Both Mani Shankar Aiyar and former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf longed to get their birth certificates from Lahore and Delhi municipal corporations. Lahore scored over Delhi when Aiyar, visiting Pakistan as a minister in July 2008, promptly received his birth certificate in a few hours.

As per the record of registered births in Lahore, Aiyar was born at Lady Aitcheson Hospital in Lahore on 9 April 1941. His name registered with the Lahore municipality was Venkata Subramaniam. According to the birth registration record available at Jinnah Hall, his father V Sankar Aiyar and mother Bhagya Lakshmi Sankar Aiyar, lived at 44 Lakshmi Mansion, Lahore.

Recording it in his yet-to-be-released book, Memoirs of a Maverick -The First Fifty Years [1941-91] [Juggernaut], Aiyar recalls how the Lahore civic authorities processed the document within hours, bettering the record of Delhi in that the latter took longer to access old records and prepare the birth certificate of former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf was born on 10 August 1943, at Nehar Wali Gali, a locality in old Delhi, and was a little over four years old when his parents migrated to Pakistan. The Delhi government had prepared his birth certificate, but it could not be gifted to him when he visited India in 2003.

Aiyar wrote in his memoirs that when he visited Pakistan as Union Panchayati Raj minister, he tried getting a bit mischievous in response to a boasting mayor of Lahore, Mian Amer Mohammad, that they had digitised all records of birth. “I inquired if they could retrieve their birth records from 1941. ‘Yes Sir;’ came the reply. I then asked if they had records of April 1941” and added, “Would you have the records of Aorul 10, 1941? ”

Intrigued, Mian Amer Mohammad said he would, but asked Aiyar why he would want to know. “Because, I answered, that was the day I was born here in this city, and I would like to test if they could get my birth record quicker than Delhi [MCD] that had been able to find President Musharraf’s.”

To his surprise, the next morning, when Aiyar took his chair at the conference, he found an envelope staring at him. It was a duly certified birth record, retrieved literally overnight by the Lahore Municipal Corporation. “The finding of my birth record within a few hours by the city government was a pleasant surprise for me,” Aiyar wrote, admitting that he was amazed to find that his original name, registered at the Lahore Municipality, as Venkata Subramaniam.

Amer Mohammad told Aiyar later that the records right from 1876 were intact and computerised.

There was more surprise in store for the career diplomat-turned-politician, columnist, and author. The date of his birth was actually recorded on 9 April 1941. Astrologically inclined Aiyar thinks the actual timing of his birth, advanced half an hour during World War II by the authorities, may have brought the day to 10th when he was actually born in the dead of the night of 9 April 1941. Aiyar was told by his mother that he was born at 12:24 am on 10 April but in effect the time as per Lady Aitcheson Hospital records, was 11:54 pm!

Incidentally, Aiyar’s name at the time of birth was Venkata Subramaniam, a combination of his maternal and paternal grandfathers. At home, young Aiyar was called Ajit, but when he turned eight, the future politician imitated Napoleon and ‘crowned’ himself as ‘Mani’ which was also a diminutive of Subramanian.

Aiyar’s father was living in Lahore in 1941 as an income tax expert.

After leaving the Indian Foreign Service when Aiyar was serving as joint secretary in Rajiv Gandhi’s prime minister’s office, he became a member of parliament, an AICC functionary, and a union minister. Aiyar himself describes his ‘half-life’ in politics much like the radioactive half-life discovered by Ernest Rutherford, the father of atomic physics—that is, the phenomenon of radioactivity growing for a while and then slowly petering out. “In a similar way, my life in politics rose in spurts to its highs and then sputtering out to a point where I find myself sidelined by Rajiv Gandhi’s heirs and marginalised even in the party….”

The writer is a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. A well-known political analyst, he has written several books, including ‘24 Akbar Road’ and ‘Sonia: A Biography’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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