April 10: If the shoe is now more than just footwear, hand it to Mr K.

Muntazer al-Zaidi may have given the harmless leather accessory a new sense of purpose and Jarnail Singh made a statement more effective than many governments have, but the men — journalists to boot — were following in the footsteps of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who held up to the world the power of the shoe.

If al-Zaidi targeted the then mighty President George W. Bush and Singh lobbed one past home minister P. Chidambaram, even lesser politicians and the hinterlands are getting a taste of shoe power. Raj Bal Singh, a retired schoolteacher, today hurled his jooti at industrialist Naveen Jindal, the Congress’ MP from Kurukshetra in Haryana, but missed his target.

Khrushchev, though, did not throw but brandish and bang he did.

At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on October 12, 1960, the Soviet premier, known as much for his brash and aggressive demeanour as for his efforts at de-Stalinisation, pounded his shoe during a debate over a Russian resolution decrying colonialism.

Khrushchev, then 66, had visited the UN for three weeks in October 1960 to vent his anger over several issues, chiefly the American U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia a few months earlier.

On October 12, Khrushchev, who had been at loggerheads with the UN for alleged partisanship over newly independent Congo, became infuriated by a statement of a Filipino delegate who accused the Soviets of double standard as they were following an imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.

Khrushchev, referred to as Mr K by the West, in turn accused the delegate, Lorenzo Sumulong, of being “a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism”.

It was then that the Soviet leader picked up his shoe — he was wearing a brand new pair of tan loafers — and after standing up and waving it vigorously, he sat down and started banging his desk with it.

“He banged to a regular rhythm, like the pendulum of a metronome,” his bodyguard, Nikolai Zakharov, later recalled. “That was the moment that entered world history as Khrushchev’s famous shoe.”

The incident had capped a week of “K-power” beginning with Khrushchev’s demand for the resignation of then UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, accusing him of acting on behalf of colonial powers.

Less than a year later, Hammarskjöld, honoured posthumously with the Nobel peace prize, was killed on a visit to Congo to negotiate a settlement. His aircraft exploded, but till date no one knows why and sabotage has still not been ruled out.

Khrushchev, who famously replied on another occasion while speaking on capitalism “we will bury you”, made a point with his shoe. His granddaughter Nina Khrushchev was to later write: “A shoe, pounding the table, was the distinctive sound of ‘cold’ war, as much as the report of a gun was the sound of ‘hot’ war.”

Over the years, Khrushchev’s shoe, like al-Zaidi’s and now Jarnail Singh’s, has become part of pop culture and may well have triggered online games had it happened in the age of cyberspace. It inspired a million-dollar question on TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and a book on public speaking, Khrushchev’s Shoe: And Other Ways to Captivate An Audience of 1 to 1,000.

The Soviet leader, who presided over one of the darkest periods of the Cold War culminating in the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, remained in power for a mere four more years. Following the missile crisis of 1962, Khrushchev was removed in a coup staged by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964.

But by then he had made history and left behind a legacy. Of his shoes.