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When Ibn Saud visited India

opinionWhen Ibn Saud visited India

Arab chief of protocol said about the King, ‘His Majesty is never late. Your ministers have come too early.’

 

The first Arab I met was Faher Bin Taimur. He was one of the numerous sons of the Sultan of Muscat. During World War II, some Omani members of the royal family were sent to India for education. Faher came to Mayo College, Ajmer, a princely educational establishment where sports got precedence over studies. Faher became my class fellow. He was much older. His English at the time paid little attention to grammar. This was in 1940. We remained lifelong friends. I visited Oman several times as his guest. For a few years he was Deputy Defence Minister. Faher had a short temper. He fell foul of his nephew, the present Sultan of Oman. He died of cancer in his late sixties. For the past few days he has been in my thoughts on account of the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi with the approval of the highest authorities in Riyadh, in the office of the Consul General of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. Had Faher been alive, he would have been horrified and outraged.

I now turn to a happier event connected with Saudi Arabia. In the winter of 1955, His Majesty Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud came to India on a state visit. He was 6’6” tall, heavy of build, slow of movement. He brought a large delegation with him, including several young princes. The Saudi ambassador in Delhi at the time was Al Fausan, who had spent decades in Bombay as a businessman. Each time the King spoke to him, Al Fausan fell on his master’s feet. Jawaharlal Nehru was both irritated and amused. I was attached to the Saudi delegation as liaison officer along with several others IFS officers.

His Majesty stayed in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The day after his arrival, Pandit Gobind Ballabh Pant, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (he spoke fluent Arabic) and C.D. Deshmukh were to call on the King between 11.30 am and 12.15 pm. The first to arrive was Maulana Azad. He waited but the King did not appear. Next followed Pandit Gobind Ballabh Pant at 11.45 am. His Majesty did not send for him. C.D. Deshmukh reached Rashtrapati Bhavan punctually at 12.15. The three senior ministers kept cooling their heels. At 12.30 the chief of protocol, I.S. Chopra, approached his Arab counterpart. He said to him, “Perhaps His Majesty was late getting ready. The ministers were busy men. Another time could be allotted to them to pay their respects to HM.” Instead of apologising, the Arab chief of protocol answered, “His Majesty is never late. Your ministers have come too early.”

Two days later the King and his delegation took a train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Night was spent in the train. The next day too was spent sight-seeing. By the afternoon, Mohammad Yunus, an IFS officer, a nephew of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and jailbird with Nehru during the Freedom Movement, arrived in Agra. He met His Majesty. Most deferentially and politely he informed the King what the princes had been up to at night. They had paid in gold bars for services rendered.

The word had got round and had caused the UP government great discomfiture. The response of the King was, “Give me the names of the miscreants. I will send their heads to Prime Minister Nehru.”

The story of course is apocryphal. No such incident ever occurred. Yunus Bhai (that is what I called him) was an unmatched raconteur. He had invented this tale.

Winston Churchill in his memoirs of World War II has a splendid story about his meeting with His Majesty Ibn Suad on 17 February 1945 at the Fayyum Oasis near Cairo. Churchill had been told that Ibn Saud did not smoke or consume alcohol and did not approve of others doing so in his presence. This was conveyed to Churchill before the dinner he was giving for the King. During the dinner Churchill told Ibn Saud, “…my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred rite smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them.”

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