In Sickness and in health

Imagine if TV cameras been there to capture an almost blind President S. Radhakrishnan in 1963. Or an invalid Jawaharlal Nehru returning to Delhi from Bhubaneswar in early 1964. Or the iron man Sardar Patel in his wheelchair after taking over as Home Minister in 1948. Or the legendary Govind Ballabh Pant unable to move around as Home Minister without a stick, his hands trembling and head shaking.

While the Indian media has not fought shy of attacking the establishment, it has been shy of writing about the health and personal relations of political personalities and this has, by and large, remained unchanged over the years. It may partially explain the strong reaction to the Time article.

What is more, the magazine did not just write about what it called Vajpayee’s health problems, it drew a link between them and the fact that he was the man who had his finger on the nuclear button. So was he a man to trust?

While the piece and its conclusion can be faulted as sloppy reporting—the only people quoted on record are hardline MP B P Singhal who can always be trusted with a hawkish quote and a magazine editor—the Government’s ministers and the BJP functionaries have over-reacted.

They have given needless currency to the PM’s health. With newspapers printing the Time article on their frontpages, even as they criticised it, the controversy is being discussed not just by the magazine’s readers but all across.

Moreover, it has prompted criticism of the government’s crude attempt to get back—Time’s reporter Alex Perry has since been summoned to explain his multiple passports.

Ironically, all of this comes at a time when the Western media has been overwhelmingly on the side of New Delhi in the current Indo-Pak standoff, emphasising that Pak President General Pervez Musharraf must deliver.

It is now a matter of time before the restraint exercised by the Indian media to lay off certain subjects, gives way to more aggressive coverage. Western newspapers and TV channels unabashedly question Tony Blair’s son or George Bush’s daughter over minor violations of the law. The Indian voter may soon insist that there is nothing private about a public figure.

Over the years, India has revered age and experience. With the exception of Rajiv Gandhi, the country has thrown up leaders at the top who are in their sixties and seventies, and people have been used to leaders in top positions who are ailing.

The history of independent India is replete with these figures; they include Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chief Ministers and Ministers of the Union:

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,

who succeeded Rajendra Prasad as President, was almost blind, a year after he took over as President, with cataract in both eyes. He could neither read nor write and spent most of his time talking to visitors.

This almost created a major problem between him and Nehru. His biographer S Gopal records that on one occasion he told his friends jokingly that it might be worthwhile, after Nehru, for the President to take charge of the government temporarily and set things right and then step aside for a democratically elected Prime Minister.

During the last year of his presidency, the 78-year-old President suffered a stroke, which numbed his right hand and slurred his speech. However, Indira Gandhi would not let him go on leave because of rumours that she did not want a second term for him but wanted Zakir Hussain instead. Radhakrishnan could not even attend the Republic Day parade in 1967.

Shankar Dayal Sharma

suffered from acute arthritis and he could only shuffle along, ever so slowly. There was the highly embarrassing incident of the news cameras capturing the President toppling over at the samadhi of Rajiv Gandhi.

Once Sitaram Kesri had come to call on him and this was a story Sharma told his friends at the time, in 1997. Kesri, then Congress President, had just withdrawn support to the UF Government. In his inimitable style, Kesri put his topi at the feet of the President. (Some said he felt he had a chance to become PM.)

Having bent down, Kesri could not lift himself up. Afflicted with arthritis, Sharma could not bend down to lift him up. For a few seconds, the two men were frozen. Then Sharma called for his ADC and Kesri was helped up.

President K R Narayanan

has been ailing for the last one and half years and he had to deliver his speech sitting down to the joint session of Parliament which passed POTA.

Jawaharlal Nehru,

the country’s first prime minister, remained in the saddle for many months after he suffered a stroke at the Congress session in Bhubaneswar in January 1964. He hardly made any public appearance after that and there were rumours at the time that Indira Gandhi had begun to exercise the levers of power. Nehru appeared at a press conference a week before he died on May 27, 1964.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

suffered a heart attack soon after he took over as Prime Minister, and was advised rest. He cancelled his visit to attend the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference in London and had to send TT Krishnamachari and Indira Gandhi in his place to represent him.

After his illness, Shastri had to take things easy, with several hours of rest in the afternoon, even though his short premiership was a turbulent period which included a war with Pakistan in 1965.

P V Narasimha Rao

in March 1991, flew to the Texas Heart Institute in the US to undergo bypass surgery. When he returned to India, he was getting ready to retire. He had packed up his bags at 9, Motilal Nehru Marg and suddenly Rajiv Gandhi died and by a quirk of fate, Rao was catapulted into the country’s highest seat.

Within weeks, his skin cleared, his cheeks glowed and his gait straightened. The man began to look younger, and lasted five years, opening up the economy and successfully defeating the designs of his adversaries to throw him out.

I K Gujral

needed a hearing aid when he was PM. The travails of V P Singh began after he demitted office. But for the last eight years, he has had to undergo dialysis every other day because of kidney failure, but that has not deterred him from political activity.

H D Deve Gowda

was much younger than Rao when the chief ministers pulled him out of Karnataka and installed him in the PM’s gaddi at the head of the United Front government. Gowda had a way of nodding off in the midst of a conversation—even at international conferences, because of a health problem. There is a story about his famous meeting in Zurich with the NSCN(M)’s T Muivah. It was said that the meeting took four hours because Gowda went off to sleep halfway.

M G Ramachandran

was battling for his life in a New York hospital in 1984 after a paralytic stroke when the AIADMK swept the polls again and he continued to remain Chief Minister. He remained an invalid CM for three years till his death in 1987.

Sheikh Abdullah,

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, was bedridden during the last few months of his life. Indira Gandhi withheld the news of his death for four hours to ensure the succession went off without a hitch, though Farooq Abdullah had taken over as the president of the National Conference 18 months earlier.

Sardar Patel,

India’s iron man and its first Home Minister, almost died in 1948, suffering a massive heart attack, five weeks after Mahatma Gandhi’s assasination. Jayaprakash Narayan and the socialists gunned for him, demanding his resignation for security failure, saying that a man of 74 had no business to look after departments which a person of 30 would find difficult to handle. In the few months before he died in 1950, his colleagues found him inattentive, forgetful, unable to hear properly. He did not come to North Block for weeks but functioned from home.

Govind Ballabh Pant,

Patel’s successor, was 73 years old, in 1960 and he could not move without the help of a stick.For many years he had been speaking in Parliament while sitting, his hands would tremble, his head would shake. But his mind was clear, and he continued to work 17-18 hours a day.

Dinesh Singh

continued to be Foreign Minister for a year and a half during Narasimha Rao’s premiership, even when paralysed, and insisted on addressing the UN General Assembly.

Ghani Khan Chowdhury

has repeatedly been elected MP from Malda though he is hardly able to walk. He had to be brought into the house in a wheel chair to vote in a confidence motion.