On June 9, 1964, at the end of a 13-day mourning for Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri was sworn in as the country’s second prime minister. A week earlier the Congress parliamentary party had unanimously elected him its leader. At the end of the month he was scheduled to be in London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference to which considerably more importance was attached then than is the case now, with what is called CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meet). But that was not to be. The prime minister fell ill. Forced to stay at home, he deputed T. T. Krishnamachari and Indira Gandhi jointly to represent him at Marlborough House.   

What followed was in complete contrast with the total transparency that has been meticulously observed about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s heart bypass surgery. There was absolute silence about Shastri’s health. No government spokesperson or doctor treating the prime minister or any other official would even discuss the subject. Obviously, even after nearly two decades of independence, democratic India was still following the ancient taboo on any discussion of the ruler’s health.

Unfortunately, those that had issued the gag order failed to realize that whenever news is blacked out, rumour takes over. And the way rumours are blown out of all proportions, especially in this country, has to be seen to be believed. Eventually the penny dropped, and the Shastri family decided that something needed to be done to control the damage.

Consequently, the prime minister’s eldest son appointed himself as some kind of a surgeon-general of the country and started briefing the press (there was no media then). At his very first venture, he “fed” the assembled journalists “potato cutlets”, which, he claimed, his father had had for breakfast. There was no hiding the scepticism of his listeners.

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