Shastri, who resigned after the Ariyalur derailment, had close ties with T.N.

Lal Bahadur Shastri's lesser-known contributions to Tamil Nadu and his role in key political decisions highlighted.

Free India’s third Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904-66), whose death anniversary falls on January 11, had a close engagement with Tamil Nadu, an aspect that has not been given much attention.

What was fairly known was that he resigned as the Union Minister for Railways and Transport in November 1956 following a train accident in Ariyalur, and one of the doyens of the Congress, K. Kamaraj, played a crucial role in getting Shastri elected as the Prime Minister. Also, it was when Shastri was the Prime Minister (June 9, 1964-January 11, 1966) that the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu turned more intense than in the past. But what remains relatively less known is that it was Shastri who facilitated the establishment of a high-pressure boiler plant, under the auspices of the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), in Tiruchi. Also, one of the prominent leaders of the Congress hailing from Tamil Nadu, C. Subramaniam, who came to be later known as one of the architects of the Green Revolution, had a role in the re-entry of Shastri into the Union Cabinet in January 1964.

A few months before the Ariyalur accident, a passenger train, originating from Secunderabad, met with an accident near Mahbubnagar (now in Telangana) on the intervening night of September 1 and 2, 1956, leading to the death of 121 persons. Two-and-a-half months later, an express train, bound for Thoothukudi, derailed around 5.30 a.m. on November 23 near Ariyalur, claiming the lives of at least 140 passengers and causing injuries to many more. Three days later, Shastri tendered his resignation to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who informed the Lok Sabha of his decision to accept the resignation. Explaining the rationale behind his decision, Nehru told the House that he had made up his mind to recommend Shastri’s resignation to President Rajendra Prasad “not because I hold him responsible for the disaster but from the point of view of constitutional propriety that we should set an example in this matter. No one should think that whatever may happen, we could carry on in the same way without being affected by it,” The Hindu reported on November 27, 1956.

In the late 1950s, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh began fighting over a plant to be put up by the BHEL. The Union government was going ahead with its decision to have heavy electrical industrial plants, which would manufacture all the equipment needed for power generation and transmission. The first plant in Bhopal had come up with the British assistance, which was “a comparatively small plant”, Subramaniam points out in his memoir Hand of Destiny (Volume I). The Centre had decided to establish the second plant with the help of the Soviet Union. It was for the third plant that Czechoslovakia, in central Europe, had been identified as the technology partner. The two southern States had vied with each other for getting the proposed plant.

Andhra Pradesh, which was formed in November 1956 after the amalgamation of Hyderabad and Andhra States, wanted to have the plant in its capital of Hyderabad, while there had been a demand from Tamil Nadu that the plant be set up in Tiruchi, located in the fertile Cauvery delta. Subramaniam, then Union Minister for Steel, Mines, and Heavy Engineering, recalled that Shastri, who was by then back in the Cabinet, was requested to resolve the issue, and a meeting took place in New Delhi with representatives of the two State governments.

“I suggested to Lal Bahadurji to split the project into two,” Subramaniam says, adding that one plant was meant for boilers and the other was for the rest of the equipment. Shastri accepted the idea and allotted the boiler plant to Tamil Nadu. Apparently, this issue was also discussed among technocrats who had felt that the best way to sort out the row was to split the project, if one is to go by the version of V. Krishnamurthy, who was the Chairman and Managing Director of the BHEL for about five years in the 1970s. In his autobiographical work, At the Helm, Krishnamurthy recounted that the decision did not go down well with Andhra Pradesh leaders initially, as they felt that their fledgling State had been denied its due by Tamil Nadu, given that the latter had a towering leader in Kamaraj. When the matter reached Nehru, he mollified the Andhra Pradesh leaders by suggesting that the Hyderabad plant would have more investment than the Tiruchi plant.

When the talk started doing the rounds in political circles in the early January 1964 that Shastri, who resigned in September 1963 under the Kamaraj Plan, was going to be re-inducted into the Cabinet, Home Minister Gulzari Lal Nanda was, according the Volume 2 of Subramaniam’s memoir, “not reconciled” to his erstwhile colleague alone being brought back. His advice was that Indira Gandhi, too, should be taken in.