“I do not believe it is necessary for a biographer to maintain distance from ones object of study. Despite my different upbringing and differences in political and personal beliefs I admired and was quite fond of Charan Singh.” 

- Paul R Brass

This book, third and last of a three-volume series, uniquely straddles the conventional division between the history of an epoch in the politics of North India and a definitive biography – that of Chaudhary Charan Singh, a great son of India.

This volume commences with the dramatic political event of the fall of the Congress in 1967 in the politically most critically important state of UP and the formation of the first non-Congress government since Independence. It traces the struggle between Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi in which each at crucial times needed the political support of the other, neither trusted the other, with Gandhi on one hand as the unscrupulous and superior strategist with a determination to remain in power and Singh on the other with firm, principled policies in favour of the village that he ever sought to implement when in power. 

Charan Singh was a man of principle and pride and a dedicated nationalist, who at once loved his country while condemning the path chosen for it by its political leadership. Charan Singh attempted throughout his public life to wrest power from the urban, elite castes in favor of the rural middle and lower castes and construct a Gandhian economy from the grassroots. He himself came from a humble background in the countryside, though he was no country bumpkin, but a self-made man of high intellect. From a middle self-cultivating peasant caste, he went on to embody and speak for a new social movement, that of the backward castes of Northern India. He molded a multiplicity of castes into a political coalition based on common class and economic interests, whose interests he always promoted and in whose advancement he played the most important role.

Paul R. Brass (1936-2022) was Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. During a career spanning 60 years, Paul studied the political culture of the Indian subcontinent, wrote 18 well-received scholarly books and published scores of articles on South Asian politics and mass communal violence.