Former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda often supported farmers’ issues and as a tribute to his commitment and initiative towards the community, farmers of Punjab named one of the finest varieties of paddy after him, a tribute to him. Biography says. Gowda is known to have violated the decorum of the House as an MLA and MP. But only once in his long career did he violate this self-imposed principle, and it was when the welfare of his loyal constituency of farmers was ‘threatened’, journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju wrote in his book “Farrow in a Field: The Unexplored Life of”. HD Deve Gowda”.
Referring to the events of 31 July and 1 August 1991 in the Lok Sabha, the book recounts how, during a heated discussion on Manmohan Singh’s first budget, the Gowda government was pressurized to withdraw its decision to end subsidies. had reached the Well of the House for Agriculture sector for a period of more than three years. “I am a farmer and the son of a farmer and I will not allow this. I will sit on dharna. I will not leave this house. It’s not for publicity that I’m doing this.”
In 2002, when there were reports of farmer suicides in large numbers from across India, Gowda took a delegation of about 2,000 farmers from Karnataka to Delhi by train and had an audience with the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “It was unprecedented, especially for a former prime minister to protest in this way. People of Delhi were bewildered,” book published by Penguin Random House India it is said.
“As a tribute to Gowda’s lifelong commitment to farmers, and his policy initiatives towards the farming community, and the brilliant pro-farmer budget of 1996-97, the farmers of Punjab recognized one of the finest varieties of paddy as ‘ Nominated. Deve Gowda’ (sic) after stepping down as prime minister,” writes Srinivasaraju in the book.
“It is said that the paddy variety was very popular for more than two decades. The farmers who could not speak to Gowda in Punjabi, Hindi, Kannada or English had understood and accepted the man’s intention. Ironically, this tribute too was little known and, like everything else related to Gowda, was unheard of.”
He says, “The generally well-known Gowda himself did not know about this paddy variety until Chiranjeev Singh, a Punjab IAS officer of Karnataka cadre, wrote about it in his Kannada newspaper column in 2014. ” The association with soil, the staple diet of the people, was the most magical and original metaphor that could be thought of for Deve Gowda, the author says.
The book also narrates how in 1996, Mahendra Singh Tikait, a farmer leader from the same western Uttar Pradesh as Charan Singh, hailed Deve Gowda as the ‘Chowdhary Charan Singh of the South’ at a meeting in Muzaffarnagar. Deve Gowda has been in public life for nearly seven decades. He started at the bottom as a member of the Holenarasipur Taluk Development Board and rose to the top in 1996 as the 11th Prime Minister of India.
In between, he was an independent legislator, served as the Leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly for a long time, was an effective Irrigation and Public Works Minister, and on several occasions was Chief Minister in 1994. Even 25 years after leaving office as Prime Minister, he remained relevant in Indian politics.
The book also describes in detail the conversation between Deve Gowda and Vajpayee, among many other things. If they had not been prime minister and former prime minister, and had not preceded one and succeeded the other, the two would not have interacted as much, it says.
Gowda replaced Vajpayee soon after his first 13-day brush with power, and there was a confidence motion in which the two came face-to-face on the floor of Parliament for the first time. “Gowda and Vajpayee were two very different people. While Vajpayee was essentially a Hindi person, Gowda used English to communicate, which was indeed above Vajpayee’s delight. If Vajpayee was full of rhetoric, flourishes and pregnant silence, Gowda was always about dry details, documents and a kind of lackluster,” says the author.
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