have written about who gained from it.

Kurien’s lecture is his own recollection 24 years after the events, and ThePrint’s details of the overnight stay come from later accounts, so neither is a cabinet record.

Three institutions in one term

Sanjeev Chopra’s ThePrint op-ed counts six institutions founded in Shastri’s tenure, among them the NDDB, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the body now called the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. The Food Corporations Act, 1964, the law that created the FCI to trade in foodgrains, is dated 10 December 1964 and came into force on 17 December.

Brass writes that in his short term Shastri introduced economic policies in favour of agriculture and private investment that deviated from Nehru’s. The credit for the seed programme itself belongs to others. C. Subramaniam was the food and agriculture minister, and M. S. Swaminathan and others carried Mexican wheat into the fields; tuput’s article on the Green Revolution follows them. Wheat reached 16.54 million tonnes in 1967-68, after Shastri’s death.

September 1965: the Punjab front and the ceasefire

The US State Department’s history of the war says it intensified in August 1965 when Pakistan’s army tried to take Kashmir by force, and that the attempt did not succeed. On 6 September, Indian troops crossed the international border towards Lahore. Naidu said in 2021 that Shastri authorised the armed forces to widen the war beyond Jammu and Kashmir, and that the thrust towards Lahore and Sialkot forced Pakistan to pull its forces back from the Chhamb-Akhnoor sector.

The Ministry of Defence’s release of 23 September 2025 says the Indian Air Force flew about 4,000 sorties in the western sector, estimates that Pakistan lost 43 aircraft, and records four Maha Vir Chakras and 43 Vir Chakras for air force personnel. The State Department’s history says the UN Security Council passed Resolution 211 on 20 September, and the Ministry’s release says the ceasefire was declared at 3.30 a.m. on 23 September 1965.

How to score the outcome is disputed, and the two countries still teach different versions. Manoj Joshi of the Observer Research Foundation writes that India’s aims were reactive and modest, that it met the first and not the second, and that the war is popularly seen as a stalemate. Sajjad Haider, a retired Pakistani air commodore writing in Dawn, calls the “Big Picture” that sections of the Indian media project of the war an “unreal picture”. tuput’s account of the 1965 war sets the claims side by side.

Tashkent, 10 January 1966

The Soviet Union hosted the talks. Prime Minister Shastri and President Ayub Khan signed a declaration at Tashkent on 10 January 1966, and its text thanks the Soviet leaders and the Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers for bringing the meeting about. Its main clause says all armed personnel of both countries would be withdrawn by 25 February 1966 to the positions they held before 5 August 1965. It also provided for the High Commissioners to return to their posts, for repatriation of prisoners of war, and for talks on trade, communications and cultural exchanges. Each side set out its position on Jammu and Kashmir, and the text records that discussion without resolving it. Joshi describes the result as a return to the status quo of 5 August.

Shastri died in Tashkent the next day, 11 January 1966. Brass records the cause as heart failure.

What the record says about his death

No post-mortem was carried out, in the Soviet Union or in India, Outlook reports. The same article says the Prime Minister’s Office turned down a 2009 Right to Information request for the Moscow embassy’s correspondence on the death, citing “security, integrity and sovereignty of the country”. Outlook adds that Shastri’s family has long maintained he was poisoned, while his grandson Siddhartha Nath Singh told the magazine he is willing to believe it was a heart attack if the information is shared with the family. No document tuput could open establishes a cause other than the heart failure Brass records.

Honours

The PMO profile quotes him: “Hard work is equal to prayer.” The Ministry of Home Affairs’ list of Bharat Ratna recipients gives his year as 1966 and marks him “Posthumous”. He is the first entry in the list carrying that mark, ahead of K. Kamaraj in 1976.