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Features

Three Leaders, Two Nations, One God !

Aroon Sharma
Jan 2011

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The dramatis personae of this write up are three: Dr Rajendra Prasad, Jawahar Lal Nehru and Mohd. Ali Jinnah . The year 1947. The day – the Independence Day: August 15 for India; August 14 for Pakistan. Dr Prasad was chosen the President of the Constituent Assembly of India; Nehru, the Prime Minister of India and Jinnah, the Governor General of Pakistan. The write-up is wide off the polemics of Partition. It's how the mighty three invoked the Almighty on the day.

Rajendra Prasad, a Gandhian, even as the President of India later, swept the very floors he walked on in Rashtrapati Bhawan, slept on a wooden plank with home spun cloth, and was a believer in rituals. On the eve of the Midnight of August 14/15, he had the backcourt (now Mughal Gardens) mopped up clean. All the Prime Minister's men

(except the Prime Minister himself) filed past the Holy Fire, lit by rubbing two raw wood pieces by two Brahmins chanting hymns.

A 'sadhvi' stood by, cupping a copper vessel with clutch of freshly plucked leaves of a Palm tree. One by one, the men who were to minister India hence after, were given a sprinkle-in-passing by the Brahmins. All bowed before the 'sadhvi', who, with the middle finger of her right hand, dotted vermillion on their foreheads – symbolic of Shiva's Third Eye - to exorcise evil spirits. The ministers supported the vermillion dots, visually conspicuous as they were, at Nehru's oath

Nehru couldn't escape a second time. Soon after, the date of Independence for India had been announced on June 3, astrologers of repute in Benares, and as far as Calcutta had sunk into a state of shock. For one, August 15 was a Friday, a day as inauspicious as Sunday is in Hindu constellation. Late Swami Madanand had even rolled his eyes heavenwards and sighed: “If floods, drought, famine and massacres follow, it will be because Free India was born on a day cursed by stars.”

But rituals were to revisit an agnostic Nehru, a third time. ( The first, when he was born at Allahabad. The second, when he went through nuptials with Kamala (Kaul) at Old Delhi, where Moti Lal Nehru's word was the law.) And today at 17, York Road. The clock was ticking towards the Midnight. On a Ford 1937 taxi were two bare-chested Brahmins from Tanjore (Thanjuvar); foreheads streaked with holy ash; hair unshorn in matted strands, en route 'Mission Bless Prime Minister'.

The Brahmins sat cross legged on antelope skin, held a bamboo stave with seven joints, a coconut with water, and a clothful of boiled rice – earlier offered at the feet of Lord Nataraja in South, then re-accepted as 'prasad'. Free India's Prime Minister-to-be sat too cross-legged, was all smiles; all submission as the Brahmins bathed him (with Gangajal, I presume ? ), draped him in 'Pitamber' – gold embroidered white silk, carried with care in a 'thali' of silver. And make Nehru hold a 5-foot sceptre.

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