Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s seven-point call to action for the citizens of India lays bare the gravity of the crisis in West Asia. On Monday, he reiterated his appeal for austerity, urging people to reduce fuel consumption, make greater use of public transport and electric vehicles, and defer gold purchases.

This is not the first time the country’s leadership has called for austerity in the face of a crisis.

A look back at the 1960s, when the then-prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri made similar appeals.

As home minister during the Chinese invasion of India in October 1962, Lal Bahadur Shastri felt that the Indian Army was unprepared to defend the country. At the same time, the threat from Pakistan remained ever-present. Strengthening India’s defence capability and restoring the morale of the armed forces, therefore, became an urgent national priority.

But the crisis extended beyond national security. “Inadequate attention to agriculture in governmental planning meant that food production had fallen below the country’s essential requirements. Vast quantities of foodgrains had to be imported,” writes C P Srivastava in Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Life of Truth in Politics (1996).

Shastri, deeply familiar with rural India, believed the country could achieve food self-sufficiency if agriculture received sustained policy attention. He advocated measures such as improved access to seeds and fertilisers, better irrigation, and incentive pricing for farm produce. Politically too, he saw agricultural self-reliance as essential to reducing India’s dependence on foreign countries.

Food shortages nevertheless intensified, compounded by a rapidly rising population. India increasingly depended on food grain imports, mainly from the United States. While food imports in 1956 stood at less than a quarter of a million tonnes (236,358 tonnes), they rose sharply the following year and, by 1963, had climbed to 4.05 million metric tonnes.

When Shastri became prime minister in June 1964, the country was in the grip of a severe food crisis. “Shortages had led to hoarding and a sharp increase in prices,” writes Srivastava.

A failed monsoon that year further aggravated the situation, pushing it to alarming levels: food prices had risen by 22 per cent over 18 months.

The growing realisation was that the only sustainable way to meet India’s rapidly expanding food needs was for Indians themselves to invest more resources in agriculture.

As part of the government’s crackdown on hoarding, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act was enacted, imposing stringent penalties on those who stockpile food grains.

“The manner in which Shastri dealt with the food crisis merits detailed elaboration,” notes Sandeep Shastri in Lal Bahadur Shastri: Politics and Beyond (2019).

Under the revised Fourth Five-Year Plan, Shastri ensured that agriculture received the highest priority while simultaneously expanding the base of food grain production.

At an emotional and symbolic level, Shastri appealed to citizens to sacrifice one meal a day to help the nation tide over the crisis. “‘If one gives up one meal in a day, some other person gets his only meal of the day,’ was his appeal to people,” writes Sandeep Shastri.

Leading by example, Shastri’s own family gave up one meal every day. Restaurants and eateries across the country voluntarily shut on Monday evenings, and many regions observed what came to be known as the “Shastri Vrat”.

In a speech in 2021, M Venkaiah Naidu recalled: “For Shastri Ji, austerity and simplicity began at home. A very famous anecdote relates to his idea of conserving food supplies as one of the ways to address the problem of famine in the country. Before he asked his countrymen to fast for one day in a week, Shastri Ji put this principle into action at home. He wanted to see for himself whether his children could bear hunger with fortitude.”

Shastri also urged people to scale down guest lists at wedding celebrations so the country could better cope with the food shortage.

Shastri addressed the nation in a radio broadcast on October 10, 1965 — a speech that would go down in history for giving India one of its most enduring slogans: “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” (Hail the soldier, hail the farmer). The phrase came to symbolise the twin pillars of India’s nationhood: national security and agricultural self-reliance.

In his address, Shastri appealed to farmers to increase agricultural production, urged traders to market produce fairly and at reasonable prices, and called upon consumers to exercise restraint in consumption.

“Self-sufficiency in food grains needed to be a national goal. At the same time, the country needed to develop a defence framework that could protect the national interests and sovereignty of the land,” writes Sandeep Shastri. Maybe there’s something we can still learn from that decade today.