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No Escaping Social Media

Running a magazine concentrating on issues of small and medium enterprises and managing with limited resources is a like living life on the edge. In this rush of meeting deadlines,...

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Apr 2012

EMRC, Brussels Associates with SME WORLD as its New Media Partner

EMRC has promoted business partnerships with the developing world and has organised dozens of business forums in key decision-making cities, such as Amsterdam, Rome,...

First Person Singluar

Of Indira's Stare & Benazir's Sari !

Aroon Sharma
Nov 2010

End June 1972 in Shimla wasn't really as cold as Indo-Pak relations were that year. Six months back, Pakistan had lost its Eastern wing – now Bangla Desh. More, it had lost its Lt. General A.A.K. Niazi and his 93,000 soldiers as POWs to Lt. General J.S, Aurora of India. Soon after, Pakistan's Chief of the Armed Forces, General Yahya Khan had been ousted in a coup. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had taken over as its President. The morale in Pakistan was in a pit -- as much as it was on a peak in India.

The 17 day war over, UN intervened. Shimla was to be the venue for a Bhutto-Indira Summit. On lines of Nehru grooming Indira , Bhutto wanted Benazir, 19, to get a hang of the tricks of the trade. She was at Harvard, vacationing in Pakistan when he told her

(she recalled in 1982) : “Whatever the result, the meeting will be a turning point in Pakistan's history….I want you to witness it first hand.”

Aboard the aircraft to Chandigarh ( thereon the father-daughter took a helicopter to Shimla ), the diplomat in him tweaked her: “You must not smile and give the impression you are enjoying yourself while our soldiers are still in Indian prisoner-of-war camps. You must not look grim either, which people can interpret as a sign of pessimism. They must have no reason to say “Look at her face.”

A greenhorn in Indo-Pak politics, Benazir wondered: “So how should I look?”. Bhutto repeated: “Don't look sad and don't look happy.” The Oxford-Harvard educated daughter argued: “That's very difficult.” The father, now the President of Pakistan countered: “It's not difficult at all.” The helicopter landed on a football pitch. It was raining. Mrs Indira Gandhi, in a raincoat, greeted received the Bhuttos.

In Benazir's words: “How tiny she was, much smaller than she seemed in the countless photographs I has seen of her. And how elegant, even in the raincoat, she wore over her sari under the threatening skies.” Benazir greeted her the Muslim way: “ As-Salaam O Alaikum.”. The Swiss educated Mrs Gandhi smiled “Namaste-Greetings”, the Indo-British way. Benazir recalls she returned a faint or a half smile.

Five days went by when the two ladies, a Prime Minister, and the one whom fate had willed to be a Prime Minister 17 years later, met again at a select dinner for the delegates from Pakistan. The Summit had not succeeded. In Benazir's words: “Though he ( Bhutto ) had been a great admirer of….Jawahar Lal Nehru….Mrs Gandhi, my father felt, did not have the vision and the ideals of her father ( Nehru ).”

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