Shri Dinesh Singh, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs, assured the Zionist Organization of America, in a letter made public here today, that the New Delhi Government had intended no discourtesy to Israel’s President Zalman Shazar, and had promptly arrested Arab students who had staged a demonstration against Mr. Shazar recently.
Mr. Singh’s letter, transmitted to the ZOA by India’s consulate-general here, was read to the meeting held today by the ZOA’s national executive committee by Jacques Torczyner, president of the ZOA. The Indian leader’s statement, issued at New Delhi, was in reply to a protest made by the ZOA last month, when Mr. Shazar had evidently been snumbbed as he stopped in India on the way to and from a state visit to Nepal. Mr. Singh declared categorically that no discourtesy was intended and that the Arab students who demonstrated when the Israeli president was at an Indian airport had been “promptly arrested.”
Today’s session of the ZOA executive was addressed by S.Z. Abramov, a member of Israel’s parliament; and Rabbi Armond E. Cohen, spiritual leader of Park Synagog in Cleveland. The executive voted to hold the next ZOA convention in Israel, in July, 1967, to coincide with the celebration there of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the World Zionist Organization by the late Dr. Theodor Herzl.
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