Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant

Govind Ballabh Pant was in the front rank of nationalist leaders who played a key role, first in India's struggle for freedom and subsequently in the politics and administration of independent India. He was a member of the highest policy-making echelons of the Indian National Congress, Deputy Leader of the Congress party in the Central Legislative Assembly, Chief Minister of U.P. and Home Minister in the Union Cabinet headed by Jawaharla Nehru. The eighteeth volume of the Selected...
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Govind Ballabh Pant was in the front rank of nationalist leaders who played a key role, first in India's struggle for freedom and subsequently in the politics and administration of independent India. He was a member of the highest policy-making echelons of the Indian National Congress, Deputy Leader of the Congress party in the Central Legislative Assembly, Chief Minister of U.P. and Home Minister in the Union Cabinet headed by Jawaharla Nehru. The eighteeth volume of the Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant covers the last twenty-six months of Pandit Pant's Union Home Ministership, from January 1959 till his death on 7 March 1961. During this period he had to deal with several crises in the country. The Kerala ministry - the first-ever Communist ministry in India - was dismissed, the Bombay state was bifurcated into Maharashtra and Gujarat, and in Assam a consensus was reached on the issue of official language following large scale riots on this issue in the state. And at the Centre, by favouring the use of English as an official language even after 1965, Pant allayed the fears of non-Hindi-speaking people, and by dealing firmly with the strike of Central Government employees be averted disruption of administration, especially of railways and postal and telegraph services. As one of the senior leaders of the Congress, he had an important role in formulating the party's foreign policy schemes of establishing village panchayats and introducing joint cooperative farming. Some letters written on these and other subjects to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and others, which chronologically pertain to earlier volumes, have been printed in this volume. The Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant is a series that will not only document and illuminate the career and personality of an eminent political leader but provide valuable source material for analysts and scholars of modern Indian politics and history.