Durbar (23 page)

After the other Indian woman journalist and I seated ourselves in the circle of women around the Sheikha, Mrs Gandhi arrived in a sombre black sari. She was still in mourning and I remember thinking that she looked as if someone had drained her of her life force. Her eyes were dull and her smile more sad than happy. In the hour that she spent in the Sheikha’s palace I did not hear her say one thing that sounded as if she
were really participating in the conversations she had. She smiled politely when someone read a poem about women, and she spoke to the Sheikha and everyone who talked to her, but as if she were only half present. I think it was the other woman journalist, although it may well have been me, who asked her views on the practice of veiling women in Arabia and she said, ‘People have different traditions and cultures, and we must respect them.’

Afterwards, we were led to a dining room, larger and more glittering than the drawing room, where there were long tables covered with food. Kebabs, curries, rice, bread, smoked salmon, caviar, eggs, everything. It reminded me so much of a very grand supermarket that I remember wondering if the Sheikh had asked his architect to copy the food hall at Harrods. There was so much food and so many women buzzing around it that I lost my appetite and noticed that Mrs Gandhi, seated beside the Sheikha, seemed to have lost hers as well.

T
he announcement that Rajiv would be standing for election from his brother’s constituency came soon enough.

Rajiv and Sonia went off to Amethi so that he could file his nomination papers and the friends he left behind in Delhi, who had now started making political predictions, talked about his political future. They said they were certain he would be prime minister one day and that it would be wonderful for India. Nobody seemed to notice that Mrs Gandhi was instituting a form of dynastic succession that so far had not existed in our proud democracy. In our little set this could have been because Rajiv was so loved. Acceptance within the Congress Party was understandable since Mrs Gandhi had already divided the party twice and now had her own Congress (I), the ‘I’ standing for Indira. But, either because of Sanjay’s untimely death or because political dynasties did not exist at the time, nobody seemed to find it strange that Sanjay’s constituency should pass on to his apolitical brother.

The first time I met Rajiv after he became a politician was at a dinner party in one of the usual drawing rooms. I cannot remember where it was or who else was there but it was a small enough gathering for Rajiv and Sonia to be able to talk freely about what they had seen in Amethi. He looked both elated and a little confused, and she seemed quite overwhelmed. I report the following conversation from memory. My recollection remains vivid enough for me to be able to recount it almost verbatim.

‘The real shock is the poverty,’ Rajiv said. ‘I know I should have realized that we are a poor country and that means there would be poverty. And it’s not that I haven’t seen it in the faces of beggars and street children in
Delhi. But in the villages it really is something else…beyond anything I had imagined.’

Sonia was appalled by the filth she had seen in the villages. It made her unusually eloquent. ‘In one hut we saw a small baby crawling around right next to this large pile of cow dung. He was playing with it and putting it in his mouth. It was awful and I wanted to tell his mother to stop him from doing this, but I thought she would mind so I said nothing.’

‘It’s better not to interfere in local customs,’ said one of the ladies, sipping delicately at her Campari-soda.

‘We heard from a health worker in one village that the main reason why newborn babies die from tetanus is because midwives put cow dung on their belly buttons to dry up the cord. Can you imagine?’

‘Well, that is the practice…’ someone said.

‘They have nothing,’ Rajiv continued. ‘The women have never seen the inside of a hospital. The men depend on what they can earn from the land, and that isn’t much. I can’t believe that they live without something so basic as clean water.’

‘Indians believe in karma,’ one of the men said, ‘and that makes them believe it is their fate to be poor, that they must have done something bad in their last life to suffer in this one.’

Rajiv’s political career began at almost exactly the same time as the violence began in Punjab. Before he had time to understand the complexities of poverty and its connections to caste and social barriers in his constituency, before he had time to think about the flawed policies that may have been at the root of India’s economic problems, there began a bigger problem that would concentrate the attention of the whole country for more than a decade.

In Punjab violence had lain under the surface for a while but revealed itself without warning on a hot September day in 1981 when Lala Jagat Narain, a newspaper baron from Jalandhar, who owned the three most influential newspapers in the state and was a well-known public figure in Punjab, was killed while he was driving home. Jalandhar, like other Punjabi cities has a large army presence because of its proximity to the border with Pakistan. Whole areas of the city are reserved exclusively for
regiments garrisoned there. They have their own hospitals and clinics for out-patients called Medical Inspection Rooms (MIRs), their own cinemas and shopping centres, parade grounds and playing fields. The soldiers live in barracks of tedious uniformity, with sloping roofs, narrow verandas and small rooms with barred windows, which make them look like prison cells. For the officers there are fine colonial bungalows set in gardens so large that their wives plant vegetables and often grow their own wheat and rice so that their kitchen gardens resemble small farms.

By the eighties some of the traditional boundaries between the civil and military areas of cities like Jalandhar had blurred. Senior civilian officials had moved quietly into the more salubrious surroundings of the cantonment. The best residential areas in the civilian half of the city could not match the cleanliness, order and immaculate standards of the cantonment, where even trees had their lower halves painted white to add to the sense of military order. The officials who moved to the cantonments from the civilian side were the most important ones. The district magistrate, the collector, the chief of police, leading to a dangerous disengagement between them and ordinary citizens. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why nobody at the higher levels of administration in Jalandhar appears to have noticed the growing divisions between Hindus and Sikhs.

Simmerings of these divisions had existed since Partition. For reasons that remain puzzling even today, while other Indian states were created on a linguistic basis Punjabi was not declared the official language of what was left of Punjab after Pakistan took most of it away. With Punjabi becoming unusable for competitive examinations for public service, the Sikhs were officially disqualified from participation since they neither spoke Hindi nor read the Devnagari script. The Hindus in Punjab spoke Punjabi at home but were familiar with the Devnagari script because their scriptures were written in it. At this time a small group of influential Sikhs started to demand that Sikhs be given their own
suba
or state, with Punjabi as its language, in the tiny piece of Punjab that remained in India.

Eventually, when Mrs Gandhi became prime minister, she conceded the need to divide Punjab once more on a linguistic basis and the state of Haryana came into being. But most Sikhs continued to resent Hindus for having betrayed Punjab, because during a census ordered after the Punjabi
suba
agitation, they had declared that their mother tongue was Hindi (and not Punjabi). One of the men who had led the campaign
to urge Hindus to declare that their mother tongue was Hindi and not Punjabi was Lala Jagat Narain. He used his newspapers,
Hind Samachar
,
Jagbani
and
Punjab Kesari
, to persuade Hindus to disown Punjabi as their mother tongue.

As someone who grew up in a Sikh family I remember hearing often about the ‘betrayal’ of Punjab by the Hindus. It was this sentiment that Bhindranwale tapped into when he revived the demand for a separate country for the Sikhs. When Bhindranwale started to preach militant Sikhism one of the first issues he raised was the Hindu ‘betrayal’ of Punjabi and one of the first men he targeted was Lalaji. Without realizing the terrible consequences of criticizing Bhindranwale’s violent ideology, Lalaji had been openly hostile in his newspapers towards him and his political activities. Bhindranwale was quick to respond. In a speech he made at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, in a hall filled with Sikh students, he openly targeted Lala Jagat Narain. A university official later gave this report of the speech: ‘On that day in a great fury he [Bhindranwale] called upon someone to read aloud what Narain had said. [After the passage was read …]…there was silence. “Our turban has been torn from our heads!” he proclaimed. Then one of his followers asked, “What are your orders?” Again in anger, he said, “Orders? You need orders? What orders? Are you blind?”’

On 9 September 1981, Lalaji was on his way from Patiala to Jalandhar when he was shot dead by unidentified Sikh gunmen on the highway near Jalandhar. Bhindranwale’s open threats against Lala Jagat Narain were taken seriously enough by India’s home minister, Zail Singh, for him to link Bhindranwale to the assassination. He was taken into custody from the gurudwara in the village of Mehta Chowk, which he used as his headquarters, and put under arrest for a month. His imprisonment served only to make Bhindranwale a bigger hero.

At the end of the summer of 1982 I returned to India with a young son to bring up and desperately in need of a job. M.J. Akbar, who had just become editor of a new newspaper, the
Telegraph
, was happy to give me one. The newspaper was only a few months old but by the time I joined the
Telegraph
’s Delhi bureau, it consisted almost entirely of women who had taken charge of covering all the important ministries and were fiercely possessive about them. I was the joker in this female pack with not a lot left to do except tread on other people’s toes and so it was that I suggested
I go to Amritsar and take a look at what was going on in the Golden Temple. I think I may have argued that as a Sikh I might find access to Bhindranwale easier and, besides, the only language he spoke was Punjabi so this gave me a natural advantage.

Bhindranwale had recently moved into the Guru Nanak Niwas, a rest house for pilgrims within the temple’s boundaries. He and his men had occupied it completely. Nobody asked any questions about why he had moved into the Golden Temple, how long he planned to stay there, or whether he intended to pay for the rooms he and his men occupied. He was too powerful by then. More powerful than the men elected to the committee that controlled Sikh religious affairs, more powerful than any other Sikh religious leader.

The bureau chief at the
Telegraph
, Kewal Verma, happened to be a fellow Punjabi with a deep understanding of Sikh politics. He was a stocky, rotund man with a shock of white hair who saw the world through the Marxist prism that had defined his life. His view of Bhindranwale was almost sympathetic. In the briefing he gave me before my first visit to Amritsar, he explained that it was not a Hindu–Sikh problem yet, but a problem that Bhindranwale seemed to have with the police. ‘Notice that in all his speeches the only people he attacks are the police.’

‘Why would he have killed Lalaji then?’

‘Ah, that’s different. You see Lalaji’s newspapers have always taken an aggressively anti-Sikh line. In the time of the Punjabi
suba
agitation the group openly encouraged Hindus to say that Punjabi was not their mother tongue. I remember personally asking my own Hindu family why they were doing it…imagine, the census man asks them in Punjabi what their mother tongue is and they reply in Punjabi that he should write down Hindi. It was wrong to do that and it upset the Sikhs.’ The violence and Bhindranwale’s power had been growing for months before Lalaji’s murder but neither Mrs Gandhi nor anyone in her government appeared to notice what was happening. Remembering her as I did from Sheikha Fatima’s purdah palace I concluded that this must be because she had lost interest in government and politics after Sanjay’s death.

She was so removed from what was going on in Punjab that while Bhindranwale wandered about making hate speeches and inciting violence in village gurudwaras she was busy supervising the Asian Games. Delhi was not usually chosen as a venue for major sporting events so for the Games
to be held there in 1982 was a big thing, but not so much that political violence in a border state should have been considered less important. Yet, this is what happened. The Asian Games were considered such a triumph for India that the first political assignment Mrs Gandhi gave Rajiv after he won his election from Amethi, with a stunning majority (84 per cent of the vote), was the organization of the games. Delhi had never hosted a major international sporting event before so it had neither enough stadiums nor suitable accommodation for visiting athletes. This infrastructure had to be built very quickly. The PWD, with its slothful ways and shabby record, could not be trusted with providing either speed or quality and Rajiv was given charge of making sure things happened on time.

After becoming a politician one of the first things that Rajiv did was select from his small circle of close friends those whom he thought should assist him in his new career. This could have been because he was politically unsure and it could have been because he wanted to bring a new kind of person into politics. Whatever the reasons, one of his first decisions was to ask his oldest and closest friend, Arun Singh, to give up his job in Calcutta and come to Delhi to help him. The other friends he enlisted were Satish Sharma and Vijay Dhar, whose father, D.P. Dhar, had been one of Mrs Gandhi’s advisors at an earlier stage of her career. He was remembered in Delhi’s political circles more for his passionate leftist beliefs than for his administrative skills.