Charan Singh quotes

Charan Singh was an Indian politician and the fifth Prime Minister of India. Known for championing the rights and welfare of farmers, he enacted significant agrarian reforms. He is remembered as a dedicated leader who focused on rural development and social justice. Here are 20 of his quotes:

...quite a number of Congressmen are disguised as communists. They will go with Mrs Gandhi to the ultimate end. They have always been enemies of democracy. Behind-them is the Right CPI and behind it is Soviet Russia.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

The name of the Congress is mud. There is utter lack of leaderdhip in the state.

Charan Singh

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...

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

Non-Jats also vote for him. How many districts are there in UP and how many districts are there in which in which this animal of a Jat is found? Is there anything in my life to suggest that I am casteist? In 1954, I wrote a letter to Nehru, it is on record, in which I suggested that all candidates for gazette jobs must marry outside their own caste. And if a man married inside his caste while holding such a job, he would have to resign.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

He was different. He had little taste for the finer side of the politics no interest in political philosophy; and he had hardly any values. In any scheme of things, his one target was personal interest. He was anti-Nehru, anti-Indira, anti-Desai, anti-Ramon carrying it, ignoble. He was also given to anger.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

I had interviewed him when he was Chief Minister of UP. As a Jat, a member of caste of small farmers, he had expressed practical ideas about helping poor Indians. But a certain slyness seemed to substitute for any sense of moral principle. Indira knew just the man to go when she felt the time was ripe to break up Morarji's Janata coalition.

Charan Singh

Political leadership of the country must remember that nothing mocks our values and dreams more than the desperate struggle of our people for existence.

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh

Big leaders, said Niccolo Machiavelli, should inspire both love and fear. He [Chaudhry Charann Singh] had that ability. He was the ‘dictatot' within the area of his political influence but he also enjoyed a ‘reputation for integrity'

Charan Singh

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.

Charan Singh