´óÏó´«Ã½

Was India's third prime minister, , murdered? Officially, the diminutive leader died of a heart attack in a dacha in Tashkent, hours after he signed a with the Pakistani president, , on 11 January 1966, some four months after the end of the second war between the two neighbours. But if you believe surviving members of Mr Shastri's family and an enthusiastic Delhi-based journalist, Mr Shastri was possibly poisoned.

What has added grist to the conspiracy mill is the it has in its possession pertaining to Mr Shastri's death. In response to a right to information request by the enterprising , a journalist and a self-proclaimed "declassification enthusiast", the prime minister's office said that making public that document could "harm foreign relations, cause disruption in the country and cause breach of parliamentary privileges". Totally non-controversial in his life, Mr Shastri has become controversial in death.

I did a little digging around and found that most of the better-known accounts of Mr Shastri's death have raised no doubts - death by heart failure. In his magisterial India After Gandhi, historian writes Mr Shastri "died in his sleep of a heart attack". In her writes that after he "went to bed in the early hours of the 11th January, Mr Shastri had a fatal heart attack".

The most vivid account is in my dog eared copy of the long out-of-print book India, The Critical Years by veteran Indian journalist . He was part of the prime minister's travelling press corps to Tashkent.

Mr Nayar writes that the Indian prime minister was already a heart patient, having suffered two attacks. He had had a hectic day, holding talks with the Russian premier, - the Russians having brokered the pact - and his officials and had had very little sleep.

"That evening," writes Mr Nayar, "I met by chance his personal physican Dr RN Chugh, who accompanied him. I asked him how Shastri was standing the strain. He looked up to the sky and said: 'Everything is in the hands of God'." Mr Nayar does not elaborate.

Mr Nayar then proceeds to describe the fateful night in Agatha Christie-like detail. Since he was to travel in the prime minister's airplane early next morning to Kabul en route to Delhi, he retired to bed early an hour before midnight. "I must have been dozing when someone knocked at my door and said: 'Your prime minister is dying.' A Russian lady was waking up all the journalists," writes Mr Nayar.

A group of journalists then sped to Mr Shastri's dacha from the hotel. On arriving, Mr Nayar found a grief-stricken Mr Kosygin standing on the verandah. "He could not speak and only lifted his hands to indicate Shastri was no more."

When Mr Nayar went in, he found Dr Chugh being questioned by a group of Soviet doctors through an interpreter. In the next room Mr Shastri lay still on his bed. The journalists emptied the flower vases in the room and spread them on the prime minister's body. Mr Nayar also noticed an overturned thermos flask on a dressing table some 10 feet away from Mr Shastri's bed and wondered whether the prime minister had struggled to get to open it to get water. "His slippers were neatly placed near the bed; it meant that he walked barefoot up to the dressing table in the carpeted room," Mr Nayar writes.

Mr Nayar then pieces together the events leading up to Mr Shastri's death - of how the prime minister reached the dacha around 10 pm after a reception, chatted with his personal staff and asked his cook Ram Nath to bring him food "which was prepared in the dacha by the Russians". It gets more interesting from here. "In the kitchen there was a Soviet cook helped by two ladies - both from the Russian intelligence department - and they tasted everything, including water, before it was served to Mr Shastri," Mr Nayar writes. Remember this was at the height of the Cold War and India-Pakistan hostilities and the security paranoia was extreme.

As Mr Shastri tucked into a frugal spinach and potato curry meal, he received a call from a personal assistant in Delhi and sought the reaction to the Tashkent agreement back home. Then he spoke to his family in Delhi. He asked his eldest daughter, Kusum, about how she had found the peace pact. "She replied, 'we have not liked it'," writes Mr Nayar. "He asked 'what about her mother?' She too had not liked the declaration, was the reply given." A crestfallen Mr Shastri, according to Mr Nayar, then remarked: "If my own family has not liked it, what will the outsiders say?"

Mr Nayar writes that the prime minister's wife did not come on the line to talk despite many requests - a contention that is disputed by many of his surviving family members. This upset Mr Shastri. "He began pacing up and down the room... For one who had had two heart attacks earlier, the telephone conversation and the walking must have been a strain," he writes. Then his staff gave him milk and some water in the flask. Around 1.30 am, his personal assistant Sahai, according to Mr Nayar, saw Mr Shastri at his door, asking with difficulty, "Where is the doctor?"

The staff woke up Dr Chugh, while the prime minister's staff, assisted by Indian security men, helped Mr Shastri walk back to his room. "If it was a heart attack - myocardiac infarction, and obstruction of blood supply to the heart muscles, as the Soviet doctors said later - this walk," writes Mr Nayar, "must have been fatal."

Mr Nayar writes - presumably from an eyewitness account by the personal assistant - that Mr Shastri began coughing "rockingly", touched his chest and became unconscious. Dr Chugh arrived soon after, felt the prime minister's pulse, gave an injection into the heart, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but to no avail. More doctors arrived. They found Mr Shastri dead. The time of the death was 1.32 am.

Talk about foul play began as soon as the body arrived in Delhi. Mr Nayar says the prime minister's wife asked him why Mr Shastri's body had turned blue. He told her that when "bodies are embalmed" they turn blue. Mrs Shastri was not convinced. She asked about "certain cuts" on Mr Shastri's body. Mr Nayar told her he hadn't seen any. "Apparently, she and others in the family suspected foul play," Mr Nayar writes.

They still do. I went to meet , the prime minister's grandson and a senior member of the main opposition , recently to hear the family side of the story. He told me that Mr Nayar's account of the telephone conversation that Mr Shastri had with his family members that night was inaccurate, and that he HAD spoken to his wife. Mr Singh, who was two years old when his grandfather died, says that one person was detained on "suspicion of poisoning Mr Shastri", but was released. Mr Nayar's book has no mention of this.

"Knowing the truth is important for our family. The truth has never been out," Mr Singh told me. Then he talked about the cold war politics of the day, and who would have gained from poisoning Mr Shastri who had served as prime minister for only 19 months: a foreign power, political rivals. Some of it sounds remotely credible; other bits outlandish. But Mr Singh and the nation deserve to know why the government is holding the paper about Mr Shastri's death back. How will it imperil our foreign relations? With whom? India has a notoriously ; the state almost encourages a statist historiography. The truth should be out and the controversy should be buried, once for and all.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Why are some of India's Hindu nationalist leaders in love with Mohammed Ali Jinnah? The founder of Pakistan is a , treated as a minor conspiratorial figure, and considered to be the architect of the bloody partition of the country on religious lines in 1947. Even the secular Congress party abhors him.

So when leaders of the Hindu right sing praises for Mr Jinnah, they stir up a hornet's nest. Four years ago, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), , who led a successful Hindu revivalist movement in the early 1990s, praised the founder of Pakistan during a visit to the country. This raised the hackles of Hindu fellow travellers and invited scorn from the Congress party. The BJP leader even offered after the kerfuffle.

Now Jaswant Singh, a doughty senior party leader and former finance and external affairs minister, who counts people like as his friends and chess, golf and polo as his pursuits, has praised Mr Jinnah as a "self made man" who "created something out of nothing and single-handedly stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him."ÌýHe has expanded on his thesis in his new, unimaginatively titled 669-page book Jinnah: India-Partition- Independence, which released this week.

What is surprising is Mr Singh's defence of Mr Jinnah in a in the run-up to the book release where he is even more effusive in his praise of the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) as Mr Jinnah is remembered as in his homeland. He demolishes the popular Indian historiographyÌýof Mr Jinnah being a Hindu-basher and a born demagogue. "That certainly he was not," says the BJP leader. "His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan."
Ìý
Then Mr Singh goes on to say that India misunderstood Mr Jinnah "because we needed to create a demon". He insists the Congress party's majoritarian instincts were responsible for the federalistÌýMr Jinnah turning away from the idea of India and asking for a separate nation for Muslims.

Yet Mr Jinnah began his political career with the Congress and until after World War I remained India's best "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Biographer says he was as "as enigmatic as Gandhi, more powerful than Nehru, and one of the most charismatic leaders and least known personalities". Historians like believe that though Mr Jinnah "remained a secularist of sorts until his death, but also at times... willing to use communal antagonism in a strategic way."

Listen to Mr Jinnah before the formation of Pakistan, raising the spectre of Hindu majoritaranism:

"We Muslims have got everything - brains, intelligence, capacity and courage- virtues that nations must possess. But two things are lacking, and I want you to concentrate your attention on these. One thing is that foreign domination from without and Hindu domination here, particularly on our economic life that has caused a certain degeneration of these virtues in us."

Or listen to him after a meeting with Egyptian and Palestinian Arab leaders in 1946:

"I told them of the danger that a Hindu empire would represent for the Middle-East... If a Hindu empire is achieved, it will mean the end of Islam in India, and even in other Muslim countries."

At the same time, it is true that Mr Jinnah felt short changed by the Congress. On 26 July 1946, Jinnah and his working committee spoke about Muslim India having

"exhausted, without success, all efforts to find a peaceful solution of the Indian problem by compromise and constitutional means; and whereas the Congress is bent upon setting up Caste-Hindu Raj in India with the connivance of the British..."

In Mr Singh's book, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress emerge as some of the principal architects of the partition. He writes that the Congress "overestimated its strength, its influence, and its leaders were extremely reluctant to accept Jinnah as the leader of just not the Muslim League but eventually of most Muslims in India".
Ìý
There is some truth in all this. But in trying to say that Mr Nehru and Congress were largely responsible for partition, Mr Singh is possibly ignoring the larger political realities of the time. Mr Jinnah positioned himself as the "sole spokesman of Pakistan", but his party Muslim League which led the Pakistan movement, won the last election in 1946 in British India with the number of Muslim voters at significantly no more than 10 to 12% of the total Muslim population in that year. As many historians say, the nation of Pakistan came into being "even before its mass base was established." The fault lines have widened since.
Ìý
But to return to the original question, why did Mr Singh write this book?ÌýDoes it have to do with his wider political ambitions? He is a self-professed liberal in a party of hawks. In 1992, at the zenith of the BJP's rathyatra (motorised chariot) movement to whip up support for a temple at Ayodhya, Mr Singh did not attend a single function on the road. His induction into the cabinet in the late 1990s was vetoed once by the party's ideological fountainhead, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Ìý
With his mentor and BJP's only pan-Indian leader and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee fading out and Mr Advani himself weakened by political defeat and party infighting, is Mr Singh trying to position himself as a liberal party leader-paterfamilias that Mr Vajpayee once occupied? It is difficult to say.
Ìý
In a sense, one could argue, Mr Singh kills two birds with one stone with his revisionist take on the partition - as a senior leader of the main opposition party, he goes for the Congress's jugular by holding it responsible for the partition along with Mr Jinnah; and by heaping encomiums on Mr Jinnah, he endears himself to Indian Muslims, who have been lukewarm to the BJP's overtures. Is Mohammed Ali Jinnah a way for Mr Singh to reach out to Muslims and push his political ambitions in a party which appears to have lost its way in modern India? We will know in the days ahead.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Is cocking a snook at Bollywood? Well, yes and no, if his new film is anything to go by. (Rascal), a 130-minute gangster film, is a work of astonishing bravura, far removed from the tripe and treacle of Bollywood. It is now India's most-talked about film - people are sharing their . It also takes him, again, to the top of the pile of India's filmmakers.

Bhardwaj is an audacious filmmaker. Cinema-crazy Indians are addicted to linear stories with happy songs and sunny, pat endings. But Kaminey turns every Bollywood cliché - lost and estranged brothers, the uber-exaggerated villains, the coy and cloying love interest, the retribution and redemption - on its head like no other film I have seen. He takes a chocolate-faced hero who has done very little in his earlier work apart from looking good and serenading girls and makes him do two gritty, grimy roles, one with a stammer and the other with a speech defect. He takes a former beauty pageant winner turned actress, transforms her into an ordinary Mumbai girl and keeps her in tight histrionic check.

The result is a veritable tour de force studded with contemporary tropes. There's a diabetic, chauvinistic political thug, a gangster called Mikhail who takes after Heath Ledger's rather than anything else, and an ensemble of more gangsters from home and abroad. With its vertiginous hand-held camera work and an infectious soundtrack fusing nu folk with almost everything else, Kaminey is a stupendous audio-visual experience, reminiscent ofand work. The writing is crisp, and like his previous work, Bhardwaj edits ruthlessly and abruptly, never stretching a dramatic moment to banal extremes - another Bollywood affliction. Kaminey is a work of precision and panache.

Bhardwaj is a truly sophisticated director. Some critics are already calling his work 'new Bollywood'. I don't quite know what it means. But I do feel that he is going to be the first Bollywood filmmaker who will take his work to international audiences to great popular and critical acclaim. He tells a good yarn in his own edgy, unique and unconventional way. He has a great sense of the dialogue and music, being a proficient musician himself.
So far, unlike most Bollywood directors, he has not repeated himself - he has made a wicked children's film, a Shakespearean take on feudalism, politics and gangsterism in India's political heartland and a loose adaptation of Macbeth. Bad, dark guys and the underbelly are close to Bhardwaj's heart, and that is what makes his cinema so exciting in a largely cliché-saddled industry. After Kaminey, he takes his position as the godfather of Bollywood cool.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

I spotted him outside our office in Delhi. An earnest looking young man, briefcase in hand, strode through the gathering downtown crush wearing a clunky white mask, his eyes darting from side to side. He looked straight out of a novel: a potential victim of a predatory, mutating virus on the loose in a big city. He also appeared to be a victim of the these days.

Everywhere I go people are talking about the flu. It doesn't help that this is the 'flu season' in Delhi anyway when almost everybody is sneezing, coughing, feeling feverish or retching. When I caught a bug last week and stayed in, well-meaning friends called in to say that I should get tested for the flu. When I went to a neighbourhood clinic for a routine examination, the pretty receptionist reminded me that a few swine flu cases had been reported in the area where I live. I ran back home.

On return, I found television news agog with manic anchors spreading panic. A programme on the flu called itself with an emotive visual of a glum looking father and son, presumably on their way to a testing facility. I wondered what was unknown about the flu; the programme gave me no answers. I picked up a newspaper and counted 21 stories about the flu; there were barely five stories on the impending drought. The hysteria was now threatening to disrupt my peace.

So I went back to work to be greeted by more talk about the flu. Then I found my inbox running over with emails about homeopathic and other remedies to keep the pandemic away from my door. My favourite: eat raw garlic, two to three times a day; eat raw onion; eat fresh raw ginger, two to three times a day. With the stink I would raise after having this potent prophylactic mix, I risked getting lynched, even if I manage to beat the flu.

Indians love hyperbole. So it is with the swine flu 'debate'. Authorities are asking people to avoid crowded places "during weekends". A because the actors fear getting infected. A friend called from Pune whining that his bosses were asking him to go on business meetings wearing a mask. And the latest scare is about the main anti-flu drug having side effects, despite sensible doctors saying it is nothing much to worry about. Every such media-fuelled 'outbreak' is also an opportunity for shamans and scams: one channel is even reporting a "H1N1 mask scam". Now the authorities have shut down schools and colleges in Mumbai for a week after three flu deaths in the city. All over, the fear is legitimate; the response is exaggerated.
What is conveniently forgotten is that India is no stranger to vicious outbreaks of fell diseases. Four years ago, just in a single month. A fourth of these patients - nearly 300 - died. But encephalitis in a badly governed, poor state was not sensational enough for saturation coverage. Not many of the patients had possibly ever travelled outside the village. Apart from its name, there was nothing remotely global about this outbreak.

The same year, a , and in just about two months, affected over 400 people. Forty eight of them died. To put things into perspective, just under two million people contract malaria in India every year. And tuberculosis kills 325,000 people here every year.

But swine flu with double digit deaths - undoubtedly this number will rise - in a month and a thousand-odd patients gets disproportionate media and attention because it is imported, and affects the more affluent among us, people who go abroad and come in contact with others. In a country where globalisation means nothing to over 70% of the people, the brouhaha over H1N1 is another example of the tyranny of the minority.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

A jarring signature tune and a ring of fire fade out to a modern-day inquisition. In a studio bathed in blue lights sits a middle-aged tattooed woman in a pink sari. She calls herself an astrologer and a purveyor of all things spiritual. Opposite her, atop an uncomfortable perch, sits the show's rakish anchor, a little-known TV actor. Around them squat the astrologer's amused-looking guru with a perpetual grin, a sullen-looking father, a smiling mother and more family.

I am glad I have finally caught up with . The questions fly thick and fast.

As a teenager, did you drink milk from a feeding bottle?

The astrologer winces and looks down. Then she regains her composure, looks up at the anchor, bites her lips and suppresses a giggle.

"Yes," she says, after a pause.

The jangling music is in its crescendo; the anchor calls for the results of a polygraph test on the astrologer; he finds that the answers match and - voila! - announces some reward.

Things begin to get just a bit steamier and thornier now - by Indian standards, at least.

Do you like reading the sex column in women's magazines?

Clashing cymbals and moaning synthesisers follow the question. The astrologer fidgets in her seat, looks away, and then fixes her gaze at the anchor, who a top TV critic in town has found "seriously dishy", according to her column.

"Yes ji (sir)," replies the woman, after a long pause intercut by close-ups of her grinning guru and befuddled parents.

Now the astrologer is breathing heavily. The anchor asks her why.

"I am trying to stay calm. I take normal, deep breaths (sic). I am a religious person. I do prayers and various functions. I also solve heartbreaks. This is heartbreak season!" she giggles nervously.

The posers continue. Have you ever duped a client? Yes. Have you had a relationship with a man without knowing anything about him? Yes, says the woman. That was the two years ago. "The man lied about everything, even his name. After that I became spiritually inclined."

It is time for the question by turns described as soul-churning, culture-destroying and family-threatening - the question for which the show has gained infamy.

Do you love your father?, the anchor asks the astrologer.

The music almost blows the set off this time. The father is a divorcee. He is calm. Before he can answer, it is time for a break.

Four minutes and 13 adverts later, we return to the show to find out whether the astrologer loves her father. She doesn't disappoint.

"No, I don't," she says.

The camera closes in on the father: he appears to be unruffled. The story unfolds: he left the astrologer's mother and remarried. The father is a generous man.

"I am just a rubber stamp in my daughter's life. It's just my surname she carries. How can she love me?" he says.

And so it goes on and on. This is Sach Ka Saamna or Face the Truth, which seems to be the biggest talking point in the country these days. Many Indians find it repulsive but religiously watch it every night, well past prime time, after putting their children to bed.

Politicians debate the show in parliament, calling it a threat to Indian culture - whatever that means in a nation of a billion people and many cultures. Sociologists and writers deconstruct the show and break their heads trying to find out whether shy and conservative Indians have come out of the closet to show their true colours.

The show's organisers are laughing all the way to the bank, but also have a sanctimonious alibi - they say the show fosters honesty as people who speak the truth are rewarded. Is Transparency International listening - sorry, watching?

Apparently, people in the hot seat have been asked whether they have visited a brothel, had a child out of wedlock, dreamed of sleeping with various men, or urinated in a swimming pool.

The other night, when I caught the show, I found nothing to squirm about - what is the big deal about drinking milk from a bottle or catching the sex advice column in your friendly family magazine?

Also, it's just another reality TV show in this world of the glorification of hoi polloi with contrived situations, gasping anchors and participants looking for a shot at midnight fame (as in the case of this show) and some easy money. It's just much ado about nothing. It also makes the case that India - and Indians - have nothing better to do than get worked up over some silly TV show.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Hi. I'm Soutik Biswas and I'm the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News online correspondent in India, based in Delhi. I have also worked with newspapers and magazines in India and Singapore and am from .

You may remember me from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ India Election Train blog (the entries of which are now archived here) which covered the 18-day, eight-city, 6000km tour of India I took along with colleagues during the general elections in April and May. This time, of course, I hope to go on a much longer journey with you.

I joined the ´óÏó´«Ã½ some six years ago, and have travelled around the subcontinent covering many stories. But, in the end, no story is more fascinating than India's and how the world's biggest and most raucous democracy is evolving and facing up to its many challenges. The blog is also an effort to try to make sense of the vast changes sweeping the country.

When I'm not working, I listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of cinema. First movie seen: Oliver Twist. First music heard and loved: Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles. Last movies seen: Double Indemnity, M, and Miller's Crossing. Last music heard: Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood: Live at the Madison Square Garden.

My dream was once to work as a music journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. Or a writer on Mad magazine. Instead, I ended up covering the shenanigans of politicians and their ilk, among other things. But then, with apologies to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you can't always get what you want.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?