Ghost of former premier haunts India
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - The mysterious death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, one of India's most
popular prime ministers, has returned to haunt the Indian government 43 years
later.
Shastri passed away hours after signing a controversial peace accord with
Pakistan in a summit meeting in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR). The pact formally ended the 1965 war between the two sub-continental
neighbors.
This July, the Indian Prime Minister's Office (PMO) rejected a petition asking
for the government to release details on Shastri's
death. The PMO admitted that it had a classified document on Shastri's death,
but refused to declassify it.
Shastri, 61, died under strange circumstances in Tashkent, now the capital of
Uzbekistan and one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, on January 11, 1966,
soon after signing the Tashkent pact with then Pakistan president Mohammad Ayub
Khan. (He assumed office in June 1964.)
Various accounts of the week-long summit in Tashkent say that Soviet leader
Alexei Kosygin may have arm-twisted both South Asian leaders into formally
ending the five-week India-Pakistan war in 1965.
The Tashkent pact required both sides to withdraw troops to pre-war frontiers,
India to return conquered territories and Pakistan to agree not to wage war in
the future to settle disputes. Members of both the Indian and Pakistan
delegations accused their respective leaders of surrendering national interests
in signing such a pact. Hours afterwards, Shastri died.
Forty-three years later and exhibiting the deft technique of how to shoot
oneself in the foot, the Indian government said that declassifying the Shastri
document could harm foreign relations, create disruption in the country and
cause a breach of parliamentary privilege.
The manner of the government's refusal to declassify the Shastri document is a
dream come true for conspiracy theorists. It not only acknowledges having
something to hide about Shastri's death, but also indirectly admits that the
secret is explosive.
The current and past Indian governmental stance on Shastri's death is baffling.
Here was a war-time prime minister who died suddenly not just while in office,
but while attending a critical summit in a super power foreign country to
discuss terms to end the war. Usually, Indian governments love appointing all
manner of committees of inquiry, investigations and judicial probes. But the
Shastri death is cloaked in mysterious silence.
Not much controversy brews over the sequence of events on that fateful winter
night of January 11, 1966, in Tashkent. After a public reception to celebrate
signing the Tashkent pact, Shastri was in good health when he returned to his
dacha. He was dead by 2am, following a coughing fit and losing consciousness.
His personal doctor and other Russian doctors failed to revive him.
At 4am, his Soviet butler, Akhmed Sattarov, was arrested on suspicion of
poisoning Shastri. He was later released and absolved of the charge.
Shastri's wife Lalita, and later his sons Sunil and Anil, have alleged that
Shastri was indeed poisoned. "I was just 16 years old then. But I remember his
body had darkish blue spots on the chest, abdomen and back," Shastri's elder
son Sunil said this month to Indian media. "My mother and we suspected he died
under mysterious circumstances."
New Delhi-based investigative journalist Anuj Dhar revived the mystery in his
Right to Information petition filed on June 2. Dhar, author of books CIA's Eye
on South Asia and Back from Dead: Inside the Subhas Bose Mystery,
runs website "End The Secrecy", in which activists try to access classified
Indian government documents, in a kind of Indian version of “X-File” hunters.
Responding to Dhar's petition, in a letter dated July 1, 2009, Debraj Pradhan,
joint secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs, remarkably says that the
USSR government conducted no official post-mortem on the body of the former
Indian prime minister.
If Shastri did not die of natural causes, then who killed him and why? Such
questions continue to mystify India.
Shastri died three months before I was born, but whenever his name comes up I
often recall my history professor in Loyola College declaring how much better
India's future would have been if Shastri had lived on as prime minister. I
read more about him to find out why.
Shastri was prime minister for less than two years, but he is still respected,
four decades later. Diminutive and soft-spoken but tough, he was considered
honest, austere and a courageous leader who cared for the poor and downtrodden.
He was railway minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet, and among the first
Indian leaders to hold himself accountable for failures. In 1956 he resigned
from the post, accepting moral responsibility after a train accident that
killed 144 people in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Nehru re-included him in the cabinet in 1957. Four years later, Shastri, as
home minister, initiated one of independent India's first anti-corruption
measures by appointing a governmental committee, "Prevention of Corruption".
The son of a poor schoolteacher, he came from a low-income background but
remained honest in power. He was dubbed the "Homeless Home Minister" because he
owned no house. He and his family lived in government quarters or in rented
accommodation.
Shastri was sworn in as prime minister after Nehru's death in 1964. He
instantly caught the global media’s eye.
"Because he did not have money for the ferry fare as a schoolboy," the New York
Times wrote in its January 25, 1964, edition, "Lal Bahadur Shastri swam the
Ganges twice a day with his books tied atop his head."
Time magazine said in its January 12, 1964, story, "After Nehru, who? The man
chosen last week to command one-seventh of the world's people has a turkey
neck, a smudgy mustache, and an expression of ineffable meekness. It is a
little misleading, insists Lal Bahadur Shastri, the new prime minister of
India. 'I am not as simple as I look'."
"What, then, focused attention on Shastri?” Time asked. “His personal honesty,
for one thing, and his deftness at conciliation for another. A secret
government poll revealed that Lal Bahadur, next to Nehru, was the best-liked,
best-known figure in India."
Shastri’s sudden death expectedly stunned India in 1966. "People then suspected
the USA and CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] of being behind Shastri's death,"
remembers K K Nair, a Mumbai resident who was 32 at the time of Shastri's
death. "The talk then was that Shastri was forced into signing the Tashkent
declaration, and he was killed to ensure it was not revoked."
Conspiracy theories differ, but people I talked to who are old enough to
remember January 1966 all agree that suspicions about Shastri’s death raged
across India.
Whether Shastri was assassinated, or simply had a natural heart attack, rumor
and intrigue merchants had a field day given the global situation when Shastri
died.
The Vietnam War was raging, India and Pakistan were at war, China was making
threatening noises to intervene, the USSR was flexing its muscles and the US
was blundering through some of the worst foreign policy days of the Lyndon
Johnson presidency.
Alternating between showing anger at Shastri's government for severely
criticizing his Vietnam War, and the familiar US policy of trying to please
both India and Pakistan, Johnson only managed to have the US bitterly hated in
both countries by 1966 when the Tashkent pact was signed.
On the other hand, playing peacemaker in South Asia whetted the Russian
appetite for being a global referee. In its coverage of the Tashkent meeting,
the Associated Press said that the pact was signed only at 1:30am on the
morning of January 11, 1966, after what Pakistan's information minister Aziz
Ahmed attributed to "mediation behind the scenes".
The Associated Press also quoted an unnamed Soviet official as saying after the
India-Pakistan pact was signed, "Now we will take our team to Vietnam and maybe
something will come out of it." The Soviets were starting to fancy themselves.
But little came out of the Soviet-engineered Tashkent pact itself. Five years
later, India and Pakistan went to war again in 1971. In fact, the seed of the
1971 war that divided Pakistan and created Bangladesh was sown in Tashkent, as
84-year-old Kuldip Nayar, veteran journalist and former member of parliament
saw. Nayar was close to Shastri as his former press advisor, and was covering
Tashkent as head of the United News of India agency.
In a July 2001 article, "Trouble in Tashkent", published in leading Indian
portal Rediff.com, Nayar blames the Tashkent problems on the hardline stance of
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir and then radical foreign minister of
Pakistan in 1966. Bhutto was Pakistan president during the 1971 war. Was a US
hand behind Bhutto defying his boss, president Ayub Khan, and trying to scuttle
any peace deal? What had transpired in the midnight meeting between Shastri,
Ayub Khan and Kosygin?
The Indian government, continuing its mysterious secrecy about Shastri's death,
ensures that the mystery of his death will not die.
It's a significant story that continues to interest even the younger generation
of Indians like me who was not even born when he died. Where would India and
the region be if for 40 years the country had followed the Shastri legacy of
efficient, honest public life, instead of a legacy of a political system cursed
with sycophancy and corruption that replaced Shastri?
Kuldip Nayar experienced some insight into what might have been the day Shastri
died. He revealed in the Rediff.com special article of 2001: "Late that night,
[Pakistan president] Ayub Khan came to the dacha. He prayed. He told me, "If
this man had lived, there was a possibility of India and Pakistan coming
together to live in peace."
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