A MAN OF SILK & STEEL

Freely translated, Lal Bahadur Shastri means "Graduate Brave Jewel." He was born in 1904, the second son of a minor tax collector in the vil lage of Mughal Sarai, near the holy city of Benares. His father died when he was an infant. The child belonged to the Kayasth caste, who were disdained as quislings by other Hindus because they became clerks and officials under the Moslem rule of the conquering Mogul emperors. Their reputation for shrewdness is so great that an Indian saying runs, "If you meet a Kayasth and a serpent, kill the Kayasth first."

Lal Bahadur showed little of his caste's supposed brilliance, although he cared enough about an education to walk eight miles a day to school, sometimes taking a short cut by swimming the Ganges River, carefully strapping his books to his head before entering the water. He made his first total commitment at 16, when Mahatma Gandhi spoke to students in Benares. From Gandhi, says Shastri, "I learned of the moral aspect of life--to serve your country without love of power and authority, if possible." To fight for freedom, the lad quit high school three months before he was due to graduate, and, in all, was arrested eight times by the British, serving a total of nine years in jail. In 1932, when police refused to let Indian nationalists hoist their flag on the clock tower of Allahabad, he rode by in a cart, disguised in the veils of a Moslem woman, suddenly leaped off and sprinted up the tower stairs, raising the flag before the police could stop him.

Repaid Loyalty. In his home state of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and the birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru, Shastri became the protege of the Hindu traditionalist leaders, Puru-shottamdas Tandon and Pandit Pant. With independence in 1947, he rose through the state government to become Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

When Prime Minister Nehru broke with the conservatives in 1951, Shastri abandoned one preceptor, Tandon, to join the other, Pandit Pant, in supporting Nehru. From that moment Lal Bahadur Shastri never left Nehru's side, and the grateful Prime Minister repaid the loyalty with a succession of Cabinet jobs.

In a nation where politicians affect superior airs, Shastri is modest and retiring. Among a people given to rhetoric and ritual, he is concrete and practical. In a land reverencing charismatic leadership and far-reaching intellect, he looks like a messenger boy and disparages his own brain. Above all, he is reassuringly rational. Though he fights corruption, he does so with intelligence and compassion, well aware that badly paid public servants will invariably be tempted by bribes.

In foreign affairs, Shastri may seem provincial, since he has only once been beyond India's borders, and then only to neighboring Nepal. In a nation so divided by religion, language and regionalism, his great strength is his ability to bring people together. When a volatile language dispute broke out in Assam, Lal Bahadur quietly worked out a settlement. When the Sikhs campaigned for a separate state, Shastri was able to talk the Sikh leader out of a planned fast unto death. "I listen to different viewpoints. I have the capacity to understand them. I keep an open mind." As Home Minister, he noted: "Although I am a mediocre, yet I find that a mediocre like me is able to produce something new and original, not in a very high sense, but whatever new things are suggested in the Ministry, well, they generally come from me, and the officers who are far, far abler than myself go on with their routine way of thinking and, perhaps, their routine way of working."

Grumbling Friend. Shastri is close to his country's mind and soil. He is one of the few Congress politicians not to have amassed a large fortune or property or donations from wealthy businessmen. He has no auto, would prefer to stay on in his tiny bungalow, and still gives part of his salary to the Servants of the People Society, a group devoted to public service with whom he worked as a young man.

Shastri usually rises at 5 a.m. By then his lawn is crowded with audience-seekers. When he emerges, he selects one and then another to join him in a stroll around the garden, thus combining interviews with his constitutional. He stays in his office until ten or eleven at night. Since a 1959 heart attack, Shastri has appeared to be in excellent health, and as tireless and alert as ever.

Whether India's new leader or anyone, can cope with the nation's manifold problems at home and its external dangers, especially from Red China, cannot be foreseen. Shastri, at least, can be depended on to expend his life willingly, if necessary. As a top Indian leader said last week, "After Nehru, we had no giant. So we turned to a man more like Gandhi, with the softness of silk and yet the hardness of steel."

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