On Lal Bahadur Shastri's birth anniversary, son remembers his last birthday

Lucknow: Anil Shastri, son of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, vividly remembers the legendary leader's last birthday, especially the cutting of a cake resembling a Patton tank used by Pakistani forces against India. He said the celebrations on October 2, 1965, as compared to Shastri's previous birthday, were much higher as he had emerged as a hero, especially after the India-Pakistan war.

"I describe him as an honest, sincere, committed, dedicated and a fine gentleman, a brave person and a decisive man," Anil, a Congress leader, said about his father.

Recalling Shastri's last birthday, he said, "Thousands of people from different walks of life had gathered at 10 Janpath, then the prime minister's official residence, to greet my father. At the time, a Congress leader had brought a cake, which resembled a Patton tank and urged my father to cut it.

"My mother Lalita Shastri expressed her unwillingness to the idea saying, "Hamare yahan cake kaatna sahta nahi hai," (cutting a cake is considered inauspicious in our family). But the visitors insisted saying it was not just a cake but a Patton tank. And eventually, the cake was cut," Anil, a former Union minister recalled.

Narrating an incident wherein Shastri scolded him for using the official car, a Chevrolet Impala, Anil said, "He got angry, took the logbook from the driver and told him to take money from my mother for the distance covered."

When the country was reeling under food shortage after the US refused to send wheat, Shastri had appealed to the people to undertake fast, but not before asking his own children to make the same sacrifice.

"He checked whether we, the children in the family, could observe fast. Only after he was convinced that children in the family could do so, he appealed to the people of the country to go without food for sometime," Anil recalled.

"This had a tremendous impact and this was the reason Shastriji's credibility was so high. People had faith in him as there was no difference in his words and actions," he said.

After a rail accident in 1956, Shastri resigned as the railways minister taking moral responsibility. Narrating this incident, Anil said he was seven years old at the time. "I had asked him, 'babuji, you have resigned but you were not the loco pilot.' His replied saying, 'bete, I am the driver of my ministry'."

Shastri was born on October 2, 1904, in Uttar Pradesh's Mughalsarai and passed away on January 11, 1966, in Tashkent, which was part of the USSR and is now in Uzbekistan.