Veteran Journalist, Fareed Zakaria’s Mother, Padma Shri Fatima Zakaria Dies Aged 85

Renowned journalist, academician and Padma Shri awardee, Fatima Rafiq Zakaria passed away at the Bajaj Hospital in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad due to COVID-19 on Tuesday noon. She was 85.

Fatima Zakaria was the widow of former Maharashtra Minister and Islamic scholar Dr Rafiq Zakaria, and had been admitted to a local hospital for the past few days, IANS reported.

She was chairman of Maulana Azad Educational Trust and Khairul Islam Trust Mumbai and was also the executive vice-chairman of the Board of Governors of the Trust’s Institute of Hotel Management which is run in collaboration with the Taj Group of Hotels.

Conferred with the Sarojini Naidu Integration Award for Journalism in 1983 and the Padma Shri in recognition of her work in education in 2006, Fatima Zakaria worked for the Times of India Group for many years and went onto become the Editor of The Sunday Times, the Bombay Times, and later edited the Taj magazine, a coffee-table publication brought out by the Taj Group of Hotels.

She is survived by four children – Tasneem Zakaria, an art historian, Manzoor Zakaria, Arshad Zakaria who is with a US-based global hedge fund and renowned US-based journalist Fareed Zakaria, who is the former Editor of Newsweek magazine and ex-Editor at large with Time magazine, and currently hosting the ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’ show on CNN.

Condolences started pouring in soon after the news of her passing away.

“My mother, Fatma Zakaria, passed away last night at 85. She lived a long, rich, eventful life, with children and grandchildren whom she adored. She loved this photograph,” her son Fareed Zakaria tweeted.