A friend of India in Budapest

In Mexico neither the people nor the leaders took much interest in me even though Octavio Paz, the late poet, would not be dissuaded from the view that India and Mexico had a bond.

In fact I found warmth in nearby Nicaragua and Cuba, among the common people as well as among the leaders including Fidel Castro.

In France, Germany and Italy, leaders like Jacques Chirac, Klaus Kinkel and Romano Prodi and scores of others have sometimes surprised me with theaccess they have given me.

In Britain, on the other hand, I have drawn a blank in recent years. Denis Healey and Neil Kinnock being the last political leaders I met.

I have the fondest recollection of my numerous meetings with leaders, academics and journalists in Sri Lanka and Nepal. That I have not been able to touch first base in the Islamic states of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mald-ives is slightly ironical because I happen to be a Muslim.

Have my overtures been spurned by these societies because of my views on theocratic and secular states? If this were true, how does one explain the total access that both Israel and Iran, two theocracies, have given me and my TV crew repeatedly over the past decade? Prime Ministers Shamir, Rabin, Peres and Netanyahu on the one hand and former President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Foreign Ministers Ali Akbar Velayati and, later, Kharazzi on the other, have talked of India in terms that few other leaders in my experience have.

India is held in very high esteem in boththese societies. This, I dare say, is not true of Saudi Arabia, for instance. Yes, I forgot to mention Iraq, a country which has always related to us on a civilisational basis, supporting us on issues when few others did from as early as the ’70s. In its hour of trouble we have shown a singular lack of spine.

Spinelessness is not our only failing. There is a perverse streak which causes us to go down on our knees seeking membership of clubs where entry is denied to us. Abundance of affection causes us, quite perversely, to take no note.

Never have I been so disturbed by these thoughts than during visits to two very different countries: Ireland and Hungary. I was astounded at the discovery of a high school in Dublin which teaches Sanskrit and Vedic mathematics to its pupils, not as a fetish but on sound scientific argument.

Whereas Robin Cook across the channel was impossible to reach, a man possibly more busy than him, Jerry Adams, met me on three separate occasions.

Hungary was even more of arevelation. Have you ever heard of a man called Arpad Goncz? Well, he happens to be the President of Hungary and he remembers India as the country which saved his life. He remembers three names: “Ishi” Rehman, Jawaharlal Nehru and K.P.S. Menon, in that order. Rehman was the head of the mission in Budapest and Menon ambassador in Moscow.

“No embassy in Budapest had more information and a clear idea of what was happening in the Soviet bloc countries than the Indian embassy”, President Goncz remembers. “During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, again it were the Indians who knew best.” According to the Hungarian president, the Indian embassy had become the embassy of the Hungarian opposition.”

When Goncz and two of his friends were arrested for being part of the Hungarian resistance after the Soviet troops entered Hungary on November 4, 1956, it was Nehru’s intervention with the Soviet leaders at Rehman and Menon’s behest which “saved my life.”

Instead of being executed, he was “imprisoned forlife”, and released after an amnesty in 1963.

That Goncz went on to translate Premchand only embellishes the record of a Hungarian Indophile. The fact of the matter is that an interest in Sanskrit and Indology is part of an ancient Hungarian tradition. Hungarians are of eastern stock and proud of it.

Visit the university and you will have Dr Maria Negyesi holding classes in Hindi. A floor below, Sanskrit is the chosen subject of young PhD scholars. Prof Ildiko Puskas, one of the great Hungarian Indologists, can barely stop talking about the Hungarian search for eastern roots.

And in token of this affection for India, the Hungarians have preserved a prime suite at a famous sanatorium on Lake Belatone where Rabindranath Tagore stayed in November, 1926. A tree he planted in the garden is now full grown. The poet’s well chiselled bust rests in its shadow.