Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Aamar sonar Bangla/Aamitomai bhalobashi.

This week, we celebrate the silver jubilee of independent India's finest hour, the Liberation of Bangladesh. I was 30 that year. There is no other year I would rather have been 30. For I was old enough to be a participant. And, yet, young enough to dream my dreams.

As Dhaka fell, I was named secretary to a committee chaired by Sukhomoy Chakravarty to organise emergency relief supplies to enable the incoming Government of Bangladesh to take back and rehabilitate the refugees who had fled in their millions to camps in India. I was, in that sense, present at the creation.

It was Indira Gandhi's finest hour. Whatever might be history's eventual judgement on her, and however many reservations her contemporaries might still have about her Emergency, in that first flush of victory in December 1971, every Indian was of one view: Indiraji had done us proud.

With consummate skill, she had manoeuvred the nation through some of the most treacherous shoals we have ever travesed and brought us across, like a true majhi, safe and secure, leaving on the shore a fuming Kissinger and a stunned Nixon bemused, bewildered, befuddled. Whether it was Cambodia or Bangladesh that was Kissinger's worst hour is something of a historian's toss-up.

The lesson I have learned is how dangerous it is to entrust the destiny of any nation to these Harvard types!

The heroes of the hour were General Jagjit Singh Aurora and his brigadier, Jack Jacob. At that momentous moment in history they belong to the nation.

Now, one belongs to the Akali Dal and the other to the BJP. Nevertheless, they deserve the nation's gratitude. They can do no harm now sufficient to obscure the tremendous boost they gave us that misty evening 25 years ago, when Niazi and Tikka Khan were brought to heel.

Looming above his soldiers in the field was Sam Manekshaw, the tallest of them all. India's one and only field marshal, still as erect as ever, still as witty as ever, still as sensible as ever.

If Indiraji had made him President in 1982, we might have been spared the dreaful five years that followed in Rashtrapati Bhavan -- and the even more dreadful Memoirs that have since emerged.

What an amazing contribution this microscopic community has made to the nation: Dadabhoy Naoroji and Pherozeshah Mehta pioneered our freedom movement; Jamshedjee Tata brought us into the vanguard of industry; Homi Bhabha took us to the frontiers of science; Sam Manekshaw sliced Pakistan in half. If we were to treat our larger minorities with a tithe of the affection we reserve for our smallest, we might still become Number One in the coming Asian Century.

I made my first trip to Bangladesh in January 1972. As the plane swooped in to Tejgaon airport, I gazed down at the golden fields below and hummed to myself the tune that had, over the previous several months, become so familiar to all of us: Aamar sonar Bangla/Aami tomai bhalobashi.

Perhaps because ours was the first-ever economic delegation to visit Bangladesh, or perhaps because he wanted to stretch his legs, or perhaps even because he was so fond of me, the acting high commissioner, J N Dixit, was at the airport to greet us on arrival. Wickedly, his eyes twinkling, he whispered to me that our economic delegation's slogan might be: Aamar sona; tomar Bangla.