So how significant is this achievement? It is definitely one to raise a toast to, but many sensible commentators rightly suggest that fans should not lose their head over it. Remember, India climbed to the top of the ICC rankings without beating Australia and South Africa - two of the world's toughest Test playing sides - on their turf, but that's how quirky rankings can be. As my friend Clayton Murzello writes: "It makes you wonder what sense do the rankings really make? But then, that's what happens when superiority or inferiority is decided only by statistics."

It's been a long, strange trip to the top of the Test pile for India. After Sunday, it had won 101 of the 433 Tests it had played in its 72-year Test history. (It has lost 136 and drawn 195 games.) That's a modest win rate of 23%. Compare that with India's one-day stats - 351 wins in 727 games since 1974, a win rate of nearly 50%.

Now look at India's most formidable foe, Australia - 333 wins in 714 Tests since 1877. That's an impressive win rate of 46%, double that of India.

But there is an interesting catch, pointing to the improvement in India's fortunes: since 2000, India has won 40 of the 103 Tests it played, and the win rate has climbed to nearly 40%. But during the same period, Australia clocked up an amazing win rate of over 68%, winning 77 of 112 Tests.

India's resurgence began with the maverick Saurav Ganguly taking over the reins of the team, and becoming one of its most successful captains ever with a curious mix of aggression and intransigence. Saurav's heir MS Dhoni carries the mantle of captaincy with a cool head.

So, it is time for some celebration, but, as commentators like Clayton say, "let us not go overboard" with this ranking feat. India's batting line up is undoubtedly the strongest in the world now, but its bowling, despite a decent pace battery, can be very patchy and infuriatingly inconsistent. India's fabled spin bowling reputation appears to be on the wane - and there are no exciting upcoming spinners on the domestic circuit. The team still lacks a top class all-rounder, a must in today's game.

So there is a lot of work to be done to make India a team that dominates world cricket, the way West Indies and Australia did not very long ago. Maybe this will never happen as the game mutates into Cricket Lite with newer, crowd-pulling, shorter versions of the game - including, who knows, even Tests in the future. What do you think?

Why has the compensation to the victims been so paltry? Why is there a thick fog over the extent of contamination of groundwater in the Union Carbide factory neighbourhood? Caught between NGOs and a secretive Big Government, nobody is quite sure what is happening.

And above all, many ask why those responsible have been allowed to go free? After all, they say, money - whatever the amount - cannot compensate for a crime of such magnitude, whether committed because of negligence or sabotage. If this happened in the West, campaigners say, the company would have been held to account, perhaps driven to bankruptcy by compensation claims. But since this is India and the poor are dispensable, justice in Bhopal has been a travesty.

Also what about the blot to Bhopal's image and its inglorious reputation as a 'gassed' dystopia? Locals say the city lost its innocence after the tragedy. "Life in Bhopal had been laid back and gentle. But the gas tragedy changed all that. Nowadays everybody whinges, that's all that they do," says Raj Kumar Keswani, the city's best-known journalist. "Also, the tragedy divided the people. In a strange way, people who got compensation are often reviled by people who didn't."

Mr Keswani should know. He has lived all of his 59 years in Bhopal and was the only journalist who cried himself hoarse for two years before the tragedy, saying the Union Carbide plant had lax safety procedures and that the city was "sitting on a volcano". He had written a series of articles on the doomed plant, petitioned the courts and worked the politicians. Nobody listened to him.

After the tragedy he challenged the government, accusing it of a sell-out to Union Carbide - the Indian government sued the company for $3bn but settled for 15% of the amount - and Mr Keswani became a mythic hero of sorts: Dominique Lapierre, for example, mentioned him in great detail without once talking to him while writing another best-seller. "He wrote that I used to go around in a car with a bagful of CDs because I was a music lover. Those days, as a struggling journalist, I had an old scooter and CDs hadn't even come to India," Mr Keswani laughs. This is one of my favourite Bhopal stories - it tells you how fact and fiction blur in the chaos of India.

The gas tragedy, in a perverse way, actually ended up oiling parts of the grassroots economy of Bhopal. As thousands of dollars of still inadequate compensation money poured in, this sleepy city was transformed, say its residents. Bhopal never had an economy of its own to speak of apart from one state-owned behemoth; the city of Indore to its west was always the commercial hub. Also, Bhopal belongs to one of India's most backward states - Madhya Pradesh - with human development indicators comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.

Twenty-five years later, Bhopal is a mini boom town, largely a result of India opening up its economy and partly because of the money that flowed in after the tragedy. It got some decent new hospitals, property grew and the city became the headquarters of a powerful vernacular media group which also publishes Harry Potter in Hindi. New malls are coming up and dozens of new private colleges - most of which are now suffering from lack of students - have opened up. Finally, Bhopal appears to giving its bustling cousin Indore a run for its money

Today, a street-smart, English-speaking social activist and darling of the international media and a street-fighting, hardboiled activist help the victims, in their own way, to live and fight for compensation. Maimed by gas, Bhopal's lost generation struggles to survive and to make sense of what is happening around them - pictures of children whose futures have been snuffed out by the gas make one's blood boil and leave a feeling of numbness and helplessness.

An anniversary like Bhopal's should be a solemn time to remember the dead and pledge to help the living dead, not become circuses of the kind they have become today. 1984 was India's annus horribilis - the army stormed the Golden Temple, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, Sikhs were massacred in revenge - but, in hindsight, Bhopal must count as the greatest tragedy of them all.

The story of Bhopal, as Mr Keswani says, is a story of a proud city and its people cheated and betrayed by a country and the world. For India, it is a collective shame and a disturbing reminder that its poor don't matter. Most of the time anyway.

All roads lead to Leopold Cafe in Mumbai these days, so I join the procession obediently one rainy afternoon.

Offices and schools in the city have shut mid-afternoon after a cyclone warning. Dark grey clouds hang menacingly on the horizon. Defying a light drizzle and gusty winds, office-goers and school children saunter on the seafront promenade. It makes more sense than rushing back to the hovel-like housing in which most of Mumbai's residents live.

In the bustling streets of Colaba, Leopold - "Since 1871 Getting Better with Age" - is buzzing with activity. The 138-year-old eatery, which was the first target of gunmen during last year's terror attacks, is full to the brim. Over 100 guests, mainly foreigners, occupy its 34 cheek-by-jowl tables.

The trauma of that terrible night - eight people died here, including three foreigners and two employees - is largely forgotten, and business is brisk. Horror sells along with its hugely popular chicken tikka masala and chilly beef: guests gape at the bullet marks on a shuttered shop front glass, the fraying walls and ceiling, and the cramped mezzanine bar. There are even 26/11 coffee cups to buy as memorabilia. "Bullet-proof Mumbai," says the writing on the cup. "No bullet can beat us."

Farzed and Farhang Jehani, the two enterprising brothers who own the place, are busy giving interviews to networks. "It always used to be a cult cafe," says Farzed, taking a break from the cameras. "After the attack, it has gone down in history as an iconic place. I heard that there was a debate on French TV about our restaurant." Outside, a paunchy private guard hired by the brothers to beef up security carries a metal detector in one hand and a stick in another. Presently, he is shooing away urchins haranguing backpacker clients for alms. "These children," he hollers, "are worse than the terrorists!"

I am checking out a bullet hole in the wall near the side exit when I catch a middle-aged gentleman reading Martin Amis over a plate of omelette. "You know why I am sitting here?" he chuckles. "Because I can jump out and make a quick exit if they come shooting again!" Black humour is never in short supply in Mumbai. It comes naturally to its residents from the realisation that securing 20 million of them with a 40,000-strong police force - underpaid, under-quipped and understaffed - is well nigh impossible. (To put things into perspective, New York has 37,000 policemen to look after a population of 8.27 million.)

"What security?" snaps one of the managers of the vast Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, when I ask him gently whether things have changed since the attack. (More than 50 people were killed by two gunmen here.) "Nothing has happened and..." he starts again, and stops when he realises I am a journalist. CST, as it is popularly called, is a railroad universe. Some 3.5 million passengers use it every day. More than 2,200 trains arrive and depart each day.

So I arrive there on a weekday morning in a car with dark windows, walk in with my backpack, openly avoiding the metal detector doors. Nobody asks me any questions. A sea of passengers surges through the shrieking doors, and nobody is stopped or checked.

When I seek information on security measures taken after 26/11, I am informed about increased baggage screening (I didn't spot any, but I am sure it happens sometimes), an increase in the number of closed-circuit cameras from 38 to 104 (to capture the aftermath), the deployment of 22 women constables (do they have information about female terrorists?), and some newly trained commandos. Standing near a shop called Curio Stall which sells bottled water, pillows, crisps and cola on the station concourse, I ask a station manager whether he feels safe working here.

"Oh, we are surrounded by Gods and temples," he says cheerily. "The Gods look after us."

"Tell me, is it possible to guard over three million people in one railway station?"

In a warren of grubby lanes not far away, the Chabad House Jewish Cultural Centre stands forlorn and shut. Six people, including the rabbi and his wife were murdered here before Indian commandos slid down from helicopters into the buildings and smoked out the killers.

When I looked around to meet members of Mumbai's minuscule Jewish community after the attacks, most refused. A pall of fear hung over an unnerved people. It is still not easy to meet community members. Inside Chabad House, the walls and floors are pock-marked by bullet holes and stained with dry blood, gory reminders of the bloody mayhem.

I get on the phone with Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, who is looking after the affairs of Chabad House. He tells me the new cultural centre is functioning from a discreet location, and people who come to live there are being screened.

"We will move forward with greater strength to keep the legacy of the people who died at the Chabad House alive," he says. "We will not run away". The Chabad House is a symbolic place, and in another year Rabbi Berkowitz says a decision will be taken whether they will return to the house, or move somewhere else. "But any which way, the house will remain a symbolic place."

Next door, in a century-old derelict building, residents are more worried about the roof falling on their heads rather than the next attack in the neighbourhood. During the commando operation, they say, their building rocked and shook. "It could fall on our heads any day. Can you please inform the authorities that they have to save us from getting buried under the debris of our house first?" implores Harishchandra Kashinath Awad, an employee of India's central bank, who lives with his wife and two sons in a tiny 120 sq ft room in the rocking house. It is a miracle in living, but then so is Mumbai.

I am sitting in a taxi in Mumbai with the gangly college drop-out and gang member-turned-tourist guide as he takes me on a quick "terror tour" of the places that were attacked. Nearly 170 people were killed by gunmen at a busy railway station, two posh hotels, a Jewish centre, a hospital and a hippy eatery.

As our car trundles through the rising downtown traffic, Saurabh continues to enlighten me in breakneck guide-speak.

"The terrorists got lost. They looked at their maps. But maps don't help in this crazy city. So Qasab ran and ran and gave up to the police, exhausted."

Our taxi comes to a halt on the road where a police patrol stopped Qasab's car and dragged him out after shooting his accomplice dead. "Qasab just got fed up and gave up." What about reports that the cops got him?

"Nah, that's all wrong. You think the police can do that? They are so fat!"

A year after the audacious attacks, the dividing line between fact and fiction has blurred in Mumbai. The official narrative of that terrible night is being challenged in many ways. The only thing we are sure of is that 10 gunmen walked into a city of 19 million people and wreaked havoc for 62 hours. Also, the gunmen were indoctrinated and trained across the border, in Pakistan.

Widows of senior policemen who were killed have challenged the authorities to come clean with the facts. Why is the bulletproof jacket of my husband missing? asks the wife of an officer who was gunned down that night, raising suspicions that the force had been buying sub-standard protective gear.

Another wife has written a book saying that the police owe an explanation about why reinforcements were not sent to her husband and his colleagues during the attack on the hospital; and why they were left to die on the streets for 40 minutes after being shot by the gunmen.

A day after the attacks, I visited the Mumbai police control room tucked away in a corner of the force's handsome colonial headquarters. I sought a timeline of telephone calls made to it relating to the attacks and of the police deployments on the night of the attacks.

The timeline I got did not match a number of other timelines that the papers reported, crediting them to the Mumbai police. Control room chatter from that night point to a confused and fumbling force. Now the former police commissioner has set the cat among the pigeons after saying that some of his colleagues did slip up badly. And a perfunctory investigation of the lapses hasn't helped matters.

The tourist guide's amnesia - or ignorance? - helps in the dissemination of a parallel narrative about the attacks. As our taxi turns into a narrow lane in the backstreets of Colaba where the Jewish centre came under attack, Saurabh - "I have 16 years experience as a guide," he says - tells me cheerily that "40 to 45 terrorists" entered Mumbai that day. "Most of them escaped. The police have no idea where they went. They may be still around, plotting their next attack."

Not that Mumbai's residents have any time or inclination to ponder whether they could be attacked again. They are used to living with insecurity, says Kumar Ketkar, newspaper editor and one of the city's leading thinkers. Some of the insecurities are life-long - like affording decent housing in a city where property is sometimes costlier than Tokyo or London.

Then there is the insecurity of survival: some 4,000 people alone die every year while commuting to work on Mumbai's busy suburban networks and choked roads. On the other hand, the wheels of commerce turn fastest here and opportunities abound. Life is cheap, and time is money. So there's no time to grieve in this Maximum City, as its best chronicler Suketu Mehta called it.

"There is a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. 26/11 has left behind an imprint of horror," says Mr Ketkar, sitting in his office in a building overlooking the sea. "But since Mumbai's people live with insecurity, they live for the day. They don't withdraw." Mr Ketkar remembers the streets of Delhi emptying out and the capital shutting down after seven in the evening during the peak of Sikh militancy in the 1980s. Nothing of that sort will ever happen in Mumbai, he assures me. "There will be no let-up in going out, having a good time."

There will also be no let-up in memorials with people holding candles and waxing eloquent on more accountability from politicians under the gaze of TV cameras. But only a fraction of them will turn out to cast their ballot on voting day. A politician will parade relatives of victims of the carnage to score brownie points. The police will crow about a $26m plan to equip the forces with modern guns and gizmos, never mind the fact that a few of their crack new commandos fainted during a mock exercise.

Like everything else, remembering the dead is good business. Some victims are cleverer than the rest - a hospital clerk who survived to tell his story after his throat was slashed by one of the attackers is charging journalists $125 for an interview. The manic media scrum helps.

Meanwhile, in the taxi on our terror whirligig, Saurabh says that life remains wretched for people like him, terror attacks or not. He sleeps on the streets near the Gateway of India because he cannot afford a home. His wife stays with an ex-gangster friend of his who has a roof over his head.

I ask him whether he believes that the city could be attacked again.

"Oh yes, it will happen again," Saurabh says dismissively. "Does anybody care?"

Is cricket losing its soul? Is the game being destroyed by a thoughtlessly punishing calendar, greedy officials, multiple formats and an increasingly mercenary spirit?

Some commentators, players, and coaches are beginning to believe so. A chorus of protest is rising about the state of the game and the chronic fixture congestion that is leading to player burnouts and fan ennui.

Crowds are sometimes thinning even in India, where the game is a religion. "Your wife was right. Cricket is boring," was the unbelievable headline of a recent cover story of an Indian magazine edited by a cricket-mad journalist.

The demand is loud and clear: Play less, play quality.

Consider October for proof of how the game's officialdom is reducing it to a crashing bore. The month began with the semi-finals of the Champions Trophy. Three days after the final in South Africa, there was the Challenger Trophy in India and the lucre- and entertainment-fuelled Twenty20 Champions League.

Now look at how the calendar has treated players from Australia: prior to the ongoing seven-match, one-day series against India, they have played in the super-rich Indian Premier League (IPL), the Wisden Trophy, the World Twenty20, the Ashes, two Natwest Series, the Champions Trophy, and the Champions League.

The upshot: five Australian players have been struck down by injury in India in the past 10 days or so. This is excluding fast bowler Mitchell Johnson, who played three matches despite a nagging ankle injury.

Since last October, India, the game's main engine and provider, have played 27 one-dayers, nine Tests and eight Twenty20 internationals. Indian players have also played the nearly two-month-long IPL, the Champions Trophy and the Champions League. Phew.

Rahul Bhattacharya, writer of Pundits From Pakistan, one of the finest cricket books I have read, says the comfort of the game is gone.

"Cricket has reached a stage," he says, "where even the committed fans don't know which teams are playing, when they are playing, who's playing for whom, and, because they are playing all the time, why they are playing at all."

The fine cricket historian Gideon Haigh echoes Bhattacharya's sentiments. "The sheer disorganisation of cricket's calendar is now itself fatiguing, and cannot but bring cynicism and contempt in its train," he writes. Clearly, the thrill is gone.

My friend, Sambit Bal, who edits Cricinfo, makes no bones about it. "Cricket needs reason and context," he says. "The Ashes is big because it has context. But much of the cricket today is meaningless. One series leads into another. The anticipation has gone out of it."

Two leading Indian historians and cricket buffs who have written extensively on the game don't appear to very happy with the state of affairs. Mukul Kesavan says he "thinks of Tests long gone" more than he watches cricket currently played. And Ramachandra Guha, writer of a seminal history of Indian cricket, says he has stopped commenting on the game. He doesn't say why, but I suspect he is simply tired of its excesses.

The excesses are spawning a new generation of players who may be no longer interested in playing for the country and more interested in the easy lucre of a 20-over jamboree. So much so that writer Anand Vasu, in a scathing indictment of the young Indian cricketer, wrote recently:

"There isn't one young person in the Indian team who plays the game solely for the joy of playing the game or because it's an honour to represent India. Being an Indian cricketer is a complex cocktail of commerce, social climbing, relevance and all round-acceptability. Yes, there's the small matter of runs and wickets. But anyone who gets that far is expected to deliver the details anyway."

Vasu writes a virtual epitaph for great cricketers as the game is debased by a overdose of a high-paying, high-thrills, low-quality format like Twenty20. "You will not find a cricketer in this generation who will play 100 Tests. This is simply because it isn't a realistic ambition to start with."

For more clues to the crisis in cricket, I turn to my favourite cricket writer Peter Roebuck. He listens to my fears and doubts about the future of the game, and sets out to clear and explain some of them.

Roebuck feels it's too early to conclude that Twenty20 will kill the game. He also says, surprisingly, that we play too much Test cricket. Too much? Aren't the pundits demanding more Test match games instead of more unending one-day match series?

"Too many Test matches are being played where the contest is thoroughly uneven. Let's not spoil Test cricket by overdoing it, " replies Roebuck. Interesting.

Roebuck is also worried about the spirit of the game. With players wearing multiple identities playing for the country, and a host of club sides in different formats which pay more than playing for the country, the age of the mercenary transnational cricketer could have arrived. Cricket's nationalistic ardour could be cooling. "The time has come," says Roebuck, "to instil the culture and meaning of the game to young cricketers. Otherwise, the game will be treated as a bank account or a plaything."

Roebuck cites the example of West Indian captain Chris Gayle. Thirty-year-old Gayle, a devastating batsman when in form, has played for six teams already, including the "national" team, and gone on record saying he "would not be so sad" if Test cricket died out.

Last year he played seven IPL matches for the Calcutta team before joining his team in England a mere two days before a Test match at Lords. "Gayle has become a mercenary," Roebuck wrote this week. "It does not seem much of a way to lead a team, let alone a proud cricketing tradition [that the West Indies enjoyed]."

"We are all servants and stewards of the game," says Roebuck. "You have to give to the game as much you take."

In the end, the game is a reflection of the times we live in. Cricket's prophet-philosopher CLR James famously said Bodyline - the intimidating cricket tactic devised by the English team to take on Don Bradman's Australians in 1932 - was the "violence and ferocity" of the age expressing itself in cricket.

"If and when society regenerates itself," James wrote, "cricket will do the same." And, as a prominent sports blog recently wondered: "As long as people keep paying, cricketers will keep playing, so the question is, have you had enough?".

I must confess that personally I am beginning to feel a little jaded.

The 44-year-old historian-travel writer is promoting his new book Nine Lives, an Indian Canterbury Tales of sorts, where he tells the stories of the lives of nine ordinary people across the country - and in one case, across the border in Pakistan - to explore the power of the sacred in modern India.

"Faith is not dying in India even as people become more materialist," he says. I couldn't agree more: faith in India is changing and mutating. We are witnessing the rise and rise of cults, and a thriving, cosy co-existence of local deities with the big, pan-Indian ones.
Divine enterprise is also flourishing - religion is big business.

Some of the stories in Nine Lives - presented largely in reported speech - are stunning examples of how the quotidian makes for the most engaging material - an austere Jain monk who starves herself to death, a Buddhist monk who joins the Indian army to fight the Chinese and ends up fighting the Pakistanis, a tantric who is a fan of Test match cricket, a low-paid prison warden who plays God for two months a year. Some of the early story drafts date back six years; and Dalrymple says he whittled it down to "nine lives, nine moral universes" from a long list of 23 stories.

Some years ago, Mark Tully worried about "spiritual pollution" due to the unbridled rise of materialism in India. I thought Tully was worrying too much. Even Dalrymple wonders in Nine Lives: "Does India offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast-developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?" I lob the question back to him.

"There has always been materialism in India," he says. "And one of the reasons there have been so many great renouncers in the country was because they were reacting, in part, against the excesses of materialism". Dalrymple says that when he is quizzed by inquisitive readers on his book tours abroad about materialism in India, he says: "My Punjabi neighbours in Delhi are some of the most brutally material people I have ever seen in my life!"

Dalrymple is correct. In a hierarchical and class conscious society like India, open display of wealth and a desire to hoard acquisitions has existed since time immemorial. Only the rich could afford the excesses once upon a time. Now as the middle class reaps the gains of liberalisation, it flaunts its riches too. The poor aspire equally. So when their representative, a poor, untouchable politician gains power, she splurges on birthday parties and jewels, builds her statues and shows off her new-found wealth. Her dirt-poor supporters say her ostentation inspires them to aspire for a better life. How much more materialistic can a people be?

A quarter-of-a-century's experience of travelling and living in India and writing on it has given Dalrymple the opportunity to avoid the "western gaze" and offer a deeper perspective of things. So he sets out, as he writes, to explore how religion and faith are coping with a fast-changing India. The non-fiction short stories, he hopes, will "have avoided many of the clichés about 'Mystic India' that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion".

I ask him about the "western gaze" that leads to a lot of such writing. Dalrymple says that by allowing his subjects to talk about themselves in these stories, he is trying to "reduce the danger of my own presence on the material". It works to a large extent and is reminiscent of the Naipaulean approach to non-fiction. "I want to be an insider and outsider," he says. He succeeds here as well, with a sort of semi-detached approach to the pithy narratives. The only thing that I am not sure about is whether the stories offer very powerful examples of how faith is trying to adapt to a fast-changing society.

An idol maker's son wants to study computer engineering. The prison warder who plays God worries whether his children will carry on the family tradition. A singer of epics bemoans that the younger people in his village are hooked to TV and prefer abridged versions of his work on CDs. The tantric at a cremation ground is hooked to Test match cricket. None of this is really unexceptional and entirely unexpected. None of them convey a sense of any intense battle between religion and modernity. So are there no such battles at all? I suspect a few are taking place - and is reflected in the way, say, a muddled Hindu nationalist party like BJP is fast losing ground in India. I hope Dalrymple will shine a light on some such tales one day.

Nine Lives is published by Bloomsbury


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This is not the case for historians working in more advanced democracies. Christopher Andrew, a leading British historian of intelligence, is known in India for his book The Mitrokhin Archives, which blew the lid off the KGB's penetration in Indian politics and government during the Cold War. His new book The Defence of The Realm, a magisterial authorised history of Britain's fabled security service MI5, also has fascinating insights into the service's relationship with Indian intelligence and how the bond weakened as India moved closer to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Professor Andrew had virtually unrestricted access to 400,000 security service files and there is much in his new book to excite Indian readers: an intelligence entente of sorts between India and Britain, a mutual distrust of a maverick left-leaning diplomat and friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, and much later, the unearthing of a plot to kill former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi during a visit to London.

What I found most interesting is the cosy relationship which India established with British intelligence after independence.

"India set an important pattern after the second war for MI5's relation with newly independent states," Professor Andrew told me. "It is very little known that Nehru agreed that an MI5 officer should remain in India after independence. His relations with MI5 were frequently closer than with the Nehru government."

The relationship was forged very early in the day - according to declassified documents quoted in the book. MI5 got a security liaison officer to be based in Delhi after the end of British rule. The secret agreement was agreed with the Nehru-led government in March 1947, a good five months before independence.

Soon enough, there appeared to be a convergence of interests between the newly-independent nation and its former rulers when it came to intelligence assessments. MI5 Deputy Director General Guy Liddell and TG Sanjevi, the first head of India's intelligence agency, which was curiously called Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB), were "united in their deep distrust of the first Indian high commissioner in London, VK Krishna Menon, the Congress party's leading left-leaning firebrand," writes Professor Andrew.

Menon, an old friend of Nehru's, was a flawed man of protean talents: he studied at the London School of Economics (LSE), was the first editor at Pelican Books, Penguin's famous non-fiction imprint, and somebody with whom Nehru could discuss, according to a diplomat who knew both the men well, "Marx and Mill, Dickens and Dostoevsky." He is also remembered for a record-busting eight-hour-long speech on Kashmir at the United Nations, and as a federal defence minister who presided over the Indian rout in the hands of China during the 1962 war.

"We are doing what we could to get rid of Krishna Menon," Liddle wrote in his diary, about a man who, in Professor Andrew's words, had a "passionate loathing for the British Raj which independence did little to abate". How it wanted to "get rid" of the Communist-loving high commissioner is not clear. "The attempt failed," writes Prof Andrew.

The love affair between the DIB and the security service continued unabated: the two shared intelligence on "Communist subversion" freely, and the Indians, according to Professor Andrew, even asked for an experienced counter-espionage officer to visit the DIB headquarters and for help in training transcribers.

Most of the service's special liaison people appointed to Delhi were "gregarious people, fond of India and good at getting on with both the DIB and their high commission colleagues," writes Professor Andrew. Even a chill in Indo-British diplomatic relations after the Anglo-French invasion of Suez which Nehru roundly condemned "had little impact on collaboration between the DIB and MI5."

But one special liaison officer, John Allen, was prescient when he feared that "with so many unfavourable winds blowing between India and Britain, if Nehru realised how close collaboration between the DIB and MI5 was, he would probably forbid much of it."

But that was not to be.

"Nehru, however, either never discovered how close the relationship was or - less probably - did discover and took no action," writes Professor Andrew.

As the 1960s arrived, the relationship evidently grew feebler. There was mounting frustration inside MI5 over how it was losing out to the Soviets as India became a key ally of the Soviet Union. "In the view of the security service," writes Professor Andrew, "the DIB was increasingly unequal to coping with the Soviet intelligence presence in India, greater than in any other country in the developing world."

In February 1964, a senior MI5 officer reported that the Russians were "having almost a free run for their money both in the espionage and subversive fields" in New Delhi.

Two decades later, the service was taking note of the "increasing danger" of Sikh extremism in the UK. It had, Professor Andrew writes, become a major threat during the summer and autumn of 1984. The invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Indian troops to put down a separatist rebellion and the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 triggered off by the killing of premier Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards had produced an upsurge of support within the Sikh community for the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan in India.

Prof Andrew reveals "plots" to kill prime minister Rajiv Gandhi during a state visit to Britain in October 1985 were unearthed by MI5. "Good intelligence, combined with the arrest of Sikh and Kashmiri extremists, was believed to have frustrated plots to attack Rajiv Gandhi during the state visit," Professor Andrew writes.

It is for all this and more that we owe Professor Andrew some gratitude. He will be possibly surprised to know that India's prime minister's office alone sits atop some 28,000 files which it resolutely refuses to declassify. Two years ago, it declassified 37 files dating back to 1947, up from a single file in 2005. It is a wonder that history gets written at all in India.

Now India's chatterati, again egged on by a hysterical section of the media, is deliberating ad nauseum on the alleged affair between India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.

The provocation for this latest gabfest over India's most famous love affair is the Indian government's Orwellian-sounding Information and Broadcasting Ministry throwing a spanner into the works for a planned British film on Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, based on the book, Indian Summer, by British historian Alex Von Tunzelmann.

The killjoy mandarins at the ministry who vetted the script - presumably because the film had to be shot in India - apparently have a few grouses.

Firstly, the film is not based on "recorded facts" - whatever that means in native bureaucratese and whose facts are they anyway - and so it should be declared a work of fiction. Also no scenes of physical intimacy between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten are allowed, no gestures or actions or words of love or affection between the two.

The damning word "love" has to be excised from six dialogues in the film. No intimacy and sex please, we are Indians. Joe Wright, the hapless director, is now free to film a sterile dirge on one of the most interesting relationships in India's history. (One report says the film has been shelved for the moment.)

Now let's clear the air on the book on which the film is based. Tunzelmann's book is a first class, scholarly account of the Independence and the partition of India.

Only 31 pages before the end of her book, Tunzelmann delves into the relationship between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. She paints a picture of a deep and complex affinity bound by fondness and a strong sense of mutual respect and concern. The two, says the historian, wrote "intimate letters" to each other until the end. Nehru sent her presents - sugar from United States when it was rationed in Britain, cigarettes from Egypt, ferns from Sikkim, a book of erotic photographs from Orissa's famous sun temple.

The book of photographs evoked a stirring response. Lady Mountbatten wrote to Nehru that she found the photographs of the sculptures fascinating. "I am not interested in sex as sex," she wrote. "There must be much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority. Yet another treasured bond." The two also spend a lot of time with each other - there is even a scene of the two in embrace as a governor's son opens the door of the prime minister's suite in an Indian hill station in what is Tunzelmann's only concession to the sensational, as far as I can remember.

There was a whiff of scandal about the relationship in those less prurient times. "Break open Nehru's heart and you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it", an anti-Nehru party in Delhi purred. The two ignored the chatter. "I have come to the conclusion that it is best to ignore them as any argument about them feeds them or at any rate draws people's attention to them," Nehru wrote, interestingly, to Lord Mountbatten.

In fact, Tunzelmann writes that before undergoing a risky surgery in 1952, Edwina entrusted her love letters from Nehru in a sealed envelope to her husband. "..they are a mixture of typical Jawaha (sic) letters..some of them have no 'personal' remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, spiritual - which exists between us. J has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I in his. Our meetings have been been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other," she wrote movingly about the correspondence. Tunzelmann writes "it was an odd sort of confession, and not an apology."

Edwina recovered after the surgery, and her husband opened the envelope. He later told her that he did not feel jealous about her relationship though "faintly hurt" at times when "you didn't take me into confidence right away."

That the two were more than fond of each other is fairly clear from the correspondence. Even Pamela Mountbatten Hicks, daughter of the last viceroy, has said in the past that she believed that her mother and Nehru were in love. A relative of Mr Nehru also agreed on a recent TV interview that the two "had a relationship of love." So what is the big deal about a film on the two?

Indian politicians and bureaucrats have a a schizophrenic relationship with history - figures like Nehru and Gandhi are treated as 'sacred cows', and hagiographic accounts of their lives abound in school and many college books. The censoring of the the latest film script also, according to a top social scientist, boils down to the colonial mantle that the Congress party "finds difficult to shake off". Journalist MJ Akbar says the "desire to guard a reputation is institutional."

On the street, Indians no longer care whether Nehru and Lady Mountbatten had a relationship or not; a film on the two will not scandalise them. And Indians, so far, haven't even cared much for the sex lives of their politicians. Even when a news channel ran fuzzy black and white tapes purportedly of some local politicians making out in a guest house in what looked suspiciously like a Buster Keaton film on high speed, viewership rocketed for an evening or two, and then plumetted again. Especially after one of the politicians alleged to be on one of the tapes exclaimed: "But I am in that film with my wife!".

One historian says that talk about Edwina-Nehru liason is much ado about nothing. "Did the relationship impact the course of events?," she asks. There is no evidence to show that it did. But personal lives sometimes offer interesting cues to how people perform in public and even impact decisions they make. "I think it's the personal lives that make our politicians more interesting," says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan. I couldn't agree more. But try explaining that to India's touchy politicians and the information and broadcasting ministry.

The building housing India's Planning Commission - the name itself is a throwback to the days of the sleepy command economy - cannot be an easy place to work for a man who severed a near three-decade-long association with one of the world's top technology firms, Infosys, which he co-founded, to join the government of India. The dour trappings of public office must be a revelation for a man who, according to the Forbes rich men's list from last May, is worth $1.1bn.

Mr Nilekani helped run a $5bn company before his new job. As the head of the new Unique Identification Authority of India, which plans to crunch out identity numbers for more than a billion Indians, his budget for the first year is $26m. Then there is India's Kafkaesque bureaucracy and partisan politics to negotiate.

It is a daunting task, Mr Nilekani agrees, when I go to meet him in his austere new lair. His table has the regulation shiny pen stand and glass paperweights. The first day he joined work, he yanked the white towel off the top of his chair, as photographers clicked gleefully. He doesn't tell me whether it was a symbolic gesture or a spur of the moment reflex. Mr Nilekani says he has taken the job as a challenge, despite the fact that it is a tough one to be conducted under the unblinking gaze of an increasingly unforgiving public and media.

It is not easy to find out why he took the job: the unique identification number seems to have been his pet project for a long time. He gave it away on page 367 of his first book Imagining India, published last year. For the next eight pages, he waxes eloquent on his idea of a "single citizen ID".

Mr Nilekani talks about Indians grappling with multiple identities - one for a ration card, one for the passport, one for the tax payer and so on. A former election commissioner tells him that our database is in these disconnected silos. This also leads to, as Mr Nilekani says, "plenty of phantoms" or fake cards.

He believes a national smart ID could be transformational - even though only 2% of Indians subscribe, say, to the internet. It compels the state to improve the quality of services, gives citizens better access to welfare schemes, and creates deeper awareness of rights and entitlements. A national ID system, says Mr Nilekani, would plug leaks in the distribution system and make "redundant" our dependence on the "moral scruples of the bureaucrats".

I don't quite know whether the brief Mr Nilekani has been given matches up to his ideal national ID card outlined in his book. For one, the number will be given to all residents of India; and not all citizens. So it will possibly not help in detecting illegal immigrants, and will play little role in securing the country. Also it will not be a "benefit-linked smart card", as he writes in his book, but just a number.

But the spring in his step and the shine in his eyes hint at a job Mr Nilekani is looking forward to. "It's a complex governance challenge," he tells me, as we settle down in his sparse room. He is excited by the technological challenge of creating the largest biometric database in the world. "Technology on this level has never been done before. There will be lots of hurdles, setbacks, glitches. As a project this is the biggest and most complex project I have ever undertaken."

Doesn't he miss his old company? Mr Nilekani doesn't blink. "I had a terrific 29-year stint at Infosys. It was an emotional and gut-wrenching move to come out of it," he says. But working in big government cannot be easy for somebody like him? "Government is really a big and enormous difference. It has its challenges. Nothing I have encountered till now is something I had not expected. I am in this project for five years." Mr Nilekani is an astute diplomat.

It will be interesting to see how Mr Nilekani re-educates himself in the ways and workings of the government and real India. He famously inspired Thomas Friedman to write his best-selling The World Is Flat by telling him that the "global playing field was being levelled by technology." The man formerly known as the Bill Gates of Bangalore will possibly now be surprised to find that the digital divide is the latest addition to India's deepening inequalities.

India's junior foreign minister is a former UN diplomat, a prolific writer, a political debutant and an inveterate Twitter-er. Some are already calling him, rather uncharitably, India's 'Twittering Minister', and skewering him for "wasting time" with his "frivolities" on the social networking site. His supporters - and there are over 160,000 people following him on Twitter - say that Mr Tharoor is not your average staid, fuddy-duddy Indian politician; and his thriving online social networking skills make him refreshingly different.

His political colleagues may not agree. It all began when Mr Tharoor got ticked off by the government for staying in a luxury hotel in Delhi as his official bungalow was not ready to move in. He promptly moved out and Twittered about how it didn't make much sense to him because he was paying for his hotel room, not the taxpayer. It was bad timing. The Congress government says it is on a major austerity drive in these pressing times, though many feel that it is mere tokenism - ministers may travel economy class and Rahul Gandhi may travel by train but they invariably do so with a retinue of sullen faced security men and fawning officials, which ends up inconveniencing other passengers.

Matters came to a head earlier this week, when Mr Tharoor, provoked by a follower on whether he would travel "cattle class" on his next trip to his constituency in Kerala, Twittered back: "Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!" He earned an immediate reprimand from his Congress party. "The party strong disapproves the statement of the minister," a spokeswoman said. "It is unacceptable, not respecting political or any other sensibilities." Delhi's chattering class debated whether the Twittering Minister was poking fun at economy class passengers by alluding to the "cattle class". And whether he was raising the hackles of the stuffy political class by calling them "holy cows".

Twittering back, Mr Tharoor has negotiated the "cattle class" slight uncomfortably, arguing that it was a "silly expression" not meant to disrespect economy travellers. Instead, he says, it was airline companies who "herded passengers in like cattle".

He also came up with a somewhat revisionist and semantic take on the phrase "holy cow". "Holy cows are NOT individuals but sacrosanct issues or principles that no one dares challenge. I wish the critic would look it up," he writes. "Now I realise that I shouldn't assume people will appreciate humour and I shouldn't give those who would wilfully distort your words an opportunity to do so."

As far as my limited knowledge goes, "holy cow" is mostly used as an exclamation, in American slang. In my part of the world, people use the phrase loosely as a mild pejorative.

It is time for scholars to now join the merry fray and decode Mr Tharoor's use of the phrase. And political pundits to find out whether the 'Twittering Minister' was taking a dig at the starchy party bosses while saying that humour doesn't always find many takers. Come to think of it, why not deploy a team of psychologists to ascertain if Mr Tharoor was being supercilious in wondering whether Indians, by and large, are a humourless people.

Should a member of the cabinet be using popular social networking tools to network with people? The jury is still out on this, but when I scan Mr Tharoor's tweets I find most of them to be harmless, constipated takes on cricket, traffic jams in Delhi, Patrick Swayze, Roger Federer and so on. They are unexceptional, unexciting and largely irrelevant - like most of stuff on social networking sites. He's also a frenetic Twitter-er: on Friday, a working day, he sent out 10 tweets in less than three hours.

No one should take away Mr Tharoor - or anybody's - right to use this social networking device to voice his or her opinions. But does Shashi Tharoor trivialise his office and work with his manic tweeting? Should he slow down and write his words more carefully before sending them out all over the world? Or should he tweet on regardless? What do YOU think?

PS: Mr Tharoor may have earned a bit of reprieve after his party admonished him and one of its leaders sought his resignation over his "cattle class" tweet. This evening, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said his junior minister's remark "was a joke." I suspect most party members don't share Mr Singh's view.

I am reminded of the line when I read and hear about the mess over preparations for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi next year. Commonwealth officials are panicking over the slow pace of work and wondering aloud whether the games will take off. A smug Indian official in charge says there is nothing to worry about. All will be fine, he says, and the games will be among the finest ever. The subtext of his message: this is the Indian way of doing things, silly. The stadiums will be eventually built, and we will have a jolly good Games. We are like this only. And sab chalta hain (everything goes), another of our favourite alibis.

But this time the bluff may be called sooner. There is little doubt that India has approached its first major international sports event in nearly three decades with characteristic lack of planning. A report by the federal government's own auditing arm says work on 13 of the 19 sports venues is behind schedule. There aren't enough hotel rooms yet to house guests - another government estimate reckon that only 35% of the additional hotel rooms planned for the games will be completed in time. Commonwealth Games Federation chief Mike Fennell is skittish: he wants to meet the PM now for an assurance that the games will held in time. In an internal note, the Commonwealth Games Association of Canada says in desperation: "Verbal assurances [from Indian officials] are no longer sufficient." A telling comment comes from a foreign engineer who is working at an unfinished stadium site. "The people over here are very careless and the mentality is very lazy," he says. "If one person works, the other five want to just stand around him and watch. They all waste time."

Wasting time and procrastination is a national pastime, so why blame India's poor, underpaid and overworked construction workers. The games are being planned by an organising committee along with two dozen committees - whose heads apparently hardly meet - stacked with bureaucrats, politicians, sports administrators, who are often politicians themselves, and so on. One person I know who was a member of the organising committee quit after he found out to his dismay that nothing was moving on his front in the year he was there. In one meeting called to shortlist some contractors for a job, he found a bureaucrat on the selection committee who had joined it a day before from some nondescript ministry. Friends who have been involved with international sporting events tell me it is not so much about completing work on the stadiums, but of ensuring that the "operationals" are in place - hotel room bookings for athletes, the state of preparedness for the media, transport hubs to take the media and guests to the stadia and back and stuff like that.

Nothing much has moved along on these fronts, they say. The games village is being built on a controversial environmentally sensitive site - the banks of a dying river which skirts the capital. The less said about the infrastructure, the better. The games, according to its website, will leave behind "a city much more beautiful and charming than it currently is". It talks about how a colonial city centre has been "given a new façade and is experiencing a resurgence", and how the city's monuments are being "cleaned and revitalised".

I don't know how much truth there is in these claims. But I do know that if it rains during the event, Delhi's roads will overflow with water and sewage or cave in. If there is a gale, electricity lines will snap, trees will fall and block the roads, and roofs will fly. The organisers must have been delusional to award the games to a city with such utterly shambolic infrastructure. Also, since there will be no separate lanes for the venues-bound traffic, I see huge gridlocks, and traffic being stopped to let the games traffic pass. Slums are expected to fenced off with bamboo, and beggars are to be rounded up. The 12-day, 17-discipline sporting event is all set to become the biggest nightmare for Delhi's denizens.

It also could turn out be India's biggest shame. Already workers have died at the construction sites, and human rights groups are up in arms about how workers at venues are being underpaid and have flimsy security. I spotted a picture where women workers wore tatty rubber sandals at a site where the signage indicates they should be wearing boots. It's the same old story - apart from a few shining exceptions like the Delhi Metro- of brazen disregard for basic safety norms, woeful planning and exploitative contractors.

And we have revulsion for real change. We remember how an indoor stadium roof leaked in the monsoon rains and players quit wet tables when the world table tennis championship opened in Calcutta decades ago. We remember how we sat on drying paint at an upgraded cricket stadium and endured its stinking, overflowing rest rooms to watch an international game. We see our politicians taking over sports organisations and do to sport what they have done to politics in the country. We laugh it all away every time. We are like this only. Sab chalta hain. Why do we have no shame?

But apparently embarrassed by the report, the party high command has ordered the two men to leave the hotels and move into more modest dwellings because their lifestyle "flew in the face of party's emphasis on austerity in public life." One of the two luxury loving ministers, Shashi Tharoor, is bristling with anger. "I would be ashamed if I was spending the people's money. But I'm not - I'm spending my own savings," he Twittered. Mr Tharoor, a former aide to ex-UN chief Kofi Annan, said he "needed a gym and some privacy" and the hotel gave him both.

But the newspaper that broke the story explained that it had a case against the two ministers staying temporarily in a luxury hotel even if they were paying. It wrote: "That two high-profile UPA ministers, one of cabinet rank, have been staying at five-star hotels for more than three months is not, this newspaper will maintain, a case for moral or legal rebuke. Anybody with the requisite means is within his rights to stay at a five-star hotel or build a palace unto himself. But External Affairs Minister SM Krishna at the ITC Maurya and his Minister of State Shashi Tharoor at the Taj sit against the stark backdrop of Congress exhortations on "austerity" and "sacrifice". Congress MPs are being asked to part with a fifth of their salary for drought relief (itself a meagre amount, but that's another matter) as their colleagues in the Ministry of External Affairs are running up, presumably, bills that beggar those salaries manifold. Perhaps it's pertinent to ask who should be more embarrassed - the two ministers or the party itself?"

The problem with this argument is that we are taking Congress - or any party in India - exhortations to maintain austerity seriously. Indian politicians love to preach what they don't practice. The Congress - and most national parties - have a long history of pleading its members to practice austerity, but citizens have never seen any evidence of that in real life.

So the more things change, the more they remain the same. What about the long, expensive cavalcades carrying ministers and the red and blue beacon bearing cars carrying their minions with party flags painted illegally on their number plates muscling in and out of traffic? What about the glittering political receptions? What about the wasteful adverts with pictures of ministers and lawmakers announcing the opening of a railway station or a city flyover? What about the politicians with a bevy of hangers-on travelling business class? Why then the austere righteousness over two ministers who are paying for their own accommodation in posh hotels?

The bit about Congress MPs being asked to part with a fifth of their salary is a bit of a joke anyway. "There are two ways of making politics one's vocation," sociologist Max Weber once said. "Either one lives for politics or one lives off it". In India, politicians live off politics for the most part. Apparently, the Congress party is distressed with the "extravagant lifestyle of its ministers". Do Indians even take such sanctimonious piffle seriously in a patronage-driven democracy ravaged by brazen political corruption?

Nobility cloaked in hypocrisy is the bane of Indian society. Blame should not be placed at the politicians' door alone. In a depressingly hierarchical society where the past casts a long shadow over the present, ostentation is encouraged, accepted and practised with a vengeance by the rich and the middle class alike.

People vie with each other to host flashy and vulgar weddings and functions as beggars fight for their pickings outside, reminiscent of Ryszard Kapuscinski's description of a reception that the Ethopian emperor Haile Selassie threw for visiting leaders that he attended. A sumptuous feast was on inside the venue. Outside, Kapuscinski writes, "in the thick of the night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together. The dishwashers working in the building threw leftovers at them. I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones and fish heads with laborious concentration." In rich and middle class India, scenes like these are tiresomely routine. Those who practice ostentation often condemn it the most. Doublespeak and hypocrisy is a national affliction; and talk is cheap. And people get the politicians they deserve.

What has added grist to the conspiracy mill is the Indian government's refusal to declassify a document it has in its possession pertaining to Mr Shastri's death. In response to a right to information request by the enterprising Anuj Dhar, a journalist and a self-proclaimed "declassification enthusiast", the prime minister's office said that making public that document could "harm foreign relations, cause disruption in the country and cause breach of parliamentary privileges". Totally non-controversial in his life, Mr Shastri has become controversial in death.

I did a little digging around and found that most of the better-known accounts of Mr Shastri's death have raised no doubts - death by heart failure. In his magisterial India After Gandhi, historian Ramachandra Guha writes Mr Shastri "died in his sleep of a heart attack". In her biography of Indira Gandhi, Katherine Frank writes that after he "went to bed in the early hours of the 11th January, Mr Shastri had a fatal heart attack".

The most vivid account is in my dog eared copy of the long out-of-print book India, The Critical Years by veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar. He was part of the prime minister's travelling press corps to Tashkent.

Mr Nayar writes that the Indian prime minister was already a heart patient, having suffered two attacks. He had had a hectic day, holding talks with the Russian premier, Alexey Kosygin - the Russians having brokered the pact - and his officials and had had very little sleep.

"That evening," writes Mr Nayar, "I met by chance his personal physican Dr RN Chugh, who accompanied him. I asked him how Shastri was standing the strain. He looked up to the sky and said: 'Everything is in the hands of God'." Mr Nayar does not elaborate.

Mr Nayar then proceeds to describe the fateful night in Agatha Christie-like detail. Since he was to travel in the prime minister's airplane early next morning to Kabul en route to Delhi, he retired to bed early an hour before midnight. "I must have been dozing when someone knocked at my door and said: 'Your prime minister is dying.' A Russian lady was waking up all the journalists," writes Mr Nayar.

A group of journalists then sped to Mr Shastri's dacha from the hotel. On arriving, Mr Nayar found a grief-stricken Mr Kosygin standing on the verandah. "He could not speak and only lifted his hands to indicate Shastri was no more."

When Mr Nayar went in, he found Dr Chugh being questioned by a group of Soviet doctors through an interpreter. In the next room Mr Shastri lay still on his bed. The journalists emptied the flower vases in the room and spread them on the prime minister's body. Mr Nayar also noticed an overturned thermos flask on a dressing table some 10 feet away from Mr Shastri's bed and wondered whether the prime minister had struggled to get to open it to get water. "His slippers were neatly placed near the bed; it meant that he walked barefoot up to the dressing table in the carpeted room," Mr Nayar writes.

Mr Nayar then pieces together the events leading up to Mr Shastri's death - of how the prime minister reached the dacha around 10 pm after a reception, chatted with his personal staff and asked his cook Ram Nath to bring him food "which was prepared in the dacha by the Russians". It gets more interesting from here. "In the kitchen there was a Soviet cook helped by two ladies - both from the Russian intelligence department - and they tasted everything, including water, before it was served to Mr Shastri," Mr Nayar writes. Remember this was at the height of the Cold War and India-Pakistan hostilities and the security paranoia was extreme.

As Mr Shastri tucked into a frugal spinach and potato curry meal, he received a call from a personal assistant in Delhi and sought the reaction to the Tashkent agreement back home. Then he spoke to his family in Delhi. He asked his eldest daughter, Kusum, about how she had found the peace pact. "She replied, 'we have not liked it'," writes Mr Nayar. "He asked 'what about her mother?' She too had not liked the declaration, was the reply given." A crestfallen Mr Shastri, according to Mr Nayar, then remarked: "If my own family has not liked it, what will the outsiders say?"

Mr Nayar writes that the prime minister's wife did not come on the line to talk despite many requests - a contention that is disputed by many of his surviving family members. This upset Mr Shastri. "He began pacing up and down the room... For one who had had two heart attacks earlier, the telephone conversation and the walking must have been a strain," he writes. Then his staff gave him milk and some water in the flask. Around 1.30 am, his personal assistant Sahai, according to Mr Nayar, saw Mr Shastri at his door, asking with difficulty, "Where is the doctor?"

The staff woke up Dr Chugh, while the prime minister's staff, assisted by Indian security men, helped Mr Shastri walk back to his room. "If it was a heart attack - myocardiac infarction, and obstruction of blood supply to the heart muscles, as the Soviet doctors said later - this walk," writes Mr Nayar, "must have been fatal."

Mr Nayar writes - presumably from an eyewitness account by the personal assistant - that Mr Shastri began coughing "rockingly", touched his chest and became unconscious. Dr Chugh arrived soon after, felt the prime minister's pulse, gave an injection into the heart, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but to no avail. More doctors arrived. They found Mr Shastri dead. The time of the death was 1.32 am.

Talk about foul play began as soon as the body arrived in Delhi. Mr Nayar says the prime minister's wife asked him why Mr Shastri's body had turned blue. He told her that when "bodies are embalmed" they turn blue. Mrs Shastri was not convinced. She asked about "certain cuts" on Mr Shastri's body. Mr Nayar told her he hadn't seen any. "Apparently, she and others in the family suspected foul play," Mr Nayar writes.

They still do. I went to meet Sidharth Nath Singh, the prime minister's grandson and a senior member of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, recently to hear the family side of the story. He told me that Mr Nayar's account of the telephone conversation that Mr Shastri had with his family members that night was inaccurate, and that he HAD spoken to his wife. Mr Singh, who was two years old when his grandfather died, says that one person was detained on "suspicion of poisoning Mr Shastri", but was released. Mr Nayar's book has no mention of this.

"Knowing the truth is important for our family. The truth has never been out," Mr Singh told me. Then he talked about the cold war politics of the day, and who would have gained from poisoning Mr Shastri who had served as prime minister for only 19 months: a foreign power, political rivals. Some of it sounds remotely credible; other bits outlandish. But Mr Singh and the nation deserve to know why the government is holding the paper about Mr Shastri's death back. How will it imperil our foreign relations? With whom? India has a notoriously stodgy reputation as far as declassifying historical documents is concered; the state almost encourages a statist historiography. The truth should be out and the controversy should be buried, once for and all.

So when leaders of the Hindu right sing praises for Mr Jinnah, they stir up a hornet's nest. Four years ago, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), LK Advani, who led a successful Hindu revivalist movement in the early 1990s, praised the founder of Pakistan during a visit to the country. This raised the hackles of Hindu fellow travellers and invited scorn from the Congress party. The BJP leader even offered to put in his papers after the kerfuffle.

Now Jaswant Singh, a doughty senior party leader and former finance and external affairs minister, who counts people like Strobe Talbott as his friends and chess, golf and polo as his pursuits, has praised Mr Jinnah as a "self made man" who "created something out of nothing and single-handedly stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him." He has expanded on his thesis in his new, unimaginatively titled 669-page book Jinnah: India-Partition- Independence, which released this week.

What is surprising is Mr Singh's defence of Mr Jinnah in a TV interview in the run-up to the book release where he is even more effusive in his praise of the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) as Mr Jinnah is remembered as in his homeland. He demolishes the popular Indian historiography of Mr Jinnah being a Hindu-basher and a born demagogue. "That certainly he was not," says the BJP leader. "His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan."
 
Then Mr Singh goes on to say that India misunderstood Mr Jinnah "because we needed to create a demon". He insists the Congress party's majoritarian instincts were responsible for the federalist Mr Jinnah turning away from the idea of India and asking for a separate nation for Muslims.

Yet Mr Jinnah began his political career with the Congress and until after World War I remained India's best "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Biographer Stanley Wolpert says he was as "as enigmatic as Gandhi, more powerful than Nehru, and one of the most charismatic leaders and least known personalities". Historians like Patrick French believe that though Mr Jinnah "remained a secularist of sorts until his death, but also at times... willing to use communal antagonism in a strategic way."

Listen to Mr Jinnah before the formation of Pakistan, raising the spectre of Hindu majoritaranism:

"We Muslims have got everything - brains, intelligence, capacity and courage- virtues that nations must possess. But two things are lacking, and I want you to concentrate your attention on these. One thing is that foreign domination from without and Hindu domination here, particularly on our economic life that has caused a certain degeneration of these virtues in us."

Or listen to him after a meeting with Egyptian and Palestinian Arab leaders in 1946:

"I told them of the danger that a Hindu empire would represent for the Middle-East... If a Hindu empire is achieved, it will mean the end of Islam in India, and even in other Muslim countries."

At the same time, it is true that Mr Jinnah felt short changed by the Congress. On 26 July 1946, Jinnah and his working committee spoke about Muslim India having

"exhausted, without success, all efforts to find a peaceful solution of the Indian problem by compromise and constitutional means; and whereas the Congress is bent upon setting up Caste-Hindu Raj in India with the connivance of the British..."

In Mr Singh's book, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress emerge as some of the principal architects of the partition. He writes that the Congress "overestimated its strength, its influence, and its leaders were extremely reluctant to accept Jinnah as the leader of just not the Muslim League but eventually of most Muslims in India".
 
There is some truth in all this. But in trying to say that Mr Nehru and Congress were largely responsible for partition, Mr Singh is possibly ignoring the larger political realities of the time. Mr Jinnah positioned himself as the "sole spokesman of Pakistan", but his party Muslim League which led the Pakistan movement, won the last election in 1946 in British India with the number of Muslim voters at significantly no more than 10 to 12% of the total Muslim population in that year. As many historians say, the nation of Pakistan came into being "even before its mass base was established." The fault lines have widened since.
 
But to return to the original question, why did Mr Singh write this book? Does it have to do with his wider political ambitions? He is a self-professed liberal in a party of hawks. In 1992, at the zenith of the BJP's rathyatra (motorised chariot) movement to whip up support for a temple at Ayodhya, Mr Singh did not attend a single function on the road. His induction into the cabinet in the late 1990s was vetoed once by the party's ideological fountainhead, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
 
With his mentor and BJP's only pan-Indian leader and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee fading out and Mr Advani himself weakened by political defeat and party infighting, is Mr Singh trying to position himself as a liberal party leader-paterfamilias that Mr Vajpayee once occupied? It is difficult to say.
 
In a sense, one could argue, Mr Singh kills two birds with one stone with his revisionist take on the partition - as a senior leader of the main opposition party, he goes for the Congress's jugular by holding it responsible for the partition along with Mr Jinnah; and by heaping encomiums on Mr Jinnah, he endears himself to Indian Muslims, who have been lukewarm to the BJP's overtures. Is Mohammed Ali Jinnah a way for Mr Singh to reach out to Muslims and push his political ambitions in a party which appears to have lost its way in modern India? We will know in the days ahead.