Carterpuri (Gurugram), Dec 30 (PTI) Its link with the US and first world development is tenuous and perhaps in name only. But some memories still live on in Carterpuri, the small village that waltzed with fame, albeit briefly, when then US president Jimmy Carter came visiting 46 years ago and it was rechristened.
On Monday, when news came in of Carter’s death at his Georgia home at the age of 100, some of those memories were revived.
Carter, dressed in a dark suit, brought with him the glamour of the west and stoked aspirations, but left a long lull in his wake, says Yadram Yadav, a former sarpanch of the village, an hour’s drive from Delhi.
The day was January 3, 1978. Carter visited the village in Gurugram and sent it into international pages of newspapers worldwide.
“My village now lost his son and we are deeply saddened by the death of our village son Jimmy Carter,” Yadram Yadav said on the Democratic Party leader’s death.
Carter, who died on Sunday, was an “adopted son” of Daulatabad Nasirpur. The village was named Carterpuri after him at the suggestion of then prime minister Morarji Desai.
According to The Carter Center, he was the third American president to visit India and the only one with a personal connection to the country as his mother, Lillian, had worked there as a health volunteer with the Peace Corps during the late 1960s.
Villagers already knew Carter through his mother, who, volunteering as a social worker, helped midwife babies, gave medical aid, and lived in the mansion of Jaildar Sarfaraz. The house was later sold and rebuilt.
Locals remember Carter visiting the village with First Lady Rosalynn Carter and his retinue and delving into the life of the natives for a day.
Yadav also recalled how the First Lady was dressed in traditional village attire during the visit and the couple posed for photos – an album of which he has kept.
According to revenue records, Carterpuri was formerly known as Daulatpur Nasirabad, in the Gurgaon (Gurugram) district, part of the National Capital Region. People also used to call it Kheda village.
Carter promised he would help turn the place around into a “model village.” “Jimmy Carter wanted Carterpuri to be a model village, but at that time chief minister Chaudhary Devi Lal said he would do it at his end, but nothing happened. I wrote a few letters to the White House as I was the sarpanch of the village and a delegation from the White House visited the village in 1979, but Carterpuri is still a village like any other till today,” Yadram Yadav told PTI.
Forty-six years after the visit, the village 2 kms from Gurugram’s Palam Vihar indeed bears little signs of out-of-ordinary development and still awaits the “model village” promise to be realised.
According to The Carter Center, on January 3, 1978, Carter and then First Lady Rosalynn Carter travelled to the village of Daulatpur Nasirabad, an hour southwest of New Delhi.
“The visit was so successful that shortly after, village residents renamed the area ‘Carterpuri’ and remained in contact with the White House for the rest of President Carter’s tenure,” the Carter Center said.
“The trip made a lasting impression: Festivities abounded in the village when President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, and January 3 remains a holiday in Carterpuri,” it said, adding, the visit laid the groundwork for an enduring partnership that has greatly benefited both countries.
Jimmy Carter was the US president from 1977 to 1981 and was conferred with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for brokering a peace deal between Israel and Egypt in 1978 in the form of Camp David Accords.
He was the first American president to visit India after the removal of the emergency and victory of the Janata Party in 1977.
In his address to the Indian Parliament, Carter spoke against authoritarian rule and praised India for its democracy.
“India’s difficulties, which we often experience ourselves and which are typical of the problems faced in the developing world, remind us of the tasks that lie ahead. Not the Authoritarian Way,” Carter said on January 2, 1978.
“But India’s successes are just as important because they decisively refute the theory that in order to achieve economic and social progress, a developing country must accept an authoritarian or totalitarian government and all the damage to the health of the human spirit which that kind of rule brings with it,” he told members of parliament.
“Is democracy important? Is human freedom valued by all people?… India has given her affirmative answer in a thunderous voice, a voice heard around the world. Something momentous happened here last March, not because any particular party won or lost but rather, I think, because the largest electorate on earth freely and wisely chose its leaders at the polls. In this sense, democracy itself was the victor,” Carter said. PTI COR VN VN
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