Shastri’s Death

Early in the morning of January 11, 1965, the morning following the signing of the Tashkent Declaration, Lal Bahadur Shastri died of a heart attack. There was a controversy over the death, with rumours floating that Shastri had been poisoned. The hand of the Central Intelligence Agency (of the USA) has been suspected in the matter (as also in engineering the death of Homi Bhabha in an air crash) as the West was wary of the nuclear aspirations of India and a disturbance in the balance of power in South Asia. The controversy has still not ended, especially as RTIs asking for relevant information have been turned down by the government.