Durbar (13 page)

It was 5 a.m. by the time I went home. My parents were awake and listening to the BBC. ‘She lost,’ my mother said with a bewildered smile, ‘and her son lost. I never thought it would happen. We have to salute the Indian voter.’

Later, when a new government came to power in Delhi, there were rumours that Mrs Gandhi had tried to get the Army Chief to impose martial law on the country rather than surrender power. These rumours were never confirmed, nor were rumours that Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s first reaction after hearing of the defeat was to seek refuge in the Italian embassy. Sonia was still an Italian citizen at the time and there was so much uncertainty about what might happen to Mrs Gandhi and her family that if she did seek help from her embassy it would have been a sensible thing to do. What I did hear from one of the members of the inner circle was that the children, Rahul and Priyanka, were sent away from Delhi to take shelter in the home of Arun Singh’s mother in Mussoorie. Again, they can hardly be blamed for wanting their children safe in such uncertain times.

It was just after Mrs Gandhi’s defeat, while a jubilant Janata Party government was taking over in Delhi, under Morarji Desai, that I met Akbar Ahmed. He was better known by his nickname Dumpy though I have always called him Akbar. He was introduced to me at a dinner party in the Oberoi Hotel as ‘Sanjay Gandhi’s best friend’. I took an instant liking to Akbar because of his ability to laugh at the most serious things and because he admitted without hesitation that he did not know how he had wound up in politics. At our first meeting he told me he had been studying chartered accountancy in London throughout the Emergency and had returned just before the elections were announced. He ended up helping Sanjay Gandhi with his campaign to win his first Lok Sabha election from Amethi at the behest of a senior politician in the Congress Party. ‘Weren’t you friends in the Doon School? Shouldn’t you be helping him?’ He was in Lucknow, he said, not doing very much and with Amethi so close by he just drove down and offered his help.

When I got to know Akbar better I discovered that his best quality was his ability to give unstinting loyalty and friendship. After the defeat in 1977 when many of the sycophants around the Gandhi family vanished quietly into the Delhi night Akbar felt it was his duty to be as much of a
friend to them in every possible way. Even if he had no work with Sanjay he went and saw him nearly every day. He told me that after they moved to 12 Willingdon Crescent, the house Mrs Gandhi was allotted after her defeat, the family lived in considerably reduced circumstances. Mrs Gandhi was not known to have made any money for herself when she was prime minister and the party funds vanished with as much speed as the sycophants.

From Akbar I learned that after the defeat Mrs Gandhi was so shaken that she had seriously considered retiring to a cottage in the hills to write her memoirs. She thought this would be a good way to escape any political retribution that the Janata government may have been contemplating. According to Akbar it was because Sanjay Gandhi insisted that they stay to fight another day that Mrs Gandhi did not leave Delhi. Sanjay became her pillar of support and consolidated what remained of the Congress Party. Mrs Gandhi seemed lost and defeated. I remember running into her at obscure diplomatic parties and once even at some non-event in Sapru House. Her presence was often an embarrassment at these events because it meant that the host or hostess would have to be in permanent attendance. Ordinary socialites were too overwhelmed to chat to her and diplomats and bureaucrats too intimidated. The occasional journalist would go up and ask a question or two but she did not like journalists and made this clear by responding to most questions in curt monosyllables.

It was Akbar who first told me that there were serious domestic tensions in Mrs Gandhi’s household. Since 12 Willingdon Crescent was not very far from my parents’ home he would drop by often full of stories and gossip. One evening when he settled down with his glass of Scotch whisky on my veranda he told me that Rajiv and Sonia blamed Sanjay for everything that had gone wrong and that they never tried to hide their feelings about this. Tensions ran so high that the smallest trigger could set Sonia off, Akbar said. There was a particular story about a fight over dog biscuits that I remember well.

This is how Akbar told the story. ‘Yaar, can you imagine anyone getting upset because some dog biscuits got eaten by the wrong dog? What happened was that Maneka saw these biscuits in the fridge and fed them to her dogs and Sonia had a screaming fit. Then Rajiv started screaming too and it was all very unpleasant. Apparently they were imported dog biscuits or something. But, they were just dog biscuits, yaar.’

My first real conversation with Rajiv Gandhi took place some weeks after the Janata government came to power. It was around the time of the first anniversary of the Turkman Gate incident so this would have been April 1977. I had spent the whole day in the old city trying to piece together what had happened at Turkman Gate the year before, for a commemorative piece I was writing, now that press censorship had been lifted. Drained by the stories I heard in the old city and from trying not to be overwhelmed by the raw pain of people who had lost homes and loved ones I was happy to be in the salubrious setting of a dinner party at Vicky Bharat Ram’s home.

It was a warm evening and the long windows of the drawing room were open allowing in a soft breeze that scattered cigarette smoke and the scent of French perfume. After dinner, when most of the guests had left, I must have got a little reckless from drinking an extra glass of white wine, because when I spotted Rajiv Gandhi sitting on the beige carpet with his back against a wall and with only Romi Chopra for company I sat down next to him and asked him a question that I would not otherwise have asked. The conversation I recount here is from memory as I was off duty and not carrying a notebook. It was the sort of conversation that remains vividly etched in one’s mind and I described it in the column I wrote the week after Rajiv was killed.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you this for many months,’ I said, ‘but have never been able to summon up the courage… I’ve always wondered what you knew about the Emergency and what you thought about it.’

To my surprise, instead of being annoyed, a look of relief passed over Rajiv’s face. ‘Thank God someone has finally asked me that question,’ he said with a big smile. ‘I’ve been waiting so long for someone to mention the subject and nobody has. Now that you ask let me tell you that I totally disapproved of it and tried telling Mummy that she had become very unpopular because of the Emergency. I would tell her all the stories I heard.’ He added that despite his lack of interest in politics it was hard for him to be oblivious to what was going on.

‘And?’

‘She didn’t believe me,’ he said with a self-deprecatory laugh. ‘She said I couldn’t possibly know what real people were thinking because I moved in “elitist” circles. What would your elite friends know, she said. These are people who have never voted in their lives.’

‘That may be true. But it wasn’t the elite who were upset with the Emergency. It was ordinary people, people whose homes had been demolished, who had been victims of the sterilization squads.’

‘That was all nonsense and exaggeration,’ interjected Romi.

‘No. It wasn’t nonsense,’ said Rajiv quietly. ‘The numbers may have been exaggerated but we knew that this was happening. I heard stories, too, from people who live in the old city and I told Mummy about them but she discussed them with my brother who said they were rubbish, and that was that.’

‘Do you see yourself in politics one day?’ I asked eagerly, getting in as many questions as I could like reporters do at press conferences.

‘Me? No. Never. My wife hates politics and politicians, so the question does not arise. Besides, it’s my brother who has become the family politician.’

‘But you have political views, don’t you? On the country’s problems, the issues before us?’

‘Not really, no. My mother has a rule that we never talk about politics at the family dinner table and so there is never any discussion at home about such things. So, no, I don’t have any views.’

‘It’s such a dirty business,’ I remember Romi saying with what looked to me like an angry flounce, ‘that nobody with any decency can survive.’

‘His family has,’ I said, and Romi glowered ferociously at me. He seemed displeased that I should have had such a long conversation with Rajiv.

It took me a few moments to notice that silence had fallen over the room and everyone was staring at us. Sonia and the other ladies were seated on a sofa nearby and when she saw that the conversation was getting too intense she came over and stood beside Rajiv with her hand outstretched, indicating that it was time for them to leave.

My relationship with Rajiv and Sonia changed after that night. I admit that my perception of Rajiv changed as well. It was the first glimpse I had of what I was to later discover was his enormous charm. It may have been something that Rajiv told them afterwards but it seemed to become obvious to the inner circle that not only did he not mind talking about politics but he actually enjoyed it. But since none of his close friends had ever taken any interest in politics they had no idea what to talk about. I found myself in unusual demand at parties that Rajiv and Sonia were attending. The same people who had discouraged me from talking to him about politics
earlier started to use me as a party trick. It would be arranged in such a way that when I got to ask him something about politics or current events everyone would join the discussion.

Rajiv usually had an opinion on the political issue or event being discussed but now that such conversations were openly had it became evident how little any of the others knew about what was going on in India or the world. I have met illiterate people in desperately poor villages who had a better understanding of political issues. They were, at the least, able to identify what their problems were in clear terms. In the most remote villages I met people who talked about schools without classrooms. Teachers who never came to teach. Hospitals and primary health centres that had neither doctors nor medicines. Roads that got washed away as soon as they were built. Electricity poles that stood for years without delivering any electricity. In the drawing rooms in which Rajiv and Sonia spent their evenings, it would have been next to impossible to find two people who could explain why the vast majority of Indians, including all of us, were denied such basic things as electricity and clean water.

Besides there were a lot of political topics to talk about once Mrs Gandhi was no longer prime minister because Morarji Desai and his government seemed to make it their mission to become very unpopular in the shortest possible time.

B
y the time he was sworn in as prime minister Morarji Desai was already famous for his austerity. He had survived solitary confinement during the Emergency without the smallest trauma, people said, while other political leaders had been driven to despair. Those who spread this story invariably added that this was because he had no taste for cooked food or other people’s company. He lived on nuts and, as all of India was to soon find out, his own urine. He apparently refrigerated supplies at night and drank a glass without fail every morning. The new prime minister’s peculiar choice of beverage rapidly became a subject of discussion every time he was mentioned in any conversation. Not just in India but almost everywhere I went. In London, during that first summer of his rule in 1977, everyone I met asked if it was true that the prime minister of India drank his own urine.

In India many ordinary, apolitical people were horrified by this habit and the prime minister’s office went to great lengths to spread the word that drinking one’s own urine led to the cure of otherwise incurable diseases like cancer. Most people remained unconvinced of the healing properties of auto-urine therapy and found the new prime minister’s drinking habits both repugnant and amusing. In those first few months after the new government came to power, the prime minister’s taste in beverages became the source of much ribaldry and ‘political’ chit-chat. Where did he keep it? Did it have to be drunk chilled? Was it all right to just pee into a glass and then knock it back? What happened if you drank too many whiskies the night before?

Almost the first announcement the new government made was the imposition of prohibition in Delhi. The new prime minister, a dedicated
Gandhian, meant this as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi who was a passionate prohibitionist. But the Janata government appeared not to have paid sufficient attention to the ground realities of prohibition in India. Every attempt to impose prohibition, since the days when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister, had failed hopelessly. Since Gandhiji was from Gujarat, it became the only state where the law was kept alive to honour the Mahatma but bootleggers and the illicit liquor trade have thrived as a consequence.

Delhi’s drawing rooms did not suffer when Morarji Desai’s new rules came into force because it was usually foreign liquor that we drank and this came from bootleggers. It was the ordinary citizens of Delhi who were most affected. Or not, because those determined enough would drive across the border and bring back supplies from Haryana where there was no prohibition. For those who could not afford the drive the services of cross-border smugglers quickly became available. If these smugglers were checked at the border a small bribe could ease logistical problems and policemen were in any case inclined to look the other way. In the time that prohibition remained in force in Delhi, I watched Pappu the bootlegger go from strength to strength. Before prohibition he used to bring me my supplies of cheap French wine and dodgy Scotch whisky in an autorickshaw but business improved so dramatically for him after Morarji Desai became prime minister that he soon managed to buy himself a car. Friends who continued to use his services reported some years later that they had seen him driving a Mercedes. Thanks to the laws imposed by the Janata government Pappu rose from being a shady bootlegger to a respectable businessman in no time.