Lal Bahadur Shastri Biography

 Lal Bahadur Shastri Biography

Lal Bahadur Shastri was a great leader who was born on 2^nd october, 1904, and died on January 11, 1966.He was the 2^nd prime minister of our country. He backed the Amul milk cooperation in Gujarat, also set up the National Dairy Development Board to support the White Revolution, a nationwide effort to boost milk production and supply. Shastri championed Green Revolution in India in the year 1965, highlighting the need to increase India's food production. As a result, food grain output surged, especially in Punjab, Haryana, as well as Uttar Pradesh.

Born

He was born in Mughalsarai on October 2, 1904, to mom and dad Sharada Prasad Srivastava and Ramdulari Devi. Before entering the non-cooperation movement, he attended East Central Railway Inter College and Harish Chandra High School. He dropped the caste-derived surname as "Srivastava" and campaigned for the improvement of the Harijans in Muzaffarpur. 

Readings about Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Annie Besant affected Shastri's thinking. After being strongly inspired and affected by Gandhi, he became active there in Indian independence movement in the 1920s. 

He served as the president for Lala Lajpat Rai's Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal) and also in the Indian National Congress. Following India's independence in 1947, he served Prime Minister Nehru's ministry, first as Railways Minister (1951–56) and later as Home Minister.

He served as the nation's president during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. During the war, his slogan "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" had become a cultural icon. The war officially ended on 10 January 1966 with the Tashkent Agreement; he died the next day, there in Tashkent, with the cause of his death unknown; it was said that he died of cardiac arrest, but their family was not pleased with the explanation. He was given the Bharat Ratna posthumously.

Lal Bahadur Shastri's Independence Activism

In 1928, Shastri entered Congress like an active but mature member at Mahatma Gandhi's urging. He was jailed for 2.5 years. He then served as the Organizing Secretary at the Uttar Pradesh Parliamentary Board in 1937. In 1940, he was jailed for a year for his personal Satyagraha devotion to the freedom cause.

On 8^th August, 1942, Mahatma Gandhi addressed the Quit India speech at Gowalia Tank from Mumbai, in which he asked the British to leave India. Shastri travelled to Allahabad after being freed from jail after a year. For a week, Jawaharlal Nehru provided orders to independence activists from his home, Anand Bhavan. He got elected to United Provinces legislature in 1937 and 1946.

Personal and family life

Shastri was constantly dressed in a dhoti. The only time he wore pajamas was during supper in the Rashtrapati Bhavan in 1961 in honor of the honorable Queen of the United Kingdom. On May 16, 1928, Shastri got married to Lalita Devi, the Mirzapur native. The two had four sons and two daughters, Suman Shastri, whose descendant, Siddharth Nath Singh, is a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party and also a health minister in the Government of Uttar Pradesh and Anil Shastri is a member of his dad's Congress Party, and his son Adarsh Shastri, He lost that election but was elected to the Delhi Legislature Assembly in 2015. Sunil Shastri, a member of the Bjp, and Ashok Shastri, his youngest son, who worked in the business sector before dying at the age of 37, were both members of the Bjp national executive, as was his wife Neera Shastri. Other family members have also worked in India's corporate and social sectors.

Gandhi's enthusiast (1921–1955)

While Shastri's family had no ties to the independence movement at that time, one of his teachers from Harish Chandra High School, Nishkameshwar Prasad Mishra, was a deeply patriotic and well-respected teacher who provided Shastri with much-needed financial assistance by enabling him to tutor his children. After being motivated by Mishra's patriotism, Lal Bahadur Shastri got intensely involved in the liberation fight and began to study the history and writings of numerous important personalities, like Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Annie Besant. 

In January 1921, Shastri was in tenth grade & three months away from his board exams when he attended a mass gathering in Benares hosted by Gandhi alongside Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's call for students to withdraw from the government schools and enter the non-cooperation movement, Shastri left Harish Chandra High School the very next morning and decided to work at a local branch of Congress Party as a volunteer, actively engaging in picketing and anti-government demonstrations. 

He was quickly apprehended and imprisoned but was later released because he was just a minor. He was promptly captured and imprisoned, but because he was a minor, he was later released.