Minister of Home Affairs
In office
4 April 1961 – 29 August 1963
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
Preceded by Govind Ballabh Pant
Succeeded by Gulzarilal Nanda
Personal details
Born Lal Bahadur Shrivastava
2 October 1904
Varanasi, United Provinces, British Raj
(now in Uttar Pradesh, India)
Died 11 January 1966 (aged 61)
Tashkent, Soviet Union
(now in Uzbekistan)
Political party Indian National Congress
Spouse(s) Lalita Devi
Residence 10 Janpath, New Delhi[1]
Alma mater Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth
Profession Academic
Activist
Religion Hinduism
Awards Bharat Ratna 1966 (Posthumous)
Lal Bahadur Shastri (Hindustani: [laːl bəˈɦaːd̪ʊr ˈʃaːst̪ri], listen
, 2 October 1904 – 11 January 1966) was the Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party.
Shastri joined the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. Deeply impressed and influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, he became a loyal follower, first of Gandhi, and then of Jawaharlal Nehru. Following independence in 1947, he joined the latter's government and became one of Prime Minister Nehru's principal lieutenants, first as Railways Minister (1951–56), and then in a variety of other functions, including Home Minister. Shastri was chosen as Nehru's successor owing to his adherence to Nehruvian socialism after Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi turned down Congress President K. Kamaraj's offer of premiership.
Shastri as Prime Minister continued Nehru's policies of non-alignment and socialism. He led the country during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. His slogan of "Jai Jawan Jai Kisan" ("Hail the soldier, Hail the farmer") became very popular during the war and is remembered even today. The war formally ended with the Tashkent Agreement of 10 January 1966; he died of heart attack the following day, still in Tashkent. The cause of death has been a subject of conspiracy theories.
Early years (1904-1917)
Shastri was born at Mughalsarai, Varanasi as Lal Bahadur Varma.,[2][3] and had traditionally been employed as minor civil servants and school teachers. Shastri's paternal ancestors had been in the service of the zamindar of Ramnagar, Varanasi. Shastri's father, Sharada Prasad Varma, was a school teacher who later became a clerk in the revenue Office at Allahabad, while his mother, Ramdulari Devi, was the daughter of Munshi Hazari Lal, the headmaster and English teacher at a railway school in Mughalsarai. Shastri was the second child and first-born son in his family; he also had an elder sister, Kailashi Devi (b. 1900).[4] In April 1906, Sharada Prasad contacted bubonic plague, which was epidemic at the time, and died when Shastri was only a year old; Sharada Prasad had just been promoted to the post of deputy tahsildar. Shastri's mother Ramdulari Devi, then only 23 and pregnant, took him and his elder sister to her father Hazari Lal's house and settled there, where she gave birth to a daughter, Sundari Devi, in July 1906.[2][5] After Hazari Lal's death from a stroke in mid-1908, the family were looked after by his brother (Shastri's great-uncle) Darbari Lal, who was the head clerk in the opium regulation department at Ghazipur, and by his son Bindeshwari Prasad, a school teacher in Mughalsarai. In Shastri's maternal family, as with many Kayastha families, it was the custom for the children to receive an education in the Urdu language and culture. Accordingly, Shastri began his education at the age of four under the tutelage of a maulvi, Budhan Mian, at the East Central Railway Inter college in Mughalsarai, where he studied until the sixth standard. In 1917, aged 12, he decided to drop his caste-derived surname of "Varma", and in that year, he, his mother and his sisters moved to Varanasi after Bindeshwari Prasad was transferred there. They lived in Benares with the family of one of Ramdulari Devi's cousins, with Shastri joining the seventh standard at Harish Chandra High School.[2]
The young satyagrahi (1921-1945)
While Shastri's family had no links to
