Who Killed Shastri? by Vivek Agnihotri

Author:Vivek Agnihotri [Agnihotri, Vivek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

17

The Controversial Medical Report

Our independence is full of insurmountable difficulties. We are poor and weak. Demotivated and under-confident. Doubt, discouragement, corruption and exploitation are the common features of this difficulty. There is cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything at all, an increase in dishonesty, self-growth at the cost of the weak and an obsession with pleasure by sacrificing higher things. Wherever you go, whoever you meet and whatever you hear carry a great expectation for the worst. There is defeatism and pessimism. People who fought for freedom are left with no fuel. They have given in to the authority, sycophancy and compromise. The government is in the business of deceiving the innocent masses. But I know when too much darkness envelopes us, we must prepare for the sun to shine. The sun will shine on India when our children will become adults. That is when the old order and the tyranny of the authority will go and a new India will emerge.

As I sat reading my father’s diary, I realised that I was rediscovering my father so late in life and with him, the India that I didn’t know.

‘Has India changed in all these years? Have the children who became adults at the turn of the century really defeated the tyranny of authority? Has the sun spread its light and warmth on us?’

These were just a few of the questions swirling in my mind.

The man sitting in front of me was heading the research of an event that remains a mystery even 50 years later. Does he see darkness or the light? When he started the research with me, the only question he asked was, ‘How can a prime minister’s death remain a mystery even after five decades?’ Now, after a year of research, all he said was, ‘I don’t think that even after five more decades, we would be able to solve this mystery.’

‘Sir, I don’t think this system can ever reveal the truth. This system isn’t made to empower people, instead it is made to keep them in the dark so that they spend all their lives inside a tunnel, hoping to find the light someday but that someday will never come,’ Docsaab had once summed up his experience in this manner.

‘What do you think is the real problem?’ I had asked him.

‘That our system is built on the grave of honesty, transparency and accountability,’ he had replied.

On a normal day, I would have challenged such pessimism but what struck me hard was that between my freedom fighter father and the millennial boy Docsaab, nothing has changed. The system defeats the optimism of its own citizens.

As we progressed further, these lingering thoughts got more reinforced. Docsaab read out the medical report of Shastri’s death as it had been read out in the Parliament. ‘During all the days of his stay in Tashkent, as well as on the evening of 10thJanuary 1966, the Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, felt well. He never complained about his health.

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