Durbar (14 page)

The Janata government seemed to develop an unhealthy obsession with beverages. After news of the prime minister’s urine drinking and the imposition of prohibition in Delhi news came that Coca-Cola was going to be thrown out of India. For this last policy change in the beverage department we had the minister of industry George Fernandes to thank.

Until he became a cabinet minister in Morarji Desai’s government, Fernandes had spent his political career as a trade union leader. His singular achievement had been to organize a massive railway strike in the summer of 1974. He was the president of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation and led seventy million railway workers in a strike that lasted twenty days. Mrs Gandhi broke the strike by arresting thousands of railway workers and leaving them in prison much longer than they expected.

Fernandes’s real moment of glory came later and was also brought about by Mrs Gandhi. When the Emergency was declared he became the only well-known political leader who managed to remain underground for a year. In June 1976 he was finally arrested on charges of being involved in what came to be known as the Baroda dynamite case. Fernandes and his comrades were accused of attempting to blow up railway tracks and government buildings. He remained in jail during the 1977 general election and contested from Muzaffarpur in Bihar with campaign posters that showed him in fetters, raising clenched fists behind the bars of a jail cell. This made him India’s most famous political prisoner.

Fernandes was an attractive, erudite man but with very rigid views that were founded on the principle that the Americans were imposing a new kind of colonization through their multinational corporations. So one of the first things he did after becoming the minister of industry was to throw Coca-Cola out of India. I happened to be present, quite by accident, when he announced this decision. I had been assigned to cover a meeting he was having with trade union leaders and it was at this meeting that he casually made his announcement. Eager-beaver reporter that I was I remember racing back to the
Statesman
office and telling my news editor that Coca-Cola had been thrown out of India. Sadly, he was unable to understand the importance of the story, and I was only a junior reporter, not yet eligible to argue my case, so he carried my scoop on page three. It was only when other newspapers picked it up the next day and ran the story with huge headlines on their front pages that he realized its significance. It was the beginning of my disenchantment with the
Statesman.

After the Emergency ended it did not take long for me to realize especially after despondently casting my eye over my colleagues in the reporters’ room and calculating how many years they had spent there that if I continued working for this newspaper I could remain in the reporters’ room until I was very old. My dream of becoming a major political reporter with a famous byline was likely to die in that small, windowless room.

Most English-language newspapers of the time modelled their ideas of probity and their usage of English on the Victorian era, when they had first started their lives. But the
Statesman
was the most conservative of them all. It was said that this was because it had been edited by a British editor for many years after Independence. This editor, whose name I no longer remember, appears to have taken the old-fashioned view that journalism
should be treated as a higher calling and not just a career, or so we were told in the reporters’ room.

After Coca-Cola was thrown out, the Janata government continued its beverage obsession by ordering one of its public sector factories to produce a copycat Coca-Cola that was christened ‘77’ in honour of the year that saw the end of the Emergency. It had a strange aftertaste that made it quite undrinkable and it is no surprise that it soon disappeared altogether. There are those who believe that Coca-Cola’s eviction eventually laid the foundations of the Indian soft drinks industry, so perhaps Fernandes did well for the beverage business, but he did not do well by computers because he banished IBM at the same time delaying, according to experts, the arrival of computers in India by at least a decade.

Within months of the Janata government coming to power a deep disenchantment began to set in. The new ministers seemed to spend most of their time publicly fighting with each other, which was inevitable since they came from disparate ideological backgrounds, or fighting Mrs Gandhi. They found so many ways to harass her and her family that she was never allowed to step off the national political stage.

If this had been accompanied by serious changes in governance making it less colonial and more attuned to the aspirations of ordinary Indians it may not have been viewed as a mistake. But this did not happen. The new ministers simply stepped into the shoes of their predecessors to do exactly as they had done without being able to fill their place adequately. Most of the information about what was going wrong came from senior bureaucrats who, with their Oxford accents and Western refinements, found it hard to deal with the rustic ways of the new ministers. Indian bureaucrats in the seventies were nearly all upper middle class, Western-educated, and more fluent in English than Indian languages. Their disdain for the Janata ministers came from silly snobbishness more than anything else. But they liked to regale the denizens of Delhi’s drawing rooms with stories of ministers slurping their tea from saucers, eating with their mouths open and picking their noses.

Soon even Vasundhara Raje and Naveen Patnaik, whose parents were part of the Janata government, were beginning to worry about its ability to last a full term. Naveen tried weakly, on occasion, to defend the new ministers when some bureaucrat mocked them for their rusticity and lack of refinement. I remember him telling a story that he thought
was a good example of the ‘native intelligence’ of the man who became Mrs Gandhi’s nemesis by first charging her with electoral malpractices and then defeating her in Rae Bareli. Raj Narain was appointed minister of health and family welfare in the Janata government. So it was his task to investigate allegations of compulsory sterilization during the Emergency. When his officials told him that there were no records because the orders had been ‘verbal’, he ordered one of them to go into the next room and kill the clerks sitting there. When the official looked alarmed he said, ‘I’m giving you a verbal order. Why aren’t you following it?’

It was a good story but it was easier to attack the new government than to defend it. Had the Janata government been more cohesive and more capable of coherent changes in policy, there was much that it could have achieved. India had been ruled for nearly all of its years as an independent nation by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi and the failures of their rule were abundantly obvious. Nehru was prime minister for fifteen years and at the end of his rule Indians were neither more literate nor less mired in poverty than when he became prime minister. In his long tenure as the first prime minister of independent India he failed to build the schools, village roads, sanitation and rural health services that would have provided the tools for India’s poorest citizens to better their lives.

This brought the responsibility for removing poverty so squarely on Mrs Gandhi that her campaign slogan in the election of 1971 was ‘
Garibi hatao
’. She failed to find ways to do this, and it led to the political disquiet before the Emergency. A wiser prime minister than Morarji Desai would have concentrated on improving governance and on changing the policies that had failed. Instead, his government decided to put all its energies into prosecuting Mrs Gandhi and her family and on ‘rectifying’ what came to be called the ‘excesses’ of the Emergency.

Sanjay Gandhi was the first person they went after. During the Emergency, he was responsible for banning a Bollywood film called
Kissa Kursi Ka
, which, literally translated is ‘The Story of a Chair’ but less literally means the story of power. The film annoyed Sanjay because it contained disparaging references to an unnamed politician who was given a licence to produce India’s first small car. In the film, the unnamed politician declares that he deserves a licence to set up an automobile factory because, ‘I learned about making cars when I was still in the womb.’ Sanjay
correctly saw this as a reference to himself and not only banned the film but also destroyed every copy of it.

The Janata government decided to prosecute him for this. The problem was that it was a little like doing him the one favour he really wanted. A chance to waltz back into the national spotlight. No sooner did the Desai government announce that it would be prosecuting Sanjay for stealing and destroying
Kissa Kursi Ka
, than he sent his Youth Congress supporters on to the streets of Delhi to defend him and wreak havoc. It was the summer of 1978 and I was covering a rally by his supporters on Janpath, which at the time was one of Delhi’s main thoroughfares. The procession started peacefully enough as it wandered past the row of small shops that lined one side of the street. Sanjay Gandhi, unsmiling and bespectacled, was at the head of it. Like the protesters, he was dressed in a white kurta–pyjama, and I was walking beside him in the front. Ahead of us were policemen, in charge of controlling things if they got out of hand.

It was when we got to one of the gates of the Imperial Hotel that from behind us came the sounds of slogans and cars screeching to a halt. When I turned around to see what was happening I saw that the ‘peaceful protesters’ were stopping traffic and forcing shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. At this point the senior police officer present, a distant cousin of mine, appealed to Sanjay to stop the violence. ‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘if you don’t stop your supporters from disrupting traffic I will be forced to arrest them.’ When, instead of cooperating with the police, Sanjay and his supporters began to taunt them with cries of ‘Arrest us first’ they were arrested and driven away in police vans.

Sanjay spent a few days in jail and this caused much melodrama but the courtroom scenes that followed were even more melodramatic. When Sanjay was brought to the Tees Hazari courts for a bail hearing there was the sort of chaos and mayhem that is usually forbidden in courtrooms. Someone snatched the pen out of his hand and threw it in the air. This acted as a signal for Sanjay’s supporters in the courtroom to start shouting slogans and creating a general nuisance. Eventually, as far as I know, the
Kissa Kursi Ka
case was quietly buried in some government file and the question of punishing Sanjay was buried with it.

In everything they did, the new government appeared ham-fisted and confused and it did not help that the prime minister himself was personally
very unpopular. His advisors must have noticed that his real problem was that he lacked the common touch. They advised him to rectify this flaw by meeting ordinary people every day in a public audience. A durbar. He consented reluctantly, or so we heard, but no sooner was this decision announced than the deputy prime minister, Chaudhury Charan Singh, who by then was known to have his eyes on Morarji’s job, decided he would have a morning durbar of his own. And, when Mrs Gandhi heard rumours of daily public audiences she must have decided that this was a game she could play better than anyone else so she announced that she would have a morning durbar as well.

Other newspapers carried desultory accounts of the morning audiences but the
Statesman
, famous for its quirky feature articles that appeared regularly on page three, decided that the story was worth a full feature article. As the resident expert on ‘colour’ stories I was picked to write it. So it was that I rose early one morning to get to the prime minister’s house before he was scheduled to meet ‘the people’. It was a beautiful, early, summer morning with a crisp coolness in the air and the roundabouts of Lutyens’s Delhi were covered in flowers. The prime minister had not moved into Mrs Gandhi’s house yet and continued to live in what was still called Dupleix Lane in a decrepit bungalow that had not been painted in years.

By the time I arrived a small group of people had gathered outside the closed gates. There was a young girl of about eight who had come with her blind father, an old lady who hobbled on rickety crutches, a man in a wheelchair who looked as if he had once been a soldier and a group of schoolgirls in blue frocks with red ribbons in their hair. They were with a teacher who wore a bright blue and gold sari and confided to me in a happy whisper that they had an appointment with the prime minister.

‘And you?’ she asked me.

‘I am a reporter.’

‘You people are writing such mean things about the prime minister. Why don’t you write about the good things he is doing instead of writing only, and only, about his urine drinking? And you know it works. It cures many diseases and is a prevention against cancer…’ her voice trailed off and a bemused expression crept into her eyes as she looked over my shoulder and joined her hands in greeting. ‘
Namaskar, pradhan mantriji
.’

‘
Namaskar pradhan mantriji
,’ her flock echoed. The schoolgirls pushed forward with their neatly oiled plaits and their red ribbons, leaving me
among the derelicts and the handicapped, who were less sure of how to approach the prime minister. The man they had come to see looked clean and starched and so upper-caste with his long, thin face, his wide forehead and thin, austere lips. His skin shone and the hands he joined together to greet us were long and manicured.

After the schoolgirls had been greeted and photographed with the prime minister, a flunkey from his office pushed us forward, with the little girl and her blind father just ahead of me and the old lady with crutches just behind. The blind man was the first to speak.

‘
Aadarniya pradhan mantriji
,’ he said, ‘I lost my eyesight in an industrial accident and now there is nobody to pay for my little girl’s education. I have come all the way from Bhopal. Can you please help me?’