Durbar (21 page)

The first meeting was in a small town; its main architectural feature was a Hanuman temple with a giant Hanuman statue painted in gaudy shades of saffron and red standing at the entrance. The meeting was in a small field near the temple. Four tables had been pushed together and covered with a dusty red rug to make a stage. A ragged shamiana provided a measure of shade. But the crowd was small and the party workers looked nervous. While the Rajmata was paying obeisance in the Hanuman temple they rushed about trying to get more people to gather around the stage, and by the time she came out of the temple with a large red tika on her forehead they had managed to rustle up a satisfactory gathering.

From where I stood near the stage, not far from her, it was easy to see that she was disappointed with the size of the crowd but she did not let this deter her. She joined her hands in prayer and recited something in Sanskrit with her eyes closed. After the prayer was over, she spent a long time standing with her hands joined together and her eyes closed. Then she greeted the crowd, which consisted mostly of party workers, and began to speak in highly Sanskritized Hindi. She spoke of democracy and dictatorship, and the importance of this particular election. She spoke of her time in jail and how the danger of India being turned into ‘one vast prison camp’ still remained.

‘This is why I am standing for election against Indira Gandhi. I believe that she has done grievous harm to this country, to our beloved Bharat Mata, and I am here to defeat her with your support,’ she said.

The small crowd listened quietly to everything but there was no enthusiasm, no excitement and hardly any response (except from her party workers) when she asked everyone to shout ‘
Bharat Mata ki jai
’ three times.

Then we were off again, down dusty trails and broken roads to the next meeting, and the next. She addressed many roadside meetings before lunch but there were no signs of enthusiasm or spontaneity, not even at the one that was organized in a village square. The crowds were sometimes large but they seemed to have come out of idle curiosity rather than for political reasons. By the time we stopped for lunch in an inspection bungalow in a nondescript town, my four colleagues and I agreed that we had seen enough and would be better off driving back to Lucknow to board the
night train to Delhi. We were discussing this over lunch with the party workers when one of them said, ‘Don’t go by the meetings we’ve seen so far. They were unusually small only because Mrs Gandhi is holding a meeting not far from here. People have been taken there in buses. Money power…they have money power.’

‘Where is Mrs Gandhi’s meeting?’ we asked in one voice.

The party worker, a skinny man with long oily hair and big red tika in the centre of his forehead, stopped eating his rice and dal and gave us a puzzled and slightly irritated look. ‘You aren’t going to her meeting, are you?’

‘Why not? We are here to report on the atmosphere in the constituency. We aren’t committed to any particular party. So where is it?’

‘About 40 kilometres from here.’

Before he could finish speaking we were on our way. The road to the town in which the meeting was being held was unusually smooth so we reached there well in time but once we were within five kilometres of the town, we found ourselves stuck in a massive traffic jam. Tractors, bullock carts, trucks and all manner of other vehicles clogged the entrance to the town. We decided to get out of the car and walk in the direction of the loudspeakers. Patriotic songs from the freedom movement blared from them.

When we got to the school where the meeting was being held, we saw there was such a huge crowd that people were perched on trees and sitting on rooftops and walls. We had barely got to the press enclosure beside the stage when we saw Mrs Gandhi’s chopper. It landed in a massive cloud of dust behind the school wall.

‘Our beloved leader, sisters and brothers, will soon be among us,’ a voice shrieked over the loudspeakers. ‘She will be here at any moment, so I urge you to please remain seated. Your long wait is now over. I know some of you have come from distant villages and have been waiting all day without food or water but she is now here so have just a little more patience.’ The crowd that had stood up en masse and started moving forward to catch a glimpse of the helicopter slowly settled down, but when Mrs Gandhi appeared on the stage people started pushing forward again. The hysterical shrieks of the party workers to ‘sit down, please sit down’ did nothing to stop a surge towards the stage.

The surge forward seemed to please Mrs Gandhi. She smiled and waved, then she stepped off the stage and into the crowd until she disappeared in
a swirl of dark skeletal arms and wrinkled faces. She wore a simple cotton sari, a shawl of rough wool, a big watch of Indian make on her wrist and a string of the holy rudraksh beads around her neck. After mingling with the people for a few minutes, she climbed back on the stage and stood with her hands joined together as the crowd roared, ‘Indira Gandhi
zindabad!
’

The audience consisted mostly of men with faces that had poverty written into every wrinkle of their ravaged faces. But it was in the women and children that desperate poverty was most visible. The women were unnaturally skinny and small. They had faces that were old before their time. Their children had dull eyes, scrawny limbs and the sad, whiny faces children get when they have not had enough to eat. Their distended bellies and discoloured hair were signs that they had never had such things as milk and fresh vegetables. Our inquiries in the villages we had stopped in revealed that the average child lived on one meal a day of watery gruel made from seasonal grain.

This was Mrs Gandhi’s constituency and had been for years so if there was desperate poverty it was her fault. But they did not blame her. They loved her.

When she began her speech, Mrs Gandhi spoke in colloquial Hindi. And, her message was simple. She blamed all the problems of India on ‘the two years of misrule in Delhi’. Unlike her opponent, the Rajmata, she made not the slightest effort to explain big political issues or use big complicated words to explain her case. What she seemed to understand better than any of her political rivals was that destitute, illiterate people do not care about big political issues. If they opposed the Emergency, it was not because they understood the difference between democracy and dictatorship but because they understood that it was wrong to break down the houses of the poor and to compulsorily sterilize people. Besides, two years of the Janata government had caused memories of the Emergency to fade from public memory.

Mrs Gandhi sensed this and in her speech concentrated on stirring up the general feeling of anger and disappointment over the Janata government’s failures. They have emptied the treasury, she said, so there is no money left to build new roads and schools. The country has suffered for two years because of ‘these people’ and their ‘misrule’ and this is why prices of such necessities as rice and dal had gone up. She said she had met women in the villages who told her that they had stopped feeding
their children dal because it had become too expensive and added that she herself could no longer afford to buy onions more than twice a week.

They cheered her on with shouts of ‘Indira Gandhi
zindabad!
’, and when her speech ended people surged forward once more despite the entreaties of her party workers. Once more, she descended from the stage and mingled with them. And then, as suddenly as she had come, she vanished into the clear blue skies in her helicopter.

Most people had never seen a helicopter. Most of them had never travelled outside their villages and had only an idea of India that existed from tales told to them by political workers. Long after the helicopter disappeared, Indira Gandhi’s emaciated, wretchedly poor supporters continued to stare up at the sky. If they had seen an alien from another planet, they could not have been more filled with wonder.

Afterwards, we wandered among them asking the sort of questions urban reporters ask when they travel to rural areas.

‘Is there electricity in your village?’

‘No.’

‘Is there water?’

‘No.’

‘How far do you walk to get it?’

‘It takes long, the whole morning.’

‘Is there a school in the village?’

‘No.’

‘Is there a primary health care centre?’

‘No.’

‘Will you vote for Indiraji?’

‘Yes,’ they said in unison, and laughed happily.

Indira Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister for the fourth time on a January morning in 1980. According to a BBC report, at the end of a sixty-three-day election campaign she had travelled through 384 constituencies, making more than twenty speeches a day. When the 196 million votes were counted, the Congress Party had won 351 seats and neither the Janata Party, nor the Lok Dal, which Charan Singh had formed when he had broken away, qualified with enough seats to be declared the official opposition party in Parliament. In Rae Bareli, the Rajmata won only 13.1
per cent of the votes. And in nearby Amethi Sanjay Gandhi won a seat in the Lok Sabha for the first time.

When Mrs Gandhi returned as prime minister it was as if she had never been away. The bureaucrats who had so hated working with the ‘uncouth’ ministers of the last government breathed a collective sigh of relief and things went back to what they had always been. There was not much governance, few new ideas, and little acknowledgement of the economic and political changes that were sweeping across Southeast Asia and China. But here was a prime minister whom our officials liked to call ‘a real leader’. It was not just officials who were relieved to see Mrs Gandhi back at the helm, ordinary Indians felt the same way. Polls taken decades after Mrs Gandhi passed into history reveal that most Indians continue to believe that she was the best prime minister India ever had. Whenever I have tried asking why I have received the same answer. She was strong, and India needs strong leaders.

Soon after the new government took office Akbar Ahmed dropped in to see me. It was late in the evening and I teased him about his becoming the second-most important man in India. He laughed and said, ‘Look I’ve come to say that whatever our political differences, I am your friend and I think we should keep our friendship out of politics.’ All these years later I can say truthfully that whenever I have needed Akbar’s friendship he has been there despite the vicissitudes of his political career and his changing political loyalties. That evening on my parents’ veranda in Southend Lane when we talked of politics and the campaign, Akbar admitted without hesitation that Sanjay Gandhi was India’s de facto prime minister.

It would have been pointless for him to deny it because the first thing that became clear after Mrs Gandhi’s new term in office began was that she had anointed Sanjay as her heir and that many of her new ministers were young men who owed their political careers and their allegiance to Sanjay. He did not go to the prime minister’s office at all, unless it was to see his mother, but everyone knew that it was he who was running the country. And this time nobody seemed to mind.

From being the villain of the Emergency, Sanjay was now, suddenly, India’s new hero. Everyone from political analysts and high-ranking officials to important businessmen and ordinary voters seemed to think that India’s future was safe in his hands because he was young, determined
and tough. In newspaper offices we accepted the new political realities that the election had thrown up and made it a point to find out what we could about the man now widely acknowledged as India’s future prime minister. We heard that he was very different from his mother, not just in his ideas about governance (he liked instant results) but ideologically as well. Reporters with investigative instincts and access to Sanjay’s friends found out that not only was he not of socialist disposition but that he had contempt for the Marxist parties, although they had always been Mrs Gandhi’s most devoted allies. Businessmen from Bombay started appearing in Delhi’s drawing rooms and singing Sanjay’s praises. They talked of how he was going to ‘open up the economy’. Nobody had any idea what they meant, not even in the newsrooms of Delhi’s newspapers, because the idea of the licence-quota-permit raj as a hurdle in the effective functioning of the government was something that not even the finest political analysts in Delhi had thought about.

The Indian economy was not even described as a ‘licence raj’ in 1980. Judging by the articles that appeared on the opinion pages of newspapers at the time most political observers seemed to accept that it was normal for businessmen to need a licence to do business and for factories to be governed by quotas and permits. It had been that way since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru who was deeply influenced by the Soviet Union’s model of economic growth and was at heart a passionate socialist. He had a contempt for profit and the creation of wealth. He expressed this so often that he was very unpopular with Indian businessmen. In his time major business houses that had flourished under the British were reduced to ruin. Those who survived did so by begging for licences and concessions from the officials who controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the Indian economy in Delhi.

The controls were so punishing that the economy languished in deep stagnation. For decades it grew annually at an average of 3 per cent reducing rich Indians to genteel poverty and poor Indians to subsistence. Sanjay never actually said that he would like the economy to take a new direction but because of his rumoured contempt for Marxists he was seen as someone who might be on the side of free enterprise. It helped his image that he was credited with being directly responsible for giving the Tata group permission to set up their first Taj Hotel in Delhi. It helped his image that he surrounded himself with young businessmen like Kamal
Nath and princes like Madhavrao Scindia. He seemed to prefer them to the khadi-clad ‘socialists’ who surrounded his mother.