Tashkent, 1966 Shastri with Gen Ayub Khan, Alexei Kosygin and others Lal Bahadur Shastri Was he poisoned? That night I had a premonition that Shastri was dying. I dreamt about him dying. I got up abruptly to a knock on my door. A lady in the corridor told me: “Your prime minister is dying.” I hurriedly dressed and drove with an Indian official to Shastri’s dacha which was some distance away. I saw (Soviet premier Alexei) Kosygin standing in the verandah. He raised his hands to indicate that Shastri was no more. Behind the verandah was the dining room where a team of doctors was sitting at an oblong table, cross-examining Dr R.N. Chugh who had accompanied Shastri. Next to it was Shastri’s room. It was extraordinarily large. On the huge bed, his body looked like a dot on a drawing board. His slippers were neatly placed on the carpeted floor. He had not used them. In a corner of the room, however, on a dressing table, there was an overturned thermos flask. It appeared that Shastri had struggled to open it. There was no buzzer in his room, the point on which the government lied when attacked in Parliament on its failure to save Shastri’s life. Our official photographer and I spread the national flag, which had been neatly folded up near the dressing table, over the body, and placed some flowers to pay homage to him. I then went to meet Shastri’s assistants. It was a few yards away and one had to walk through an open verandah to reach it. Shastri’s personal secretary, Jagan Nath Sahai, told me that Shastri had knocked on their door at around midnight and wanted water. Two stenographers and Jagan Nath helped him walk back to his room. This was fatal, Dr Chugh said. After sending the flash on Shastri’s death, I went back to his assistants’ room to learn the details about his death. Bits and pieces of information gathered together indicated that Shastri, after attending the farewell reception, reached his dacha around 10 pm. Shastri told (his personal servant) Ram Nath to bring him his food which came from Ambassador (T.N.) Kaul’s house, prepared by his cook, Jan Mohammed. He ate very little: a dish of spinach and potatoes and a curry. Ram Nath gave Shastri milk, which he used to drink before retiring at night. The prime minister once again began pacing up and down and later asked for water, which Ram Nath gave from the thermos flask on the dressing table. (He told me that he had closed the flask.) It was a little before midnight when Shastri told Ram Nath to retire to his room and get some sleep because he had to get up early to leave for Kabul. Ram Nath offered to sleep on the floor in Shastri’s room but Shastri told him to go to his own room upstairs. The assistants were packing the luggage at 1.20 am (Tashkent time), Jagan Nath recalled, when they suddenly saw Shastri at the door. With great difficulty Shastri asked: “Where is doctor sahib?” It was in the sitting room that a racking cough convulsed Shastri, and his personal assistants helped him to bed. Jagan Nath gave him water and remarked: “Babuji, now you will be all right.” Shastri only touched his chest and then became unconscious. (When Lalita Shastri was told by Jagan Nath in Delhi that he had given him water, she said: “You are a very lucky person because you gave him his last cup of water.”) *** Gen Ayub was genuinely grieved by Shastri’s death. He came to Shastri’s dacha at 4 am and said, looking towards me: “Here is a man of peace who gave his life for amity between India and Pakistan.” Later, Ayub told the Pakistani journalists that Shastri was one person with whom he had hit it off well; “Pakistan and India might have solved their differences had he lived,” he said. Aziz Ahmad, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, rang up Bhutto to inform him about Shastri’s death. Bhutto was half asleep and heard only the word “died”, and apparently asked, “Which of the two bastards?” When I returned from Tashkent, Lalita Shastri asked me why Shastri’s body had turned blue. I replied: “I am told that when bodies are embalmed, they turn blue.” She then inquired about “certain cuts” on Shastri’s body. I did not know about those because I had not seen the body. Even so, her remark that no post-mortem had been conducted either at Tashkent or Delhi startled me. It was indeed unusual. Apparently, she and others in the family suspected foul play. A few days later, I heard that Lalita Shastri was angry with the two personal assistants who had accompanied Shastri because they had refused to sign a statement which alleged that Shastri did not die a natural death. As days passed, the Shastri family became increasingly convinced that he had been poisoned. In 1970, on October 2 (Shastri’s birthday), Lalita Shastri asked for a probe into her husband’s death. The family seemed to be upset that Jan Mohammed, T.N. Kaul’s cook at the time, had cooked the food, not Ram Nath, his own personal servant. This was strange as the same Jan Mohammed had prepared food for Shastri when he visited Moscow in 1965. Following newspaper reports, the old guard Congress party supported the demand for a probe into Shastri’s death. I asked Morarji Desai towards the end of October 1970 whether he really believed that Shastri did not die a natural death. Desai said: “That is all politics. I am sure there was no foul play. He died of a heart attack. I have checked with the doctor and his secretary, C.P. Srivastava, who accompanied him to Tashkent.”
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 10:53:27 +0000
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