Charan Singh: Organic politician who centred politics on peasant identity

NEW DELHI: The decision to honour former Prime Minister Chowdhury Charan Singh with the Bharat Ratna is politically significant. The announcement came amidst speculation that the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), the party headed by his grandson Jayant, was about to break its ties with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh, where it has pockets of influence. Jayant Chowdhury’s first response, in a post on X, to the news was, “Dil jeet liya” while tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement on the honour.
Charan Singh is an icon for the Jat community, which has substantial political influence in western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. This Bharat Ratna could be seen as an outreach by the BJP to the restive Jat constituency, which had been lukewarm to the BJP since the protests over farm laws in 2020 and the party’s shielding of its MP, Brijbhushan Saran Singh, in the wrestlers’ issue.
Singh also represents an anti-Congress strand in Indian politics though he built his political career as a Congressman and minister in successive Congress governments in UP in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, in the wake of socialist leader Rammanohar Lohia crafting an Opposition alliance on the basis of anti-Congressism, Singh broke from the Congress to head the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal ministry in UP; he was the first non-Congress chief minister of UP. He formed the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) in ’67, which became the Bharatiya Lok Dal in 1975 after the merger of BKD, Swatantra Party, Samyukta Socialist Party, Utkal Congress and several other groups. The BKD, Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Congress-O, and Socialist Party came together to form the Janata Party in the aftermath of the Emergency, under the direction of Jayaprakash Narayan. Charan Singh, like many other Opposition stalwarts, was jailed during the Emergency and emerged as a key leader of the resistance. His differences with Prime Minister Morarji Desai contributed to the implosion of the Janata government (1977-79). Deputy PM in the Desai government, Charan Singh, who also ordered the controversial arrest of Indira Gandhi over Emergency excesses, succeeded Desai as PM, ironically, with the support of the Congress. He had to resign six months later, without having faced Parliament even once.
In his seventies by then, Charan Singh revived his party as the Lok Dal but was outsmarted by a resurgent Indira Gandhi in national and UP politics. The Lok Dal split in 1987 reportedly over his attempts to make son, Ajit Singh, the heir. His protege, Mulayam Singh Yadav, won that battle and became the face of anti-Congress politics in UP. As Mandal and Mandir took centre stage in UP, Charan Singh’s legacy became confined to western UP, and his image restricted to that of a Jat leader.
However, the perception of Charan Singh as a Jat leader of western UP hardly does justice to a layered political career.
Born on December 23, 1902, in Noorpur, Meerut, in a peasant family, he was active in the freedom movement as a Congress worker and organiser and was imprisoned multiple times from 1930 onwards. He was well educated – he had an MA in history and a law degree – and according to his biographer, the renowned political scientist Paul Brass, was well-read. Marxist academic Terence J. Byres describes him as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense.
Scholars who followed Charan Singh’s life and politics write about the coherence and consistency in his voluminous writings on Indian agriculture and economy. (Charan Singh published an article in this newspaper on agricultural marketing in 1938, a topic on which he introduced a Bill in the United Provinces assembly later). Brass describes him as “the principal spokesman of the middle peasantry”, who also “identified with the aspirations of the so-called backward castes and of intermediate social status between the elite castes and the lower castes”.
Brass argues that Charan Singh, in his books and pamphlets, presented “an extremely sophisticated and coherent alternative development strategy for India”, that was different from that of prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
In government, Charan Singh was seen as a custodian of peasant interests. He opposed landlordism and was a central figure as the minister piloting land reforms in UP in the 1950s. The peasant/farmer was at the heart of his rural vision, and small-scale production had to be the driver of industry. However, he was against land distribution among the landless – the Left would derisively call him a kulak (wealthy peasant). It is this socio-economic stance that turned him against the Indira-led Congress, which had a pronounced Left tilt in the late 1960s. His anti-Congressism was not merely derivative of his political ambitions but also the result of the new peasant-centric politics that was demanding a share in power and institutions, dominated by the caste and class elite of UP Congress. He crafted the Jat-Muslim alliance that was politically powerful and ensured social peace.
The high noon of Charan Singh’s political career was the 1970s. In 1978, on the day he turned 76, a mega rally of over a million farmers was held in Delhi, which was attended by the chief ministers of UP, Bihar, Haryana, and Punjab. That show of strength revealed his clout as a leader of farmers but it proved ephemeral as the Janata Party split and his short tenure as PM on Congress support led to the diminishing of a rich political career that upheld the centrality of peasant identity for Indian politics. The politics he advanced shows up in the occasional mobilisation of peasants and farmers, but its electoral relevance has diminished with caste and faith becoming much more potent draws.