Academic literature on the topic 'Shastri, lal bahadur, 1904-1966'

Lal Bahadur Shastri has been recently recalled as ‘the original accidental Prime Minister’ and ‘architect of India’s real surgical strike’. His sudden death has lately been the subject of a film, The Tashkent Files (2019) and a book, Your Prime Minister is Dead (2018). A memorial to him is the Government of India’s National Academy of Administration, named after him since 1972. And yet, there is less written on him directly, as against approaching him indirectly as (a) Jawaharlal Nehru’s successor, (b) leader during the 1965 India-Pakistan war amidst a food crisis and (c) peacemaker of the 1966 Tashkent agreement. This article tries to reconstruct, from some of his papers, a slice of Shastri’s political life that has either fallen through the crack between the larger preceding period of the Nehruvian 1950s and the larger succeeding period of Indira’s India or is resurrected in a reactionary, outsized opposition to these.

G. Venkataraman, Bhabha and his Magnificent Obsession Vignettes in Physics, Sangam Books, London, 1994. £6.95 (Paperback) ISBN 0 86311 555 1 On 22nd January, 1966, Homi Bhabha addressed a vast gathering at the Atomic Energy Establishment in Trombay - held to offer condolences on the death of President Lai Bahadur Shastri. The following day Bhabha’s Air India plane crashed into Mont Blanc as it commenced its descent into Geneva airport. Thus perished one of India’s most gifted scientists and a man who was a scholar in other fields too. It is ironic that the following day the present reviewer addressed a small group of heart-broken Indian physicists at the site of their joint cosmic ray neutrino experiment in the Kolar Gold Fields. Venkataram has written a fine book about his countryman, chronicling his early work in Cambridge and elsewhere on cosmic rays, not least the theory underlying their behaviour, his great legacy - the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay - and the development of Nuclear Energy in India.