Write a critical note on the evolution and significance of the slogan, ‘Jai Jawan jai Kisan’.

Question

Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Lal Bahadur Shastri coined Jai Jawan Jai Kisan in 1965 to join the war effort with food self-reliance, later widened into Jai Vigyan and Jai Anusandhan. It succeeded where the Food Corporation of India and high-yielding wheat backed it, but gains stayed regionally uneven.

**Introduction**

In 1965 India fought Pakistan while depending on American PL-480 wheat, and Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri fused both crises into one slogan, Jai Jawan Jai Kisan, saluting the soldier and the farmer together.

**Evolution of Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Since 1965**

SKETCH: timeline | Evolution of the slogan
- 1965 :: Shastri's twin call
- 1998 :: Vajpayee adds Vigyan
- 2019 :: Modi adds Anusandhan

1. **Twin crises**: The war came three years after the 1962 defeat by China, and a failed monsoon cut foodgrain output from about 89 million tonnes in 1964-65 to about 72 million tonnes in 1965-66.
2. **Food as sovereignty**: Lyndon Johnson's "short tether" released grain a few months at a time, so Shastri asked citizens to skip one meal a week and created the Food Corporation of India in 1965.
3. **From survival to knowledge**: Jai Vigyan after Pokhran-II and Jai Anusandhan at the 2019 Indian Science Congress widened the idea of security to science and research.

**Significance and Critical Limits of the Slogan**

1. **Self-reliance achieved**: Mexican high-yielding wheat more than doubled wheat output within a decade and ended PL-480 dependence in the early 1970s.
2. **Civil-military bond**: It placed the soldier and the farmer, often from the same rural household, at the heart of national identity.
3. **Uneven harvest**: Gains concentrated in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab's groundwater fell, and the National Commission on Farmers (2004-06) still found deep agrarian distress.
4. **Rhetoric over delivery**: The One Rank One Pension demand stayed unmet until 2015, showing that praise often outran policy.

**Conclusion**

The slogan worked where institutions and seeds backed it and faltered where words replaced policy. Its lesson is that security rests on borders, farms and laboratories together, and that honour must mean secure incomes, not applause alone.

Write a critical note on the evolution and significance of the slogan, ‘Jai Jawan jai Kisan’.

Model answer

Practise this question

Administrative and Socio-Economic Reorganization4 questions

Ghissu