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What Kairon meant for Punjab

Few today recall that Punjab had once dreamt of being an industrial state. That was the dream of Partap Singh Kairon: CM of Punjab for over eight years.

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M Rajivlochan
Professor of History, Panjab University

Few today recall that Punjab had once dreamt of being an industrial state. That was the dream of Partap Singh Kairon: CM of Punjab for over eight years. His assassination on February 6, 1965, killed that dream. Successor CMs rolled back his schemes for promoting industries and refused to provide assurances that industrialists needed to invest in a border state. 

Squabbles among politicians of those days were a rootless phenomena. Lala Jagat Narain, the newspaper magnate, put this on record several years after Kairon’s killing: ‘We only fought for power. It was never a conflict over ideas or principles,’ he said a few years before his death for an interview archived at the Nehru Memorial Library. 

Looking back, what one is struck by, is the unwavering vision that Kairon harboured of an industrialised, progressive and prosperous Punjab, where all communities lived comfortably with one another. ‘This is because of my education in economics at the University of California at Berkeley,’ he would say. Translating those ideas into action meant creating strategies to improve food production and to industrialise. 

For a Punjab that had been torn asunder by Partition, with an agricultural landscape characterised by the small peasant, tilling land of an indifferent quality, this was no small achievement. Wherever there was a difficult decision to be made, whether it was by way of implementing the Land Ceiling Act, or by forcing the Consolidation of Land since that was imperative for improving agricultural productivity or by imposing a betterment levy on irrigated lands to pay for the Bhakra Nangal project, Kairon never backed down.  

Economic progress entails certain costs and hard decisions. Kairon showed a clear recognition of the costs and a willingness to pay them. In a political landscape dominated by narrow and communal kind of demands, whether it was over the Hindi or Punjabi language, he towered over all others and resisted those demands. This was something even his enemies acknowledged. Dressed in a khadi kurta-pyjama, Kairon would urge the use of the latest techniques in agriculture. He would pester his officers to help peasants enter the world of scientific agriculture. Punjabi was his preferred language of communication. So much so that when Nehru began to send foreign guests to Punjab to see the economic transformation, many doubted if Kairon would be able to deal with these sophisticated foreigners.

He kept a sharp eye on black marketeers and often convinced them that it was safer and more profitable to have a legitimate business. That helped the growth of the textile industry in Amritsar and metal works at Jagadhari and Mandi Gobindgarh. A unit of HMT, a public sector unit, was started in Punjab. He even reached out to the Geological Survey of India to survey the land of Punjab in the hope that some hidden mineral or oil deposits may be found that would boost economic growth.

It was not just economic progress he talked about but also equity and education. He alone among all Chief Ministers seemed to take forward Nehru’s ideas of developing modern institutions underpinned by a scientific temper. The PGIMER, Chandigarh, was one such; other states would make efforts to set up such institutes 50 years later. Remarkably, while setting up the PGI, Kairon involved people best suited to lead it. It was of no consequence that many of them like Dr Santokh Singh Anand and Dr PN Chuttani had been his critics. Similarly, he did not hesitate to appoint Hardwari Lal as the Vice Chancellor of Kurukshetra University despite being a staunch critic. He also persuaded the Ludhiana agriculture college to upgrade to a top agriculture research university, the PAU.

It was this largeness of heart and of vision that distinguishes him above all. Combined with his propensity to take tough decisions, it made him one of the most successful Chief Ministers of his times. The Tribune Editor Prem Bhatia would not hesitate to issue the headline ‘Most powerful Chief Minister of India’ while describing Kairon’s achievements. 

Kairon would make efforts to reach out to people. Neera Grover, who retired as the head of the department of music, SNDT University, Mumbai, recalls how Kairon went about promoting Punjabi. Her father, a professor, was sitting out in the sun in Chandigarh, reading papers in his small garden, when someone walked in, tapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him for reading Punjabi. It was the CM himself, walking through the sector, stopping by at homes and taking feedback from people on the use of Punjabi that the government had recently made compulsory. 

A teetotaller and non-smoker, he would reach the home of his Chief Secretary, EN Mangatrai, ICS, to have a sarkari chat. ‘You can’t work without your smoke and whisky’ he would tell Mangatrai, ‘better that I come to your house for work rather than force you to come to mine and make you miss out on the drink.’ 

When in 1962, the Union government urged the states to implement prohibition, Kairon organised a number of events across the state to educate people on the benefits of shunning alcohol. The China war that started in the autumn of that year stopped prohibition from being implemented in Punjab. Without people’s support, Kairon would say, such a policy will not succeed. His enemies repeatedly accused him of corruption. In India of those times, the ideal of correct conduct was Ram Dasrathi, the legendary prince of Ayodhya, who demanded his wife Sita enter the fire to prove her purity. Kairon underwent such a test and came out unscathed. Had it not been for the assassin’s bullet, he would have reclaimed Punjab’s leadership, for the people were already with him.

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