Manmohan Singh: A Regret And A Reunion With Pakistani Schoolmate

New Delhi: He was a man of few words, not just during his 10-year tenure as India’s Prime Minister, but throughout his life. Dr Manmohan Singh, who breathed his last at AIIMS Delhi on Thursday night, was a man of action who believed in work more and talk less.

But that doesn’t mean Dr Singh was devoid of finer emotions and feelings.

Born in Gah, a village in Punjab province in undivided India (now in Pakistan), was around 15 years of age when his family was forced to migrate to India following the Partition in 1947.

His initial years of schooling was in Gah. More than four decades later, after he had orchestrated India’s path-breaking economic reforms as Finance Minister and then taken over as Prime Minister, Dr Singh shared with Union cabinet colleague Rajeev Shukla about a cherished wish.

“We used to a talk about a lot of things… once he told me about a strong desire to visit his childhood village which was in Pakistan. When I asked him whether he wanted to see his home, Dr Singh told me he wished to visit the school where he studied upto class IV,” recalled Shukla, who was Planning Minister in the Singh-headed UPA government.

That wish may have remained unfulfilled, but Dr Singh did have the chance to meet Raja Mohammad Ali, one of his childhood friends who visited India in 2008 and was hosted by the then-Indian PM.

Ali and Singh, who were classmates, had kept in touch, so it was a poignant moment when the two embraced each other amid smiles and nostalga, pictures of their reunion after decades surfacing from PMO Archives.

Ali used to call Singh by his nickname ‘Mohna’.

The two men, who were in their seventies, exchanged gifts.

Ali had brought mitti and pani (soil and water) from their ancestral village, which he presented to Singh with a photograph of Gah. The Indian PM gifted Ali a turban, a shawl and a Titan watch set.

Dr Singh’s unfulfilled desire may have been partly fulfilled that day.