Indira Gandhi was busy at the celebrations of India's independence day on 15 August 1975 when she was given news of the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family earlier that morning in Dhaka. It was a shock for the Indian Prime Minister to know that a friend she had known so closely and for whom she had spoken before the world in the dark days of 1971 had lost his life in the very country he had led to freedom.
Mrs Gandhi's sense of grief on the day was palpable. She must have recalled all the moments when she had warned Bangabandhu of the many threats to his life and asked him to make sure his security was strengthened. She was constantly worried that Bangabandhu's lifestyle, even as the Father of the Bengali Nation, was too easy-going and therefore invited threats to his life. But, of course, Bangabandhu was never one to believe that the regimes of Pakistan's Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan having failed to put an end to his life, his own Bengalis would commit the dark deed.
On that morning in August 1975, darkness suddenly descended not only on Dhaka but on Delhi as well. One does not need much imagination to remind oneself of the pain which Mrs Gandhi went through in the weeks, months and years following the tragedy in Dhaka. The Indian leader was fated to die in a manner in which Bangabandhu lost his life, nine years later in October 1984.
But in those eerie moments of 1975, she surely recalled the ties which had brought her close to the family of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. On her state visit to Dhaka in March 1972, Mrs Gandhi's ties with Bangabandhu attained greater depth through her interaction with Begum Fazilatunnessa Mujib and the children in the Mujib family.
It was a remembrance of these strong family ties between the two families which came alive the other day in Delhi when the present generation of Nehru-Gandhis came calling on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The images of the Bangladesh leader in warm embrace with Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra spoke of the links between the Sheikhs and the Gandhis that have withstood the test of time.
Historically, of course, the Indian National Congress and the Bangladesh Awami League have upheld similar political values --- democracy, nationalism, secularism, socialism --- and have always been regarded as forces of stability in the turbulent region the subcontinent has always been. Those values have endured.
At the family level, Sheikh Hasina certainly recalls in gratitude the hand of commiseration and friendship extended to her and her family in the dark days following Bangabandhu's assassination. Indira Gandhi knew what she needed to do when expectations were voiced of her assistance in providing safe sanctuary to the daughter of her friend. She had no second thoughts in deciding that the young Sheikh Hasina and her family would have a home in Delhi.
It was thus that for six years the future Prime Minister of Bangladesh spent her exile on Delhi's Pandara Road. That her family would have full security and would stay away from the public eye in safety was guaranteed by Indira Gandhi. Even in the years when Mrs Gandhi was out of power, Sheikh Hasina and her family bided their time in Delhi before they could return home.
The ties between the Gandhis and the Sheikhs was renewed more assertively when Mrs Gandhi stormed back to power in 1980. A little over a year later, having been unanimously elected as chief of the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina made her way home from Delhi. Those six years in Delhi had fortified her in her perceptions of politics and of what she needed to do at home.
Her links with Indira Gandhi were pivotal in giving her a sense of destiny. Here was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru navigating India to its destined shores; and here was the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman preparing to steer Bangladesh out of the sinister woods into which it had been cast by the wolves six years earlier.
In Delhi earlier this week, all these lost moments of history were again at work, were in a state of revival when the descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi came calling on the individual holding aloft the banner of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In an important way, new history was scripted on the day, for in Rahul Gandhi and his sister were embedded the seeds of a revival of the glory that had raised India to the heights of global significance. It is glory that could well be again.
In that reunion of the families it was the images of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Indira Gandhi bound in unshakeable friendship which shone brilliant. It was the images of Sheikh Hasina nursing her grief for six years in Delhi and readying herself to rise beyond it which surely must have exercised the mind of Bangladesh's Prime Minister as she gathered the three Gandhis in the warmth of hugs a Bengali woman is capable of calling forth for those she loves.
And in this tale of family ties between the two pre-eminent political dynasties of India and Bangladesh arise the many instances of heartbreak consequent upon assassinations and other unnatural deaths. Indira Gandhi lost Sanjay to unanticipated tragedy. Rahul and Priyanka lost their grandmother to assassins' bullets. They then lost their father Rajiv Gandhi to murder committed by the LTTE, leaving their mother a widow in the springtime of her life. Sheikh Hasina lost her parents, her siblings and her sisters-in-law and then found herself as the target of multiple assassination attempts.
It was a moment for historians in the two countries to reflect on. In 1971, Mrs Gandhi's government went out of its way to ensure that Bangabandhu was alive in Pakistani captivity and once it became known that he had not been despatched to the grave, launched an offensive to have the world make certain that the Yahya Khan junta did not kill the Bengali leader after a sham trial in a kangaroo court.
Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman met for the first time on 10 January 1972 on the latter's stop-over in Delhi on his way home to his free Bangladesh. He stepped on Indian soil as President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to be welcomed by President V.V. Giri and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Bangabandhu needed to express his gratitude to Mrs Gandhi, a job he did with finesse. That was the spark which set the friendship between the two families rolling.
The ties that bind, that deepen links are what keep families which share happiness and pass through common threads of tragedy together, through the generations. The Gandhis and the Sheikhs have been participants in that story in the fifty-three years which have gone by since December 1971.
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