The only institutions where the birthday of India’s second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri – 2 October – is perhaps celebrated with equal zeal and fervour as that of Mahatma Gandhi are the LBS National Academy of Administration and the Servants of People Society or SoPS: the former because it is named after him, and the latter because he was a life member and the President of the Society at the time of his death- in- harness in January 1966. As much has been written about the LBS National Academy of Administration, I will devote this column to the SoPS, and its role in shaping his life.
Shastri always made it a point to mention that it was his training at the SoPS that shaped his character as a public servant. In his own words: ‘It was due to my life-membership of the society that I got an opportunity to serve my country the most. The Society has been instrumental in inculcating in me the true meaning of the term – servants of the people’.
Shastri and his spirit of sacrifice
The SoPS was started by Lala Lajpat Rai in 1921, a year after he was elected as the President of the Indian National Congress (INC) at Calcutta. He was following the footsteps of Gopal Krishna Gokhale who had founded the Servants of India Society (SIS) after his election as the President of the INC in 1905. As Rai said, “The idea, from the very first, has been to produce a kind of national missionary, whose sole object would be to devote the whole of their time to national work, in a spirit of service, without hankering for promotion, or for furthering their worldly interests. They are contended with the allowances given to them by the Society, and they live a life of comparative poverty, which is a noble ideal by itself. They do their work in a spirit of sacrifice, and in their own ways they are a kind of beacon light and example to others’. Thus, while they were expected to raise political and social consciousness, the task of social regeneration and self-help was equally, if not more important than that of political salvation.” (SoPS annual report,1927)
Over time, Rai’s politics became closer to that of Tilak than that of Gokhale – both of whom were the lodestars of the Extremist and Moderate camps in the Congress, respectively. After Tilak’s death, Rai first established the Tilak School of Politics, the first of its kind institution in India where the pedagogy included politics, economics, sociology, social psychology, journalism and social work. Independent of any university affiliation, the objective was to train national missionaries, facilitate their research in social sciences, and encourage them to publish books, journals and popular articles on these subjects in the Bhashas of India, and to establish and maintain a well-equipped library in connection with this institution. The Tilak School then morphed into the Servants of People Society, and recruited ‘whole timers’ who lived on a subsistence wage, abjured active politics for a certain length of time, and if with a regular source of earning, expected to contribute to the society’.
The model has been successfully followed by the RSS and the Communist Parties that have a dedicated set of workers who commit all their time to the party. Prime Minister Modi started his career as a whole timer of the RSS, just as Prakash Karat did on the other end of the political spectrum.
Also read: When Lal Bahadur Shastri sent Nehru his resignation & set a gold standard for politicians
The recruitment
After establishing the SoPS, Rai undertook a tour to the Kashi Vidyapeeth to recruit ‘servants of the people’. Here he met with Chancellor Dr Bhagwan Das and asked him to recommend first-class graduates who would be willing to devote their life to the SoPS. Lal Bahadur’s name came up, and he was immediately picked up by Rai, and asked to accompany him to Lahore where he spent a few months understanding the role and functions of SoPS, and reading up on issues like untouchability eradication, women’s education, health education, labour movement: issues with which Rai was involved in both his institutional and individual capacities. The library where he interned was named after Dwarka Das, and had an eclectic selection of books — it held the works of most contemporary thinkers — from Karl Marx and Bertrand Russel to Swami Vivekanand and Swami Ram Tirath. English, Urdu, Persian, Hindi and Gurumukhi. Bhagat Singh used to receive books from the Dwarka Das Library while in prison.
After initial training at Lahore for a few months, Shastri was assigned the Meerut and Muzaffarnagar branches of the Achyut Uddhar Samiti (the untouchability eradication programme) under the auspices of the SoPS. Here he worked with his colleague and friend Algu Rai Shastri, who like him was a graduate of the Kashi Vidyapeeth. The two would tour villages, hold meetings in schools and panchayats, under trees, and where possible the homes of Arya Samajis who were in the forefront of this campaign. However, even as he worked closely with the Arya Samaj, he never joined them formally. One can get an idea of how challenging the task must have been, for even though the Arya Samaj, the Congress and both the SIS and SoPS were trying their best to eradicate the curse of untouchability, many orthodox Hindus were opposed to such a radical transformation. In fact, around the time the Tilak school of Politics and SoPS were launched, the Arya Samaj leaders of Punjab also established the Jat Pat Todak Mandal, which promoted inter-dining and inter-marriages. It was this organisation which first invited Dr Ambedkar to speak on ‘Annihilation of caste’, but later developed cold feet on account of internal opposition.
Fate intervened to bring Shastri back to Allahabad in connection with the work of SoPS. After the death of Rai in 1928 on account of injuries due to a baton charge when he led the protest against the Simon Commission at Lahore, Purshottam Das Tandon was unanimously chosen to head the organisation. However, Tandon preferred to operate from his hometown of Allahabad, rather than Lahore. He asked for Lal Bahadur to be placed at the Allahabad office to help him with his work at the SoPS. Given his skills in drafting, record-keeping and the ability to listen to multiple points of view, he soon became a confidante of Tandon, and also that of Nehru. Even though both were poles apart in their world views and personalities, he had a great rapport with both. He was the Great Conciliator as he worked for both Nehru and Purshottam Das Tandon – reporting to the former in his capacity as the Congress President, and the latter as the helmsman of SoPS. Both leaders disagreed about most things: the two exceptions being the freedom of the country, and the quiet efficiency of Lal Bahadur as he was able to prepare drafts for both of them. He got the moniker Little Sparrow at Anand Bhawan — Vijay Laxmi Pandit first called him by this name for he was quite diminutive, and escaped arrest on some occasions by simply slipping away unnoticed!
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)