The Prime Minister at Pavnar

The day the ashram changed colour

The morning after Vinobaji decided to stop food, water, and medicines, Pavnar changed colour. The ashram, usually held together by the soft rhythm of prayer and spinning, began to hum with another kind of energy—the kind that comes when important people arrive and everyone starts walking a little faster.

Mrs Indira Gandhi came that day. With her came Rajiv Gandhi, Babasaheb Bhosle, Vasant Sathe, Sitaram Kesri, and a small army of officials. Walking a respectful step behind was her personal physician, Dr K.P. Mathur. His presence made the situation feel even more serious.

When a Prime Minister brings her own doctor, you know the visit is not only political. It is personal.

Mrs Gandhi entered Vinobaji’s room quietly. She folded her hands, bowed, and touched his feet like a pilgrim. Vinobaji, frail but fully conscious, returned the greeting with a gentle namaskar.

For a moment the room felt strangely normal—an old man on a cot, a visitor on a mat, and a few doctors standing awkwardly at the edge.

“Baba,” she said softly, “at least take some water. Or a little fruit juice.”

Vinobaji lifted his hand. It was a small motion, almost mild, but it carried the finality of a decision that had already been made. No water. No juice. No medicines. No persuasion.

A lesson hidden in a breath

As Mrs Gandhi turned to speak to the doctors, Vinobaji called out in a thin voice, “Ram-Hari… Ram-Hari.”

She turned back at once.

He was showing her his breathing—slow, deliberate, almost rhythmic. He pressed his fingers against one nostril, inhaled to “Ram,” and exhaled to “Hari.” Even then, even in weakness, he was teaching. Not with words, but with breath.

Mrs Gandhi watched him closely, as if she had forgotten the crowd outside and the files waiting in Delhi. She nodded once, the way a student nods when something finally makes sense.

“Yes,” she said, “I will.”

I have seen many leaders up close over the years, but I have rarely seen one sit so still, so attentive, and so unprotected by power.

Lunch on the floor

She stayed for lunch.

The meal was the kind Pavnar served every day: roti with a little ghee, dal, rice, a boiled vegetable, curd, achar and chutney. There were no special arrangements, no separate plates, no “VIP food.” The ashram did not know how to flatter anyone, and Mrs Gandhi did not demand to be flattered.

When the meal ended, she stood up, picked up her own plate, and walked to the washing area. Then she washed it herself, calmly and thoroughly, as if she had done it all her life.

It was a small act, but it unsettled me. In medical college we were trained to stand up when a professor entered the room. Here was the Prime Minister of India washing her plate like an ashram inmate.

That image has stayed with me for decades, sharper than many speeches.

A young doctor speaks too honestly

Later, she asked the doctors to introduce themselves. She listened carefully, not distracted, not impatient. She asked a few questions about Vinobaji’s condition and our plan.

And then, almost inevitably, the conversation returned to the one thing we could not change: Vinobaji’s refusal.

I was young then, and still full of the medical instinct to fight. I had been trained to treat, to push, to rescue. Standing beside a patient who could recover if only he allowed us to help him felt like watching someone walk away from a bridge while you stood holding the rope.

“Madam,” I said, “he can live. But he doesn’t want to. As doctors, we are taught to save life. As a patient, he is choosing to leave it. What is the right thing to do?”

Mrs Gandhi looked at me for a moment. The political mask slipped away, and what remained was a woman who had seen enough of life to understand its limits.

“The patient’s wish comes first,” she said. “We may not agree, but we must respect it. Sometimes dignity matters more than the length of life.”

It was a lesson in ethics, delivered without a textbook and without drama. I remember feeling both relieved and defeated—the way you feel when someone tells you a truth you did not want to hear.

When the body stopped following rules

After that, the days tested our certainties.

Vinobaji pressed his ears with both hands, signalling pain. We tried cleaning his ears with glycerine. We tried medicines. We tried whatever little we had. The relief never lasted.

But the rest of his body behaved in ways that confused us. His urine output increased. The swelling in his feet disappeared. We tested his urine for acetone again and again, expecting starvation to show itself. Nothing.

As doctors, we like rules. We like patterns. We like predictable decline. Vinobaji’s body did not cooperate. It was as if the physiology had decided to obey a different master.

Standing by his bedside, I felt I was watching something I could not explain, and could not control.

Dr Sushila Nayar’s anger

Two days later, Dr Sushila Nayar came to Pavnar. She belonged to a different school of medicine—firm, fierce, and unwilling to watch a patient slip away if she believed he could be saved.

To her, inaction was almost a moral failure.

“This is not right,” she said, clearly upset. “He is not terminally ill. We cannot let him die of thirst.”

She took a glass of water and brought it to his lips herself. Vinobaji did not argue. He did not raise his voice. He simply brushed her hand away—gently, almost affectionately, but with the same steel we had seen from the first day.

His associates stood around him like silent guards. Not against us, but for him. They were there to protect his decision, even from doctors who meant well.

That day I understood something uncomfortable: a doctor can be helpless not only because the disease is stronger, but because the patient is.

A prediction we couldn’t chart

On the evening of November 14, we thought the end was near. His pulse felt like a tired thread. The blood pressure dropped and refused to rise. We looked at our notes, did our mental calculations, and prepared ourselves for the moment we knew was coming.

Then Radhakrishnaji—Gautam Bajaj’s father—walked in. He had been sleeping in a nearby room. He looked at Vinobaji and said, with complete certainty, “He will not go tonight. He will leave after 9:30 tomorrow morning. It will be Somvati Amavasya.”

We had our charts. He had his faith. And in that room, faith sounded strangely confident.

That night none of us slept.

9:30 a.m.

Morning came.

At 8 a.m., we gave Vinobaji a sponge bath with warm water. He remained conscious. His eyes followed us. He tried to sit up but could not. There was no panic, no pleading, no last-minute bargaining with the body.

At exactly 9:30 a.m., Vinoba Bhave’s heart stopped.

There was no shouting. No chest compressions. No desperate running around. Just a stillness that felt heavy and clean, the kind you feel after a long storm has passed.

He left the world the way he had lived—quietly, on his own terms.

From Moscow to Pavnar

The news reached Mrs Gandhi in Moscow, where she had gone for Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral. She returned immediately. The next morning she landed at Nagpur and flew by helicopter to Pavnar.

To avoid the crowd and the press, she entered from the back, walking past the goshala to the veranda where Vinobaji lay. She sat down near him and cried.

In that moment, the most powerful woman in India looked like a woman who had lost someone she deeply respected.

She did not make a speech. She did not turn it into a public moment. She simply sat there, quiet and human.

A funeral without spectacle

There was a suggestion to broadcast the funeral live on television. Vinobaji’s younger brother, Shivaji Bhave, refused. He also opposed covering the body with the tricolour.

“This is not a show,” he said firmly.

Mrs Gandhi accepted it without protest. The procession began, led not by priests or politicians, but by the women of the ashram, with Mahadevi Tai in front.

Vinobaji’s body lay on a simple bamboo stretcher, wrapped in white khadi and decorated with flowers. Mrs Gandhi walked with the ashram inmates to the Dham river. At the cremation ground, Mahadevi Tai lit the pyre.

Before leaving, Mrs Gandhi untied a small knot in the pallu of her sari, took out a piece of sandalwood she had carried, and placed it into the fire.

It was a Prime Minister’s offering, but it felt like something else—a private goodbye.

A note on memory (and power)

Years later, Arun Shourie came to Sevagram and asked me about those days. He was writing Preparing for Death. Dr K.P. Mathur wrote his account too. Others disagreed with him. Everyone remembered something different, as people always do.

Mathur’s version carries the view from close to power—security concerns, arrangements, and the small theatre that follows a Prime Minister. But at the bedside, the story felt different. The centre was not comfort or protocol. It was one man’s decision to stop.

I do not claim a monopoly over truth. But I know what I saw: a saint chose to step away, and the rest of us—doctors, politicians, devotees—had to learn how to step back.

In medical training, we are taught to act. That fortnight taught me the harder skill—to respect a patient’s choice, even when it breaks your professional reflex.

And I still remember Mrs Gandhi washing her plate. In that small act, she seemed to understand what we doctors were struggling to accept.

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