Durbar (2 page)

The best schools were those that taught Indian children to be British and they did a good job. I left Welham Girls’ High School speaking fluent English, and with a head filled with English literature and poetry, but without being able to speak more than basic Hindi. I relearned Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi only after becoming a journalist and now write Hindi well enough to write two columns a week. But it saddens me that I never learned Sanskrit. This language that is the key to India’s civilization and her ancient texts was mocked in the little English world in which I grew up.

If my foreignness had been an individual flaw it would not have been worth mentioning at the beginning of this book. It becomes important because people brought up just like me have ruled India since 1947, perpetuating a twisted continuance of colonial rule. I would go so far as to say that my generation of Indians was possibly more colonized than those who lived in colonial times and our tragedy was that most of us lived out our lives without ever finding out.

This memoir begins in the summer of 1975 when Indira Gandhi used the Emergency to declare her younger son, Sanjay, as her political heir. That summer I first met Rajiv Gandhi and his wife. He was a pilot in Indian Airlines and a devoted family man with a small circle of friends. In this circle were the privileged scions of businessmen and former ruling princes. And, there were those of slightly humbler origin whose parents had been in government service and the army. What bound them together was often that they had been to the same schools, spent summer holidays in the same
hill stations and shared the same cocoon of privilege that kept out India’s realities. They belonged to a tiny class of Indians who, like me, had grown up without any awareness of the country in which they lived.

If someone had said, when I first met them, that Rajiv would one day become prime minister and that his close friends would become the most powerful men in India I would have laughed at the improbability of people so removed from Indian political and cultural realities ever being in such a position. Yet, this is what happened. Rajiv was given a unique opportunity to make the sort of changes that could have made India a very different, more confident, country. But because he was only an elected prince surrounded by people who could not have been more distant from India’s complexities he ended up leaving as his political legacy only his Italian wife and their children.

India’s oldest political party did not hesitate before accepting this legacy gratefully and since the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty is revered as India’s royal family its example was emulated. Today there is almost not a single political party in India that does not practise hereditary democracy of a peculiarly Indian kind. Legislative assemblies have turned into private clubs with limited access except for those who consider themselves entitled by birth. There are political families in other democracies but outside the Indian subcontinent the widow or the children of a political leader do not automatically claim the dead man’s legacy as if it were their birthright. This distortion of democracy may not have happened if Mrs Gandhi had not introduced it in that long hot summer of the Emergency.

Durbar
has been difficult to write. I started to write it soon after Rajiv Gandhi died. I knew him well from the days when he was not a politician and found myself in a unique position to tell the story of how a prime minister with the largest mandate in Indian history ended up as such a disappointment. Not just because I happened to be a part of the same tiny social set in which he moved, but because my career as a journalist, that so changed the way I saw India, ran almost parallel with Rajiv’s career as a politician. I believed then that he had failed India but when I started to write the book I realized that he was not the only one who had let India down. An entire ruling class had. A ruling class to which I belonged.

As the story unfolded it became as if a mirror of my own life, a memoir not just of the short life of Rajiv as a politician and how the seeds of dynastic democracy were sown, but of my own as a journalist. I discovered how much the clear lens of journalism had changed my understanding of the country in which I had lived all my life. And this fundamentally changed the way in which I saw the people I had grown up with. I saw how aloof they were from India, how foreign her culture and history were to them, and how, because of this, they had failed to bring about renewal and change. I saw how my life as a journalist opened up doors that made me constantly ashamed of how India has been betrayed by people like me. I believe that it is because India was let down by her ruling class that she failed to become the country she could have been. If we had been less foreign and more aware of India’s great wealth of languages and literature, of her ancient texts on politics and governance and her scriptures, we would have wanted to change many things. But we failed and instead brought up our children, as we had been, as foreigners in their own country. Fascinated by all things foreign and disdainful of all things Indian.

A new ruling class is slowly replacing the old one. A newer, rougher breed of politician has come to control the levers of power. The sons of peasants and peons and the children of castes that were once considered untouchable have ruled some of India’s biggest states. But in emulation of the old ruling class they teach their children English and send them to Western universities. There would be no harm in this if they did not also bring them up removed from their own languages and culture.

The possibility of an Indian renaissance, that as the first generation of Indians to grow up in post-colonial India should have been ours to ensure, recedes further and further away. Dynasty, a political tool in the hands of the ruling class, has become the catalyst for a new colonization of a country whose soul has already been deeply scarred by centuries of it. This is the main reason why an expanding and increasingly educated middle class is becoming disenchanted with democracy and democratic institutions.

New Delhi
2 October 2012

O
n the night of his funeral there was a storm. It began quietly, a gentle swirl of a dust storm and then with great rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning came the rain. Hard, heavy, angry rain. It does not rain in Delhi in May and as I sat on my terrace watching the violent unseasonal storm I thought of it, despite my better judgement, as some kind of omen. An unseasonal storm for an untimely death – a death so terrible that not the worst person in the world should die that way.

The fact had not fully registered in my mind even though I had spent the day at Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral. It seemed hardly possible that he was dead – and yet he was. Killed by an assassin who killed herself just seconds after murdering him.

The night Rajiv was killed I talked to Jayanthi Natarajan, a Congress Party member of the Rajya Sabha who was with him in Sriperumbudur, to find out what had happened. She had just come back to Madras (not Chennai then) from Sriperumbudur and she was in shock.

‘I noticed her standing there,’ she said, ‘she looked like such an ordinary sort of girl. Dark, stout and with those big glasses. She had a garland in her hands. I remember seeing her clearly, then Rajiv told me to go back to the car and fetch something, and I had barely walked ten steps when there was this terrible explosion. When I turned around, he had disappeared and there was a big hole in the ground.

‘He saved my life,’ Jayanthi kept repeating, ‘he saved my life by sending me back to the car or I would have died too. I was walking alongside him. I would have been dead. I would have died with him because I was right there by his side.’

Jayanthi was a lawyer from Tamil Nadu who had joined politics at Rajiv’s behest and worshipped the ground on which he walked. Between tears and hysteria she told me how the policemen had run away and how she had been the only one to go back and look for him. Pictures of her in a red sari, with her hands cupped over her mouth, standing at the edge of the black pit, the crater made by the bomb, appeared in newspapers across the world.

‘It took me a few minutes because there were so many bodies – bits of bodies – scattered around. There was no sign of him and then I noticed his shoes – I recognized them, and there was the back of his head… But when I tried to turn him over I realized there was nothing to hold. His body no longer existed. Some party workers helped me gather the remains and wrap them in some cloth we found. We called Delhi when we got to the hospital.’ The other person with Jayanthi was Suman Dubey, a journalist who had been editor of
India Today
and was one of Rajiv’s closest friends. He had recently taken over as Rajiv’s media advisor.

It must have been minutes after Rajiv was killed that someone called me from the
India Today
office and gave me the news. The next person to call me was Nina Singh, an old friend of Sonia Gandhi, though now estranged. Nina’s husband, Arun Singh, was Rajiv’s oldest and closest friend. They had known each other as young boys in the Doon School and then been at Cambridge University together. They remained friends after their marriages and the friendship had deepened when their wives became close friends. They grew apart soon after Rajiv became prime minister and the reason why Sonia dropped her was never clear to Nina or anyone else.

‘I can’t believe this has happened. I just can’t believe it,’ Nina said on the phone that day. ‘If you’re going to the house I’d like to come along. I feel I ought to be there for Sonia.’

By the time we got to 10 Janpath there were many people there. Party workers in white standing sullenly in small groups, socialites in carefully coordinated mourning colours, sundry fixers and shady businessmen. They stood together in the cul-de-sac outside the house with confused expressions on their faces, not quite sure what they should do next.

Then H.K.L. Bhagat, a Congress MP with a reputation for being a thug, arrived with a group of political workers, shouting, ‘
Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge
.’ Blood will be avenged with blood. Their shouting
converted the sadness that had hung over the cul-de-sac into something ugly and violent. Some of the more hot-headed in the group said there would not be a Sikh left alive in India this time, while Bhagat, small, dark and beetle-like behind his ever-present dark glasses, watched with a half smile on his thin lips. I knew him well, from before he became notorious for being involved in the 1984 massacres in Delhi in which more than 3000 Sikhs had been killed to avenge the assassination of Indira Gandhi. So I went up to him and asked if he was preparing his supporters to participate in another massacre.

‘No, no,’ he said, looking a little embarrassed, ‘they are just venting their anger, you know, just letting go of their emotions.’

‘Well, tell them to stop,’ I said. ‘There is no evidence that Sikhs were involved in killing Rajiv.’

He made a small gesture with his right hand and the young men stopped their ‘venting’ and stood silently behind him, alert and ready to spring back into action.

The narrow cul-de-sac that separates 10 Janpath from the Congress Party’s old headquarters at 24 Akbar Road quickly filled up. I was there as a reporter, but Nina was there as a friend and wanted to find someone who could help her go into the house to see Sonia. When she saw Satish Sharma, Rajiv’s friend from his days as a pilot who became a politician when Rajiv did, taking some people into the house, she got into the white Ambassador that he was driving.

Within minutes she was out again. ‘He told me to get out of the car,’ she said, looking puzzled and hurt. I led her away.

Nina was silent and sad on the drive to her house, and I found myself unable to stop memories of Rajiv from filling my head. Memories of long ago. Of Rajiv as he had been before he became a politician, before he started to make the compromises that politicians make. I remembered how unassuming, open and honest he had been, so totally unaffected by being the son of the prime minister and the grandson of one of India’s most revered political leaders. I felt happy that in his last days we had met and talked about the barriers that had come up between us in the years he was prime minister. In 1987 I had started writing a political column in the
Indian Express
and often criticized his policies and this led to relations between us becoming frosty. I told him at that meeting that when I criticized him in my column it was in his role as prime minister. As a political journalist that
was my job and I could not understand why he had taken it personally. He smiled and said that he had never held anything I had written against me, and agreed to give me an interview in Amethi, his constituency, where he was going soon. It was there that I met him for the last time.

After dropping Nina home I drove back to 10 Janpath. There were hundreds of people there by then and the cul-de-sac had been closed off. Party workers, reporters, TV crews and ordinary people had gathered in large numbers, and the atmosphere was tense because of Bhagat and his men. They were no longer shouting their slogans but whispering among themselves about how it had to be the Sikhs who had done it. We did not know then who had killed Rajiv but the crowds outside his house assumed that it was Sikhs. Rajiv had made no known enemies in the nearly two years that he had been leader of the opposition and in his time as prime minister the only people who had hated him were the Sikhs because they blamed him for allowing the 1984 massacres and justifying them afterwards. I remember thinking that if the Sikhs were responsible for his assassination, there really would not be a Sikh left alive in Delhi this time. I thought it might be best for me to go home before the mourners turned violent, but as I was about to leave a colleague told me that the Congress Party’s working committee had met and a decision had been taken to make Sonia party president.