Thaindian News

New York, May 11 (IANS) US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recalled two “remarkable experiences” in India, including a meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Benerjee to focus on efforts for the upliftment and empowerment of women.

“I try, whenever possible, to find time to meet with women who are trying to do, often under very difficult circumstances, what we celebrate here today,” she said Thursday as she received the Century Award at the New York Women’s Foundation breakfast in New York City.

During her visit to West Bengal last week, Clinton recalled she “had two remarkable experiences - meeting the newly elected chief minister, a woman who, on her own, started a new political party and built that political party over many years.”

Banerjee, she noted, had “just successfully ousted the incumbent Communist Party that had been in office for 30, 34 years or so, and who is trying now to govern a state with 90 million people in it.”

“And then I met with a group of women - mostly Indian, some American - who, along with some of the men who were running organizations to rescue girls from having been trafficked into prostitution.”

“So when I was introduced to a young girl, probably about 10, who had, with her mother, been rescued from a brothel, who was dressed in her karate outfit and she asked me, ‘Do you want to see me do karate?’” Clinton said.

“I said, ‘I really do.’ And she proceeded to perform a karate move,” Clinton recalled. “But it wasn’t so much the karate as it was the way she stood so straight, looked me in the eye, had a sense of pride and accomplishment about her.”