Do You Remember?
INDIRA GANDHI’S VISIT TO FIJI?
Indira Gandhi was the first Indian Prime Minister to visit an island country in the South Pacific. Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi visited Fiji in September, 1981, and lasted for two and half weeks. Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara had visited India in 1971.
The former Indian Prime Minister came to Fiji to award various Indian Independence Medals to the various Fijian souls who returned to India to fight alongside Mahatma Gandhi to achieve India’s independence. The people of Lautoka gave her a most wonderful welcome with flowers – a variety of marigolds, bougainvilleas and hibiscus–strewn in her path.
Mrs Gandhi, alongside Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, was also the guest of honour at the 1981 Sugar Festival held in Lautoka. The contestants at the carnival in Lautoka had the proud honour of meeting Mrs Gandhi.
The Fijian Government provided 14 acres of prime Crown land to commemorate the centenary of the arrival of the first indentured Indians to the islands.
The Girmit Centre for Multi-Cultural Studies was opened by Indira Gandhi on September 21, 1981. There were speeches given, and a poem written in Hindi was recited by Professor Satendra Nandan during the event.
“The most memorable moment was when, after the speeches and readings, she walked off the heavily decorated dias to meet the surviving girmityas we’d gathered from parts of Viti Levu,” Professor Nandan recalled in one of his articles in the Fiji Sun.
“Instead of a traditional gesture of ‘Namaste’ to them with her folded palms and moving on to the sumptuous tea laid out for the chief guest and her invited coterie, Indira Gandhi went and hugged each of these old men.”
Indira Gandhi was the first and, to date, only female Prime Minister of India. She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.
The former Indian Prime Minister died four years after her Fiji tour. She was assassinated by her own bodyguards on October 31, 1984, in the garden of her home in New Delhi, India .
The Girmit Centre in Lautoka was used as a refugee shelter for displaced, dispossessed rural people, especially during the 2000 coup.
Information Source: