Durbar (11 page)

India’s children are the worst victims of bad governance. Those who grow up in poverty are lucky if they get one meal a day. Most grow up without ever eating vegetables or drinking milk. According to statistics collected in 2011 by the United Nations 45 per cent of India’s children are malnourished. The government schools that they are sent to provide education of such abysmal standards that most children leave school without being able to read a story or count to a hundred. If girls get sick they are often left to die because their parents consider it a waste of money to pay medical bills for girls. The situation was a hundred times worse in the seventies but nobody talked about it. In the reporters’ rooms of Delhi’s big newspapers subjects like this never came up because we did not think people wanted to read about these things. As I walked on to the river I found myself wondering how much the media was to blame for what had gone wrong in India. Had we given more coverage to India’s real problems, would our political leaders have paid more attention?

On that first day of the mela I got as much material as I needed for the ‘colour’ story I planned to write and would have returned to Delhi earlier than I had intended if the rumour of Mrs Gandhi’s possible arrival had not acquired a new seriousness. The rumour, now half confirmed by mela officials, was that Mrs Gandhi planned to arrive on the most auspicious bathing day, which was on the
amavasya
or moonless final night of the Kumbh Mela on 19 January. It seemed stupid to leave, especially since there was so little happening in Delhi. Besides, there were many of my friends at the mela and in the evenings much fun to be had drinking and merrymaking in our cold and damp tents. Drinking alcohol was strictly prohibited, but if the officials knew what was going on they pretended not to.

The last day of the mela was rainy and cold. I would have happily skipped the morning worship and stayed in bed but my tent was leaking so it seemed like a better idea to have a quick breakfast and get on with the day. As I headed towards the river under a cloud of black umbrellas I was surprised to find that a new road, wide enough for a car to drive along, had come up overnight connecting the fort to the river. Soldiers from the regiment garrisoned in the fort had been deployed to put up barricades that sealed the road from intrusions by ordinary pilgrims and everyone else.

‘Is this a private road?’ I asked one of the officials who ordered us to take an alternative route. ‘If it isn’t, why can’t we walk on it? Why are we being pushed off it and made to walk in the mud?’

‘It’s for the prime minister,’ he said simply, ‘she is coming here tonight.’

‘What is she coming for? To take a holy dip?’ My attempt at irony was wasted.

‘Yes.’

‘Great. So what time will she be taking her dip? We are reporters from Delhi.’ I pointed to the small crowd of journalists standing under black umbrellas around me.

‘We are not to speak of such details,’ he said with a suspicious scowl.

‘But we are reporters. We have a right to know.’

‘Then find out from the press information desk.’

We went back to the press enclosure for more information, and got none. The rain became heavier. We decided that our best bet was to cancel the daily trip to the river, settle ourselves in the dining room tent and wait for news. Everyone had lost interest in the Kumbh Mela. At around tea time the rain stopped and a watery sun appeared in the sky. There was still no sign of Mrs Gandhi and we began to consider the possibility that the rumour was after all just a rumour. All of us were booked on the one and only train back to Delhi that evening but as we were about to leave for the railway station we heard the sound of a helicopter.

Before we knew what was happening the public address system suddenly crackled to life and over it came Mrs Gandhi’s thin, girlish voice. We could not see her. We did not know where she spoke from but everyone at this massive gathering of pilgrims from all over India heard her voice. Her speech went something like this. ‘Brothers and sisters, beloved countrymen, you know that for some months we have been forced by the behaviour of our opposition leaders and by dark forces from abroad to take emergency measures. We have been forced, against our will, to suspend fundamental rights and other democratic processes. We did this for your good and to save our great country from threats from internal forces and from abroad. But I am happy to tell you today that the nation is now saved and we no longer need those emergency measures. I am happy to tell you that elections will be held in March.’

For a moment we stared at the loudspeaker in shock and then there was a mad frenzy to get to the railway station in time to catch the only train back to Delhi. We nearly did not make it because of the thousands of pilgrims who were as desperate as us to get on to the train to Delhi. When we got to the station we found the platform carpeted with pilgrims and as the train pulled in they rose as if with a single will and swarmed towards it. There was a stampede but somehow we managed to find a coupé and lock the door before a crowd of pilgrims tried to break it down with their sticks. They did not stop until the train started pulling out of the station. I think there were ten of us in that coupé and the only person who seemed not to mind the discomfort of the journey was Raghu Rai. I have a distinct memory of him taking pictures of a waiter with a tray balanced in his hands, swinging from compartment to compartment as the train pulled into Delhi at dawn the next day.

Mrs Gandhi’s sudden announcement of fresh elections took everyone by surprise. The country had settled into an Emergency groove. The rage over compulsory sterilizations and forcible ‘resettlement’ that had caused more than seven lakh citizens of Delhi to be moved had waned. And the opposition parties appeared to have given up the fight. The leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), Balasaheb Deoras, had gone so far as to write a conciliatory letter to Mrs Gandhi. The RSS had been among Mrs Gandhi’s fiercest critics long before the Emergency was declared and routinely used their English newspaper,
Motherland
, to charge her with all manner of crimes including treason. RSS workers formed a large contingent of the political prisoners in jail during the Emergency. For the RSS chief to seek peace with Mrs Gandhi meant the organization had adjusted to the idea of democracy remaining suspended indefinitely.

Why then had Mrs Gandhi decided that elections were necessary? The consensus in Delhi’s newsrooms was that she was deeply hurt that the Western media had taken to calling her a dictator. Mrs Gandhi rarely gave interviews to Indian journalists and treated the Indian press with disdain but was sensitive to what the Western media said about her.

It became clear that Mrs Gandhi wanted to restore her image as a democratic leader and this could only happen if the coming elections were seen to be fair. Within days of the elections being announced most of the opposition leaders who were still in jail were released. They were no longer worth keeping in jail since nobody, not even the opposition
leaders themselves, thought in January 1977 that Mrs Gandhi had the slightest chance of losing this election. Every report, even from her own intelligence agencies, indicated that she might lose a few seats but that there was no chance of a total defeat.

When the first posters appeared on Delhi’s walls announcing that a rally was to be held at the Ram Lila Maidan that would be addressed by the major opposition leaders all of us thought it was a joke. How could they possibly hope to fill the city’s largest public park when the organizational capacities of their disparate political parties had not been tested in months? There were still six weeks to go before the election but the opposition leaders had come out of jail demoralized and defeated. Some were recovering from the ordeal of long months of solitary confinement. Others from ailments caused by age and prison life. Most seemed only to want to spend time with their families and eat home food and none of them had been seen in public. In the
Statesman
reporters’ room the feeling was that even if the posters were genuine the rally would be a flop because people would be too scared to attend it. The Emergency was still in effect and the atmosphere of fear that the past eighteen months had created had not dissipated.

On the day of the rally even the elements seemed to be on Mrs Gandhi’s side. A thick pall of clouds hung over the city and by late afternoon it started to rain. In the reporters’ room we sat huddled gloomily around heaters debating whether there was any chance of the opposition parties being able to hold a successful political rally with so much going against them. Those of us who felt we needed to do our bit to help the opposition parties rang everyone we knew and urged them to go to the Ram Lila grounds to show our solidarity. But Mr Raju, the chief reporter, was his usual pessimistic self and pronounced that since Mrs Gandhi was undefeatable there was no point anyway. ‘Even if there’s going to be an opposition rally,’ he said, as always without looking up from his typewriter, ‘it will make no difference. She wouldn’t have gone for elections if she had any doubts about winning.’

‘Yes, but she could have made a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that the son and heir was totally opposed to the idea. He told her they could lose.’ Rumours about this had been circulating for days. Many years later when Sanjay’s best friend Kamal Nath was a cabinet minister in a Congress government in Delhi, I asked him whether it was true that Sanjay had
opposed his mother’s decision to have elections and he confirmed that it was. He said that Sanjay and he were together in Srinagar when they heard about the elections and Sanjay had been very upset because he believed that it would have been better to first lift the Emergency. He must have had a better sense of the mood of the people than we did on that cold and rainy afternoon as we waited to go to the opposition rally, for we agreed that the chances of Mrs Gandhi losing the election, despite the Emergency, were minimal.

On the short drive from the
Statesman
office to Ram Lila Maidan the only thing that brought some cheer was that the thin drizzle stopped and a weak sun appeared in the sky. Neither my colleagues nor I thought that this would encourage more people to come to the opposition rally. So when we saw large crowds of people walking towards the Ram Lila grounds we were taken aback. Someone said that it could be because there were committed Jana Sangh supporters in Delhi who would have been mobilized.

When we got to the grounds we noticed that people were streaming in from all sides and, beyond Turkman Gate, people were even sitting on rooftops. But not even this prepared us for what we saw when we got inside. There were more people than I had ever seen at a political rally. The crowd stretched all the way to the end of the Ram Lila grounds and beyond. But, unlike at public meetings in normal times, when there is always a carnival atmosphere, there was a seriousness about this rally. People talked to each other softly and sat under umbrellas or in flimsy raincoats in orderly lines on black plastic sheets that covered the wet ground. They looked like they had been waiting a long time.

The press enclosure was bursting with excitement. Noisy reporters were as overwhelmed by the size of the crowd as I was and there were many jokes about Mrs Gandhi’s failure to sabotage the rally by showing a super-hit Hindi film on Doordarshan. The usual fare that India’s only television channel offered was so dull that its ratings went up only when it showed Hindi films. In the press enclosure that afternoon we laughed about how it must have been some lowly official looking for applause from the prime minister who came up with the idea of telecasting
Bobby
at exactly the time the first opposition rally was being held in Delhi in nearly two years.

At about 6 p.m., the opposition leaders arrived in a convoy of white Ambassadors. They were mostly old men who walked so slowly up the steps of the yellow-washed, faux-Mughal pavilion in which the stage
was set that there were jokes in the press enclosure about them being too frail to be out on such a cold winter’s day. One by one they rose to make long, boring speeches about their travails in jail. The crowd began to look bored and restless. I said to a colleague from the
Hindustan Times
that I thought people might start to leave unless somebody said something more inspirational. It was past 9 p.m. and the night had got colder although the rain had stopped. ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied with a smile, ‘nobody will leave until Atalji speaks. Everyone here has come just to hear him.’ He pointed to a small man with steel-grey hair, the last speaker that evening.

‘Why?’

‘Because he is the best orator in India. Have you never heard him speak?’

‘No. I’ve only been in journalism since he went to jail.’

‘Well, you’re in for a treat. And to hear him for the first time today will really be something.’

It was well past 9.30 p.m. when Atalji’s turn finally came and as he rose to speak the huge crowd stood up and started to clap. Softly, hesitantly at first, then more excitedly, they shouted, ‘Indira Gandhi
murdabad
! Atal Behari
zindabad
!’ He acknowledged the slogans with hands joined in a namaste and a faint smile. Then, raising both arms to silence the crowd and closing his eyes in the manner of a practiced actor, he said, ‘
Baad muddat ke mile hain deewane
.’ (It has been an age since we whom they call mad have had the courage to meet.) He paused. The crowd went wild.

When the applause died he closed his eyes again and allowed himself another long pause before saying, ‘
Kehne sunne ko bahut hain afsane
.’ (There are tales to tell and tales to hear.) The cheering was more prolonged, and when it stopped he paused again with his eyes closed before delivering the last line of a verse that he told me later he had composed on the spur of the moment. ‘
Khuli hawa mein zara saans to le lein, kab tak rahegi aazadi kaun jaane
.’ (But first let us breathe deeply of the free air for we know not how long our freedom will last.)