Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's second Prime Minister, dies in strange circumstances at the age of 61 in 1966.
Shastriji died on January 11, 1966, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (then the Soviet Union), one day after signing a peace accord ending the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. Many of Shastri's fans and close relatives refused to believe the circumstances of his death at the time, and have refused to believe them afterwards. Within hours of his death, conspiracy theories arose, and they have remained ever then. He was hailed as a national hero, and the Vijay Ghat memorial was named for him. Following Shastri's death, Gulzarilal Nanda was re-elected as Acting Prime Minister until Indira Gandhi was voted over Morarji Desai by the Congress Parliamentary Party to officially succeed him.
Related On This Day
Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, was born in Patiala, India, in 1949.
Rahul Dravid, Indian cricket batsman and captain, was born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India in 1973.
Priyanka Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's daughter, was born in Delhi, India, in 1972.
Nizam and Maratha fought in the Battle of Kharda in 1795.
Liam Hemsworth, an Australian actor, was born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1990.
William Hewlett, an American engineer and businessman who co-founded Hewlett-Packard, died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 87.
On January 13, 1995, Karan Arjun was launched in India theatres.
Zayn Malik, an English pop singer, was born in Bradford, England in 1993.
Geeta Basra, a British actress, was born in 1984.
Actor Imran Khan who appeared in Hindi films, was born on January 13, 1983.
Jeff Bezos, the American entrepreneur and creator of Amazon, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964.
Surya Sen "Master Da," an Indian freedom activist, was executed in 1934 at the age of 39.
Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand mountaineer who was the first to summit Mount Everest in 1953, died of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 88.
Anita Ekberg, Swedish actress and Miss Sweden 1950, died in 2015 at the age of 83.
Amrish Puri, an Indian actor, died of a brain haemorrhage in 2005 at the age of 72.
Swami Vivekananda, an Indian Hindu spiritual guru and pivotal player in the introduction of Yoga to the Western world, was born in Kolkata, India, in 1863.
Agatha Christie, a British crime novelist, died in 1976 at the age of 85.