India ‘sorrow’ at royal death

PRINCE PHILIP made four memorable visits to India in his years of accompanying the Queen during their official visits overseas.

The UK’s longest-serving royal consort joined the Queen in India in 1959, 1961, 1983 and also 1997.

“Deeply saddened at sad demise of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, an iconic pillar of the British monarchy, regarded by his people and world with the highest esteem and affection. India had the honour of receiving him and HM The Queen on four memorable occasions,” the Indian High Commission in London said in a statement.

During the couple’s 1961 visit to India, Prince Philip was pictured with the Queen and the erstwhile Jaipur royals with a tiger he had shot and killed while on a hunt. It happened to be the same year he became president of the World Wildlife Fund. He also shot a crocodile and mountain sheep during that visit, but it was the photograph of the tiger that caused ripples around the world.

When the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited India to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence in 1997, he joined her on a visit to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar.

The royal couple laid a wreath at the site associated with General Dyer’s orders to open fire on a large Baisakhi gathering in April 1919.

As he walked past a plaque at the memorial which read ‘This place is saturated with the blood of about two thousand Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were martyred in a non-violent struggle’, Prince Philip queried the death toll from the massacre.

“Two thousand? It wasn’t, was it,” he is reported to have said. “That’s wrong. I was in the Navy with Dyer’s son. That’s a bit exaggerated… it must include the wounded.”