by Kuldip Nayar
In fact, the Chief of the Army Staff General J.N. Chaudhuri suffered a heart attack on the day of Nehru’s funeral. It was true that he had summoned 6000 troops from the Western Command to Delhi, but they were called solely for ceremonial purposes, to line the route and control the mammoth crowd at Raj Ghat. Moreover, General Chaudhuri had informed the president, Dr Radhkrishnan, about the movement of these 6000 men. Vishwanathan claimed that he had ordered the army’s march past to scotch any rumours.
Nehru might not have designated his successor but he left behind a durable political structure which could smoothly elect a leader, and this happened quite seamlessly. The real hotbed of activity on Nehru’s cremation day was Morarji Desai’s residence at Thyagaraja Marg. The lawn and the veranda were thronged with people, and at least two of his supporters, Tarakeshwari Sinha, minister of state for finance, and Kanti Desai, Morarji’s only son, were armed with a list of Congress MPs, with a tick or a question mark against their names to indicate whether they supported Desai or Shastri as the next prime minister.
As a newsman, I went to Desai’s house to confirm his candidature for prime-ministership. Though I could not meet him his supporters were very clear: ‘Come what may, Morarji will contest and win hands down.’ One person even took pains to explain how strong men like Pratap Singh Kairon from Punjab, Biju Patnaik from Orissa, Balwant Rai Mehta from Gujarat, C.B. Gupta from UP, and P.C. Sen from West Bengal, all state chief ministers, had already pledged their loyalty and support to him. ‘Tell your Shastri not to contest,’ said Kanti, who knew I had served as his information officer.
I reached Shastri’s house late in the evening. He said: ‘I would prefer a unanimous election,’ and after a pause, added: ‘Were a contest to become inevitable, I would like to stand against Morarjibhai because I can defeat him, not Indiraji.’ Then, as if he was speaking of an ideal arrangement, he said: ‘We need a person like Jayaprakash Narayan to head the government at this juncture.’ Shastri then asked me to carry a message to Morarji suggesting an agreed choice. Shastri proposed two names: Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, in that order.
I went to Morarji’s house and conveyed Shastri’s proposal to him. About Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji’s remark was: ‘A confused person’ and about Indira Gandhi: ‘That chit of a girl.’ He made it plain that the only way to avoid a contest was to accept him as the leader. It was Congress President K. Kamaraj who intervened and persuaded the party to choose a consensus candidate and was entrusted with the task of finding one.
After assessing the atmosphere in the two camps, I put the following story on the UNI ticker:
Mr Morarji Desai, former finance minister, is the first one to throw his hat in the ring. He is believed to have told his associates that he is a candidate. Mr Desai is understood to have said that there must be an election and he for one will not withdraw.
The minister without portfolio, Mr Lal Bahadur Shastri, is considered another candidate, though he himself is reticent. According to circles close to him, he would like to avoid a contest as far as possible.
I did not realize that this news item would do as much damage to Morarji as it did. Coming from the government’s Press Information Bureau (PIB), I could not visualize the impact of the printed word. His supporters said that it cost them at least 100 votes. Word went round that Morarji was so ambitious that he had not waited even for Nehru’s ashes to get cold before making a bid for leadership.
I realized subsequently how much the story had helped Shastri. Kamaraj whispered in my ears, while walking down the steps of Parliament House, ‘Thank you’. Shastri called me to his house to say: ‘No more story; the contest for leadership is over.’ He meant that the story had swung the pendulum in his favour and that he was as good as elected.
I tried to explain to him that the story was never meant to help or harm anyone. He concluded the meeting by placing a finger on his lips. Later, when he was elected leader of the party, he embraced me on the steps of Parliament House in the presence of everyone as an expression of gratitude.
Shastri asked me to rejoin the PIB and become his press information officer. I told him I was prepared to return provided he gave me the status that the press secretary of the US president enjoyed. Shastri said he could do so but then ‘Morarji Bhai will say that I have repaid your debt’. I did not join his staff.
Even so, Morarji remained convinced for the rest of his life that I wrote the story to favour Shastri. Whenever I broached the topic with him, he would say: ‘Shastri had his own way of using people, even without their realizing it.’ In fact, Morarji should have blamed his own supporters, who were confiding in everyone on the day of Nehru’s cremation that the prime-ministership was in their pocket. That kind of talk horrified other members of parliament.
Kamaraj declared that the consensus was behind Shastri, and he was formally elected as the party leader and appointed the new prime minister. Morarji never accepted the verdict and alleged that Kamaraj had manipulated the consensus.
Unlike Nehru, who submitted a handwritten list of his ministers, Shastri had it typed and did not show it even to Kamaraj before sending it to the president. Indira Gandhi was reluctant to join the cabinet and Shastri too was not keen to give her an important portfolio, always conscious of the challenge she posed.
Without doubt, the meek had inherited the earth. A man who during the 1942 Quit India movement lost his typhoid-stricken daughter because he had no money to buy her medicines was now India’s prime minister. When Shastri was out of government under the Kamaraj Plan, he reduced his meals to one dish and gave up eating relatively expensive potatoes, the vegetable he liked most. Poverty had, however, taught him humility, and people found that an endearing trait. It stood him in good stead in the political field which was full of men of arrogance, conceit, and false pride. He had learnt from experience that cooperation was far better than conflict. He quoted to me Gandhi’s observation on the assumption of office: ‘Sit light, not tight.’
Within days of becoming India’s prime minister, Shastri had a mild heart attack, his second. Unofficially, I was still looking after his publicity. I gave out that because of excessive strain the prime minister had been advised by his doctors to rest. I was among the few visitors who met Shastri within a few days of his illness. He looked a touch pale but he was otherwise fine.
I told Shastri that there was a book by an American journalist Welles Hangen, entitled After Nehru Who? (1963). The Almighty would give him a long life but the question was ‘After Shastri Who?’ He became a bit pensive and said: ‘If I was to die within one or two years, your prime minister would be Indira Gandhi, but if I live three or four years, Y.B. Chavan will be the prime minister.’ (Several years later, when I told Chavan about Shastri’s prophecy, he said ‘Kuldip, you must write about it in one of your columns’.)
Shastri asked me who in my view would be the best foreign minister as doctors had advised him to give up the portfolio which he, like Nehru, had retained. I suggested the name of Indira Gandhi. Shastri said: ‘Nayar Sahib, you do not understand politics. She wants to be the prime minister. The portfolio of foreign affairs would make her more important.’ I then proposed the name of M.C. Chagla, education minister in his cabinet. Shastri said that he wanted to have good relations with Pakistan. Chagla, being a Muslim, would bend backwards to be anti-Pakistan to demonstrate his impartiality.
The portfolio was subsequently entrusted to the experienced Swaran Singh. Though Indira Gandhi joined the cabinet she wanted a light portfolio. She got information and broadcasting. (She was upset when she saw her ministry issuing a calendar showing Nehru with his hand placed on Shastri’s shoulders looking much like the leader and his protégé.) In a country where Nehru was regarded as a god, this step to add to Shastri’s stature and standing was not to her taste.
Shastri was reticent about speaking about himself. With great effort I was able to find out why he resigned as rail minister in 1956 because of a stray accident. He said that as th
e portfolio was under him he felt personally responsible for what went wrong. Ministers must take moral responsibility when departments under them seriously falter.
When I told him that there were complaints of a trade connection relating to his elder son, Hari, Shastri said that Hari would have to leave the house. Shastri’s wife was livid and had it communicated to me that I had no business in interfering in their family affairs. I knew that Hari was asked to leave the house although he returned within a few weeks. He was able to convince Shastri that the complaints were unfounded.
President of Pakistan, Gen. Ayub Khan welcomed Shastri’s succession as a ‘Good augury for Indo-Pakistan relations’. He told me that Shastri was ‘really keen to have friendly relations with Pakistan but did not live long enough. ‘Nehru was not serious about burying the hatchet with us.’ He, however, added poignantly, ‘It is a strange irony that when Nehru realized that he should probably make up with Pakistan, he died, and when the climate was favourable after the Tashkent Agreement, Shastri died.’
Shastri had repeatedly told me after the 1962 debacle that India would be able to normalize relations with Pakistan but not China. He saw an opportunity to hold talks with Pakistan when returning from Cairo after attending the meeting of non-aligned nations in October 1964. On his own initiative, Shastri met Ayub Khan at Karachi. It was a goodwill gesture but Pakistani officials tried to use the occasion to reiterate their position on Kashmir.
Rajeshwar Dayal, once India’s envoy to Pakistan, was asked to draft a joint communiqué on the talks in conjunction with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister, and Aziz Ahmed, then Pakistan’s foreign secretary. Dayal had to seek Shastri’s intervention as the two Pakistani representatives argued that a joint communiqué had no meaning unless Kashmir was specifically mentioned. Ayub Khan, at Shastri’s request, told his team not to insist on Kashmir’s inclusion in the communiqué and therefore it was not eventually mentioned at all.
Even though Ayub Khan agreed to Shastri’s suggestion, he reportedly made a contemptuous remark about Shastri: ‘How can I have any talks with a person who does not have even physical stature?’ After Nehru’s death, Ayub Khan thought he had inherited his mantle in Asia; Pakistan was also becoming something of a success story at that time. Viable economically and militarily, the country had begun to be noticed. Pakistan was content with Shastri’s assurance that he would like more time to initiate steps to end the tension between the two countries. Ayub Khan reportedly said that he was willing to wait but in the meantime nothing should be done to ‘further integrate the state [Kashmir] with India.’ According to Dayal, with whom I checked, no such assurance was ever given or sought.
Shastri was very concerned about corruption, which was then beginning to rear its head. He set up a committee under K. Santhanam, a senior Congress leader, to suggest ways to stop corruption. For government employees he converted the Special Police Establishment (SPE), a department in home ministry, into the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The SPE was intended to process complaints against central government employees and investigate their conduct. The scope of the SPE was expanded to look into corruption of contracts in the award by the central government. The SPE had a small office in the penthouse of North Block above the home ministry office. Shastri seriously considered the appointment of a Lokpal (ombudsmen) as Santhanam had proposed.
The CBI assumed importance only during Indira Gandhi’s time. For her it was a machinery to chastise her critics and harass her opponents. The CBI then became an instrument of tyranny, used for all purposes it was not intended for. This has remained the practice and no government after Shastri’s has kept it above politics. The BJP-led government was no exception even though the party tried to occupy a high moral ground.
Several CBI directors have told me, and many have written books, to cite cases in which the prime minister had directly intervened to save the guilty because they wielded political power. Chandra Shekhar, even during his brief stint as prime minister, ordered the then CBI director not to pursue cases against Chandraswami (the ‘godman’), who was later arrested on charges of repeated financial irregularities.
The CBI has no jurisdiction over the states. It operates only if a particular state gives it permission to undertake an investigation or seeks its services. Its powers are still governed by the charter that the SPE held. The Centre has tried to extend the scope of CBI investigations to other parts of the country but very few states have agreed to this.
Following the policy of giving no quarter to the corrupt, however high, Shastri took action against Punjab Chief Minister Pratap Singh Kairon on the basis of the S.R. Das Commission Report within a few days of its submission. The commission had held him guilty. Shastri sent his cabinet secretary to Chandigarh to seek Kairon’s resignation. However, Kairon claimed that Shastri had punished him because of his friendship with Morarji Desai (Rajinder Puri, the famous cartoonist, drew a cartoon to comment on Kairon’s exit: ‘It was not Das Commission’s report but a UNI report’).
My disclosure of Justice H.R. Khanna’s inquiry report on allegations against Biju Patnaik, former chief minister of Orissa, was equally upsetting and drew wide attention.
The probe covered the period when he occupied office. Shastri appointed a Committee of three cabinet ministers, TTK, M.C. Chagla and Ashok Sen, to examine the inquiry report and recommend action, if any, to the government. Though the press reported on the committee’s meetings almost everyday, it did not disclose anything about the report.
One evening I went to meet Ashok Sen, whom I knew well, and asked if I could borrow the report for an hour to go through it. To my surprise, he agreed on the condition that I would return it the following morning. This was a big task because the report was voluminous.
Returning to the UNI office, I called all the teleprinter operators and reporters known for their typing speed and distributed the pages from the report among them. We worked through the night and made five copies of the report. As promised, the following morning, I returned the report to Sen. (Photocopying machines had not yet come to India; I am talking of a time as far back as forty years.)
Before releasing our story, I met Patnaik at his residence on Aurengzeb Road in New Delhi. I told him that I wanted his version so that I could run both, the report and his defence. First, he threatened to sue me and UNI for rupees one crore each. Then he offered to buy shares of UNI and also purchase the service for his daily paper, Kalinga, provided I did not release the story. It was a tempting offer because UNI was then a struggling news agency, not even earning enough to cover the salary bill. I told him that I would await his response for 24 hours. If I did not hear from him, I would run the story.
When I did not hear from him I ran the story. Many papers used it on the front page.
True to his word, Biju sued me and UNI. What could we do? Legal experts advised us to establish the authenticity of the report. This, they said, could be done if it was made public. One way of doing this was to place it on the table of any of the two Houses in parliament. I entrusted this work to the bulky, the senior-most correspondent in UNI.
Our effort to place the report in the Rajya Sabha was foiled by the then chairman S. Radhakrishnan. He expressed his unhappiness over the attempt. Finally, Joshi was able to persuade the stormy petrel H.V. Kamath to place the report on the Lok Sabha table.
Kapur Singh, the Speaker was not too happy with the ruling Congress and gave permission to Kamath to place the report on the table of the House. Suddenly it was all over.
Our rival news agency, PTI, had to run the report because it was a big disclosure. When the then home minister Gulzarilal Nanda was asked in parliament whether the report placed on the table was genuine, he said he could neither deny nor confirm it. This was quite an embarrassing moment for the government. Parliament was up in arms. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri ordered a CBI inquiry into the matter.
Aware that he was unfamiliar with modern finance, Shastri picked L.K. Jha, an econo
mic expert, as his principal secretary. He was the founder of the PMO, which during Nehru’s time was confined to one officer, Tarlok Singh. Jha’s first job was to reconstitute the Planning Commission which he had wanted to join but had failed to do. He restricted a member’s tenure to five years. Tarlok Singh, by then the seniormost member, had to leave.
Shastri was not in favour of a planned economy but wanted to convey in deference to Nehru that there would be no break with past policy. He did not reverse any economic programme but declared a one year ‘holiday’ for the Plan. What this meant was that rather than taking up new projects or programmes, the old ones would be strengthened to consolidate gains.
I could sense Shastri’s approach when I discussed with him the questions he might face at his first press conference as prime minister. He held only one in Delhi throughout his tenure, unlike Nehru who had fixed the first Wednesday of every month for a press conference. Spelling out his approach, Shastri told me that his government’s priority would be to bring down food prices. This would allay the hardships of the common man. The second step, he said, was to have projects broken up in terms of jobs. He would ask all ministries to translate the outlay into the number of people they would employ. He did not speak about socialism but would often speak about the Gandhian concept of self-sufficiency in rural India.
Shastri’s first encounter in foreign affairs was his participation in the non-aligned conference at Cairo in 1964. I found him cautious and a little overawed. He felt he did not enjoy Nehru’s stature. Still, he was determined to leave his own imprint, however hazy. He did quite a commendable job but was always compared to Nehru.