During the 1970s, Charan Singh remained fully occupied in bringing together the opposition as a national alternative to the Congress and its policies under a common manifesto and a unified organisation. The tale of the Janata Party’s birth actually began in the aftermath of the 1974 assembly elections in UP. Due to large scale rigging by the ruling Congress party and the government machinery, Charan Singh believed that for democracy to survive, all democratic opposition parties must unify as a single alternative to the authoritarian tendencies of the Congress. The first major breakthrough in his quest for opposition unity came about on 14 April 1974 at a historic meeting in New Delhi when representatives of eight smaller political parties came together and merged into a new party under his leadership: the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD).

It was when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency and imprisoned almost all opposition leaders that the need for a unified opposition at the national level became even more apparent. Upon release from Tihar jail Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Lok Dal’s political base among the peasantry of northern India provided the principal component of the Janata party coalition of the BLD, Congress(O), and Jana Sangh which defeated the Congress in the general elections of 1977 and brought about the downfall of Indira Gandhi and the first Central non-Congress government in post-independence India headed by Morarji Desai. The BLD contributed its party symbol of the ‘peasant with a plough’, the backing of the middle caste peasant communities in north India specially in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, and its Gandhian inspired pro-agrarian and pro-cottage industry development thinking. The BLD faction was variously estimated to constitute between 80-100 members of Parliament, at par with that of the Jana Sangh. Most importantly, Charan Singh finally had the political power to influence India’s policies towards what he considered an equitable development model in favour of the village and handmade.