When Sheikh Hasina got Indira Gandhi’s care, Pranab Mukherjee’s counsel
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 6
While she charts the course of her uncertain future, Bangladesh’s beleaguered former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina would be missing two elements as she homes in on an Indian safe house.
The first – “motherly affection” late PM Indira Gandhi showered on her and her sister Rehana when the two sought their first political asylum in Delhi after mass executions of their families in August 1975.
The second — late President Pranab Mukherjee’s counsel every time she needed guidance on matters involving Indo-Bangladesh ties.
About Indira Gandhi, Hasina wrote warmly in “India’s Indira: A Centennial Tribute”, a book Congress veteran Anand Sharma edited in the centenary year of the late PM, “When we met Indira Gandhi in Delhi, she received us with motherly affections. She even gave shelter to my two aunts who had lost their husbands and sons and who had become disabled after somehow surviving the August 15, 1975 carnage. Mrs Gandhi also gave shelter to all those MPs who had crossed the border in protest against the assassination of Bangabandhu (Bangladesh founder and Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman).”
Indira Gandhi had, in August 1975, arranged for Hasina and her family to come to India from West Germany when 18 members of their family were killed in Bangladesh and military rule ensued. One anecdote Hasina recalled with particular warmth in her memoirs was about a personal meeting with Indira Gandhi during that time.
“Once we requested a meeting with Mrs Gandhi upon our return from Ajmer Sharif and she granted us permission. But our vehicle went out of order and by the time we returned, there was little time left for the appointment. So after a quick change of clothes, we started for the PM’s residence. When she saw us, she asked, ‘Didn’t you take anything?’ I could not lie to her. She quickly ordered omelettes and toasts for us and served us tea herself,” Hasina says in her article in “India’s Indira.”
As for Mukherjees, they were always a family to her. “For Sheikh Hasina, Pranab Mukherjee was always ‘Dada’ and Suvra Mukherjee ‘Bahudi’ (Bengali for bhabhi),” a former private secretary to the late Mukherjee says, remembering how Hasina would ring him daily when the late Congress veteran was ill in August 2020.
Hasina’s ties with Mukherjees date back to her days of asylum in India when she stayed at their Greater Kailash family home before moving to an apartment on the Pandara Road. Hasina lived in India from 1975 to 1981 before returning home to wage struggles that culminated in prime ministership in 1996.
“Their families are still connected, Pranab Mukherjee’s daughter Sharmishtha, Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy, daughter Saima, aunt Rehana’s daughter Tulip Siddiq, who is a sitting Labour MP in the UK, all of them,” another former aide of late Mukherjee says, adding not only Hasina, even the Indian and Bangladeshi establishments would be missing the late President, who had ties across all segments of Bangladeshi society, from the political spectrum and armed forces to industry. As for Hasina, she would always stay at Rashtrapati Bhavan during Mukherjee’s tenure as the President. A former private secretary to Mukherjee mentions how as PM, Hasina in 2018 hosted Mukherjee as a state guest in Dhaka even when the latter was no longer the President of India.
“Their deep bond never changed. Few know that Mukherjee’s in-laws hailed from Narail village in Bangladesh’s Barisal and Sheikh Hasina always accorded the late President the welcome fitting of a ‘jamai raja’,” the former aide adds.
