Mohammad Hamid Ansari: The vice president of India
While working as editor in chief of Malayalam News — an Indian language daily — and also editor in chief of Urdu News, which belongs to the same company, I needed some information from a reliable Indian source. So I called Mohammad Hamid Ansari, who is now the vice president of India, for a good reason.
He had been the Indian ambassador in Saudi Arabia and we were friends because of his visits to our office and my attendance at functions in his embassy and I thought he would not have forgotten me in the period between his post here and that of the vice president.
I was gratified when he came on the phone and spoke to me with the usual amity I had experienced in Jeddah and Riyadh.
He told me what I was looking for and I promised to visit him next time I was in Delhi. By then I was in charge of Malayalam News and Urdu News and visited south India regularly where we set up a large head office and a network of bureaus.
Ansari was born in April 1937 in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). He studied at St. Xaviers College, and then at Aligarh Muslim University and obtained two doctoral degrees before joining the diplomatic service. He also held the position of the chancellor of Punjab University in Chandigarh, one of the prettiest cities in India. The city was designed by a British architect, who had also planned the beautiful secretariat and Houses of Parliament in India.
Apart from the Kingdom, he was posted as ambassador in Australia, the UAE, Afghanistan and Iran, and he also represented India as a permanent representative at the United Nations.
Apart from being a senior diplomat, which is not easy to achieve in India because of the demanding criteria, Ansari is a well known figure in the diplomatic circles in India and South Asia and is renowned for his hard-hitting writing especially on the Palestinian issue. He authored a book called “Travelling Through conflict.”
He once said: “The language used by the pope sounds like that of his 12th century counterpart who ordered the Crusades. It surprises me because the Vatican has a very comprehensive relationship with the Muslim world.”
Ansari was then the chairman of the minorities commission of India.
Ansari is a well known writer and speaker on West Asia — that is Middle East — as Indian press and politicians prefer to call the region, and has written on the Palestinian issue and the plight of the people with sincere indignation.
He questioned India’s vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program where India voted against Iran although India is a nuclear power and so is Pakistan.
He said that though the Indian government claimed to have acted on its own judgment this was not borne by the facts as his bio data claims.
His bio data also states he was the chairman of working groups on confidence building measures across segments of society established by the second roundtable conference on Jammu and Kashmir chaired by the prime minister in 2006.
The report of the working group was adopted by the third roundtable conference in April 2007. It advocates recognizing the right of Kashmiris to return to places of their original residence.
This right, it said, should be recognized without any ambiguity and made a part of state policy.
Ansari became the chairman of India’s National Commission for Minorities (NCM) in March 2006.
In June 2007, in that capacity he upheld the decision of India’s premier educational institution, St. Stephens College, to earmark a small percentage of seats for Dalits, or suppressed classes previously referred to as untouchables during the British colonial rule.
He resigned as NCM chairman after his nomination for the post of Indian vice president.
In 2007, Ansari was named by the ruling coalition as its vice presidential candidate. He is quoted as saying that he was humbled by the confidence reposed in him. He received 455 votes and won the election by a margin of 233 votes against his nearest rival Najma Heptullah, a well known stateswoman of the country.
In July 2012, he filed nomination papers for re-election to the post. His rival was Jaswant Singh, a former Cabinet minister who held key portfolios such as finance, external affairs and defense. Ansari won again and he is still serving the country as vice president.
— Farouk Luqman is an eminent journalist based in Jeddah.
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