Do you Know that Shabbir Hassan Khan Josh and Maulana Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi were great friends? Friendship, like all emotional bonds, cannot perhaps be defined and detained within boundaries. Only the childhood friends can tell you what their meetings mean to each other.
Sardar Manmohan Singh and Raja Ali Mohammed too are childhood friends and classmates who renewed their ties in New Delhi on May 30. Both were ga ga, besides themselves with joy.
Our Prime Minister was born on September 26, 1932 at Gah village in Pakistan’s Punjab Province. The village in which he studied was named after him, the day he was sworn as Prime Minister of Bharat. What a tribute!?
The septuagenarian visitor from across the border brought moving gifts, a photo of Gah village, a 100-year old shawl for the Prime Minister and two embroidered suits of Shalwar-Qamees for “Bhabi”. In return, Mr. Manmohan Singh gave Mr Ali a turban, a set of watches and a few pairs of “jootis”. To quote Mr. Ali: “InshaAllah we will meet again in our village.” The Prime Minister is expected to visit Pakistan next year.
The truth is “friendship” has an inexplicable aura, a difficult-to-define ambience and a mind-boggling logic. Can you explain the friendship between the Late Maulana Afzal Hussain, Qayyim Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and Majrooh Sultanpuri, the well-known progressive poet, who also wrote film songs?
Is equally breath-taking not the friendship between Ms Uma Bharti and Mr. Govindacharya?
During the Emergency in 1975, many a Leftist became good friends of the Jamaat people. How odd looks the friendship of the late Mr. Madhu Limaye, who was a liberal socialist with the late Maulana Inamur Rehman Khan, the then Zonal President of Madhya Pradesh? The former was such a sincere admirer of the Jamaat functionary that he referred to his thoughts in an article in the “Blitz.”
Mr. Jayaprakash Narayana was a great friend of the late Mr. Nehru. Before and after Emergency, Mrs Indira Gandhi fought a pitched political battle with J.P. But before his death, J.P. saw to it that he returned all the Nehru letters to “Indu” for the use of future generations.
One thing significantly bad about politics is that it does not recognise friendship. It recognises interests alone. That is why often we find incongruent persons having good company. Just think of Mr. George Fernandese or Najma Heptullah in the company of the BJP stalwarts. Similar oddity we may see in the US if Mrs Clinton agrees to work under Mr. Obama.
One thing exceptionally good about Arab and North-African countries is that leadership does not change there at all. How many elections has Mr. Hosni Mobarak won with 99.9 per cent majority? So was the case with Hafiz Al-Asad of Syria. Almost the same is true about the Gulf countries. In each and every international conference one sees the same, often seen faces – even of the journalists and those who crack jokes about their leaders on the foreign soils alone.
Once the late Maulana Maududi was asked while on a foreign visit, about his reaction to certain remark of the then Pakistan President. His reply was: “When I leave my country, I also leave my differences with my government on the airport:”
Deep friends christen their childhood friends in their own way. The visitor from Pakistan, Raja Ali Muhammad would call our Prime Minister “Mohana”. We Indians are grateful to him for not calling his childhood friend M-a-n-a-m-o-h-a-n-a. That is prerogative of Mrs. Manmohan Singh only.