Charan Singh Quotes

The true India resides in its villages.

That abolition of the privy purse will strengthen and ensure success of democracy is pure bunkum. Advanced countries like Britain and Japan are not less democratic or less progressive for the maintenance of their kings and princes. Royalty was not abolished even by socialist parties when they came to power in these countries.

Basically a leader of peasant community in the north and had not tackled a broad vision. He cannot be called a true Gandhian because a true Gandhian cannot be for office only.

Our poverty has to be eliminated and the basic necessities of life made available to every single citizen. Political leadership of the country must remember that nothing mocks our values and our dreams more than the desperate struggle of our people for existence; nothing could therefore be more poignant than the look of despair in the eyes of a starving child. Nothing could therefore be a more patriotic objective for our political leaders than to ensure that no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day's bread and that the future and capacities of not a single Indian will be allowed to be stunted by malnutrition.

No national leader was identified so closely with the interests of the peasantry. He doggedly sought to protect the interests of peasant proprietors against the inexorable juggernaut, as he saw it of collectivism.

He became a lawyer and in 1929 joined the Indian National Congress movement. He was jailed several times in the struggle for Indian independence. He served in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) state assembly from 1937 on and was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1967–68 and 1970.

There have been two most athletic figures in Indian politics, Gulzari Lal Nanda, the Prime-Minister-in-waiting or permanent prime minister pro-tem some times called the “stepney prime minister” and Charan Singh had set his sights on prime minisitership in 1974 and would have sold his soul to the devil for it.

I am a Jat, born in a Jat family. A Muslim I can become immediately, but I cannot become a Brahmin, I cannot become a Rajput. Nor can I become even a Vaishya. And If I want to become a Harijan, even that is impossible, because the constitution does not permit it. It is better if this sort of caste system is destroyed…

After graduation I was offered a post as Vice-Principal at the Jat High School but in that there was the name of a caste and I could not accept that. I have always been opposed to this social system since my childhood.

Born into a culture of familism and casteism, yet critical of the same, Charan Singh lambasted all and sundry in a saintly language which aimed to bridge the chasm between modern aspirations and traditional roots.

He could not check every conductor, but everybody from chaprasi [peon] to the Chief Secretary, from constable to IG [Inspector General of Police] knew that if he is caught he would not be spared. That is the kind of reputation he got.

He decided to appear in public a ‘socialist’ by professing to “nationalize” the sugar industry but, in private, he had gone into a deal with sugar barons...The man whom he had appointed as Receiver was cane inspector Man Singh, his own brother! No Chief Minister in UP had ever indulged in this sort of nepotism.

The first thing our leadership in 1947 should have done was to delegalize all communal bodies. All organizations whose membership was confined to a particular caste or religion should have been disallowed from the political field.

The Jat community votes for non-sectarian in lines far greater proportion than any other in Meerut. They are un-educated, live in villages, have no pull in the public, economic or administrative life of the country and yet would not reconcile themselves to an inferior position in society. They would not put with the taunt of being a Jat. Fifty percent of the Hindu Jats within a short period of 40 years (1891-1931) left their old faith to turn Sikhs or Muslims so that nobody could any longer treat them with contempt.

He studied law, but unlike many Indian leaders who rose to political power as practicing lawyers, he became known not as a lawyer but as a politician.