Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
das a boy i was fascinated by Caroline of Monaco And Romina Power and admired by Golda Meir And Indira Gandhi. They were the women of my childhood. The first ones were beautiful. The latter were strong womenwho commanded countries at war.
Golda Meir she was born in Kiev. He governed Israel at the time of the Palestinian attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics and the Yom Kippur war: when the Syrians broke through to the Golan and already saw Lake Tiberias and the Jordan Valley, Golda Meir (Benny Morris tells it in his book Victims) thought about using tactical nuclear weapons, but Moshe Dayan stopped her: “Wait, our men can still hold out.” The Israeli tank crews resisted; and of the 2,300 men Israel lost in that war, half were tankmen.
Indira Gandhi she had to face Pakistan and China, but death came for her from the home front: the Sikhs who dreamed of an independent Punjab occupied the golden temple of Amritsar, their Vatican; and Indira sent the army to clear it. Her Sikh bodyguards avenged her coreligionists by unloading the magazines of their weapons on her.
Being told the story by Rahul Gandhi, his favorite nephew, was a great thrill. Rahul had refused to give me the interview for years: it’s not easy for an Indian political leader to remember having a mother born in Italy and a part of the Italian family. But now he had finally accepted and was speaking, at the gates of Srinagar, on the snows of Kashmir. And he was telling me that Grandma knew she was going to die.
That same morning she called 14-year-old Rahul while she was putting on her make-up and said: «If anything happens to me, promise me you won’t cryat least not in public.” Rahul promised without understanding. Two hours later they picked him up from school: his grandmother had been murdered.
A photo of the funeral shows him with his face buried in his father Rajiv’s shirt – he too destined for power and violent death – to keep the promise made to Indira Gandhi.
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