New information coming out of the latest biography of Dalai Lama, the exiled ruler and supreme spiritual leader of Tibet, indicates that the mysterious death of Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent in 1966 could also be related to some severe international developments and forces at play that has remained out of the popular public narrative. The book reveals that the Shastri government would recognize the Dalai Lama’s Dharamshala establishment as the ‘Tibetan Government in Exile’ soon after his return from Tashkent. But the entire process dropped through following the sudden and mysterious death of the Indian Prime Minister at Tashkent.
As against Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru’s openly pro-China inclinations during the 1959 and 1961 voting in the General Assembly of the United Nations on the issue of Tibet, the author points out that the Indian government under Mr Shastri’s stewardship strongly supported and voted in favour of the exact resolution on Tibet when it was presented before the UN in 1965. According to the author, Mr Shastri was in regular touch with the Dalai Lama and used to write ‘long letters to His Holiness’ who too was a great admirer of Mr Shastri.
On an early day in January 1966, the Dalai Lama received a message from W.D. Shakabpa. His representative in New Delhi carried the news that he had been longing to hear since the day he entered India in 1959 after his 17-day-long escape from the guns of the Chinese Army in Tibet. Shakabpa informed the Dalai Lama that “the Indian government was prepared to recognize the Tibetan government in exile and that he would receive a definite answer once the Prime Minister (Lal Bahadur Shastri) returned from Tashkent.” These details come from the latest biography of the Dalai Lama, written by his closest associate Tenzin Geyche Tethong, who worked with him for over 44 years in different capacities, including 30 years as his Private Secretary. The book, titled “Dalai Lama, An Illustrated Biography”, has been published by Roli Books and carries some rare and historic photographs too.
Shakabpa was heading the ‘Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’ in New Delhi, which functions as India’s de-facto ‘Embassy of Tibet’. His primary assignment in New Delhi was to serve as the hot link between the government of India and the ‘Central Tibetan Administration’ (CTA) in Dharamshala. But unfortunately for Tibet and Dalai Lama, the claws of death snatched away Mr Shastri before he could even start his journey back home from the Soviet city of Tashkent on 11th January 1966. Just a few hours before he died, he had signed the historic India-Pakistan truce, which has come to be known as the ‘Tashkent Agreement’.
As per the limited information made available to the people of India by the successive governments in New Delhi since that fateful day, PM Shastri suffered a ‘heart attack’ minutes after taking his dinner, was preparing to sleep in his private guest room, and died before any meaningful medical support could reach him. He had signed the ‘Tashkent Agreement’ with his Pakistani counterpart, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who was at that time the dictator President of Pakistan and the architect of a military attack on India. Interestingly, despite the severe imbalance of military hardware against India due to the direct support of the USA in favour of Pakistan, Indian defence forces had turned the table on Pakistan and had snatched many strategic army posts along Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir borders.
This agreement was initiated under international pressure from both world power blocks, represented by the USA and USSR and the United Nations. The ‘Agreement’ practically forced Mr Shastri to give up all the military gains made by the Indian defense forces at a very high price of lives and war machinery. Various Congress governments successfully built up the narratives in India over the years; Mr Shastri died because of his worries about the public backlash on his return to India. The public fears about the fakeness of such narratives have failed to pass for many reasons. One reason is that no postmortem was carried out on the body of Mr Shastri. Another is that no appeal for a thorough enquiry into the circumstances and factors that led to his death was attended to by India’s political or administrative bosses.
The new information regarding the Shastri government’s plans to give official recognition to the Dalai Lama’s ‘government in exile’ gives an altogether new dimension to this issue and raises serious questions about the role of China in the sudden and mysterious death of PM Shastri. It is a well-known fact that until the India-China war of 1962, Pakistan, a close ally, rather a satellite of the US block in the cold war against USSR and communism, had perpetually stood on the wrong side of China. But soon after its war with India and worsening relations between India and China, Beijing found a new ally in Pakistan with a large enough anti-India meeting ground to further develop this ‘friendship’.
For Pakistan, too, which has been under the military dictatorship of General Ayub Khan since 1958 and the General’s government thrived on fears and widespread hatred for India, China proved to be a suitable ally. So much so that the Pakistani government happily ceded the Shaksgam region of Pakistan-Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (POJK) to China to help the latter for fortifying its borders with India and to construct the strategic Karakoram Highway through this region.
As a result of China’s attack on India in 1962 by using the occupied Tibetan territory as its launch pad, the ‘Hindi-Cheeni Bhai-Bhai’ spirit fast gave way to anti-China feelings in India. Even Pandit Nehru, who had been blindly supporting China on the issue of Tibetan occupation, lost faith in Beijing. Until then, Nehru had stood in the way of America and her allies when they brought resolutions in favor of Tibet and against China in the UN in 1959 and 1961. But following China’s attack on an unprepared India and India’s military humiliation, the anti-China and pro-Tibet sentiments started gaining ground in India. So much so that in December 1965, when a resolution on Tibet was placed and discussed in the UN General Assembly, India’s representative Rafiq Zakaria not only blasted China with a high-voltage speech but also voted in favour of the resolution. China has taken note of the meeting between the Dalai Lama and PM Shastri too, which took place in Calcutta in October 1966 and the special protection the New Delhi government provided to the Dalai Lama during the India-Pakistan war during and after the September war.
Shastri was a complete contrast from a supportive and obedient Nehru who would concede on almost every point before the Beijing leaders. He was emerging as a new challenge to Chinese designs and dreams. The changing face of India and its leadership had been already on the show before the Chinese and the world when a stubborn and determined Shastri led his poorly equipped defense forces to give a bleeding nose to General Ayub Khan and his army and air force which were armed up to their teeth with the most modern American weapons. Shastri represented a qualitative and a quantitative change in New Delhi’s policy towards China, especially in Tibet.
It was, therefore, not surprising that Beijing leaders could also know what Dalai Lama’s representative could see coming up soon in New Delhi. However, the unfortunate part of the Shastri story is that the Indian establishment failed to protect its brilliant national leader. Still worse fact is that neither the Indian leadership nor the bureaucrats in the Home Ministry or the Ministry of External Affairs could develop enough wisdom or guts to go deeper to solve the mystery even decades after the unfortunate death of their Prime Minister in a foreign land. The only explanation could be the spell of the Meera Sinha Bhattacharjea Syndrom that a sizeable section among them remained afflicted with, which keeps them more worried about the sensitivities of Beijing leaders than their national interests.