Saare Jahaan Se Achchhe din for Didi, thanks to Delhi

Imran Ahmed Siddiqui and Charu Sudan Kasturi, TT, New Delhi, May 20: The Narendra Modi government has green-signalled Mamata Banerjee's plans to bring to India family members of poet Muhammad Iqbal, who penned one of India's favourite patriotic songs and championed Pakistan's creation.

The foreign office and the home ministry have approved the chief minister's request to host Waleed Iqbal, the grandson of Pakistan's poet laureate who in undivided India had composed the song Saare Jahaan Se Achchha.

The approvals from the Centre came in near-record time for a visit involving a citizen of Pakistan. The subcontinent siblings are notorious for delays - if not refusals - in granting visas to each other's nationals.

"I am directed to convey 'No Objection' from political angle of the ministry of external affairs to the visit of the above-mentioned Pakistani nationals," the foreign ministry wrote to G.G. Sarkar, Bengal additional secretary, on May 18 in a letter.

The Bengal government's Urdu academy is hosting a programme called Jashn-e-Iqbal(celebration of Iqbal) on May 29 in Calcutta, and had initially hoped to host the poet's son, Javid Iqbal, a retired Supreme Court judge in Pakistan.

But at 90, Javid Iqbal is unable to travel, and the family communicated to the state government that the poet's grandson - and Javid's son - Waleed could instead attend. Waleed is a politician with former cricketer Imran Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaaf party.

The Mamata government has also invited two of Pakistan's most prominent Iqbal scholars - Rafiuddin Hashmi and Khalid Nadeem - for the event. Their visits, too, have been approved by the foreign ministry. Sarkar wrote to the foreign office on May 13, and Uluberia MP Sultan Ahmed - a member of the governing council of the state's Urdu academy - wrote to foreign minister Sushma Swaraj on May 15, to "expedite the process".

On May 18, Ahmed also wrote to home minister Rajnath Singh to "facilitate the visa" to the three Pakistani invitees. While the Indian high commission in Islamabad will issue the visas, the home ministry needs to approve all visa applications.

Today, Ahmed met Singh and junior foreign minister V.K. Singh. Sushma is in South Africa for a bilateral meeting.

Apart from the Calcutta event, Waleed will also visit Jorasanko Thakurbari, the ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore, Iqbal's contemporary and the author of India's national anthem.

Born in Sialkot in 1877, Iqbal studied in Lahore, London and Munich before returning to Lahore in undivided Punjab, where he pursued poetry and also aligned himself with Mohammed Ali Jinnah in the Muslim League. Iqbal advocated the creation of separate Muslim-dominated provinces in 1930, and detailed this vision in a famous letter to Jinnah in 1937.