Fifty years ago, India started the year 1966 with a peace treaty with Pakistan after a 17-day war, and the sad demise of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. On January 10, 1966, Shastri signed the Tashkent Declaration with Pakistan's President Field Marshal Ayub Khan. Alexei Kosygin, the prime minister of the former Soviet Union, was the witness. The following day, he passed away.

Tashkent in Uzbekistan has symbolic significance for India. This was the foreign city where revolutionary M N Roy had founded the first Communist Party of India in 1920. A lot happened in India in 1966. After ...