Durbar (24 page)

Arun Singh, despite a dour exterior that could deter the friendliest human being from starting a conversation, was intelligent, refined and educated. He read books, thought deeply about the issues of the moment and had a serious interest in matters of security. He read
Jane’s Defence Weekly
as a hobby. And would have been one of only a handful of Indians who had even heard of the British magazine that caters to the arms trade and a niche group of weapons aficionados. I heard from those who knew him well that one way to break through his formidable reserve was to begin a discussion on the latest weapons in the international arms bazaar.

Vijay Dhar was a very tall, very thin Kashmiri Hindu who had no political or administrative experience but it was possible to have an intelligent conversation with him about political issues. I learned a great deal about what was going on in the Kashmir Valley from talking to him. So he was a good choice for Rajiv to have made as an advisor in those early days of his political career. But the choice of Satish Sharma has continued
to baffle me all these years later. It is hard to think of a man less likely to be chosen as a political advisor. When I asked Rajiv’s close friends what they thought about Satish being recruited as a political aide they admitted that they were mystified but suggested that it could have something to do with the cockpit camaraderie that develops among pilots when they fly together.

Rajiv and his small coterie treated the task of organizing the Asian Games as if it were the most momentous event in the history of India. They spent all their time wandering in and out of high-level meetings at which they discussed matters of infrastructure, accommodation and security, and personally supervised the building of the stadiums and the Games Village, in which athletes from abroad were going to stay. Had India been planning to invade Pakistan the planners could not have been more committed or diligent. They reminded me of the sort of earnest schoolboys that end up being popular with their teachers and hated by their peers.

For middle class Indians the best part of the Asian Games was that Mrs Gandhi relaxed her socialist principles enough to graciously allow colour television sets to be imported into India so that the Games could be watched in full colour. For the suffering people of socialist India television until then had meant the grainy, black-and-white images that Doordarshan’s state-controlled channels telecast across the land. If that was not bad enough we had the misfortune of being subjected to the bleakest programming outside the communist world.

Mrs Gandhi believed that Doordarshan’s only purpose was as a vehicle of government propaganda and during the Emergency, when she became a dictator, this reached unimaginable heights. If the Emergency had continued longer it is possible that Indian television would have become entirely a forum to project the Great Leader and the Little Leader in North Korean style. The Janata government had considered allowing private investment in television but it did not last long enough to take the idea forward so we remained stuck with Doordarshan, which to this day continues to produce unwatchable and amateurish programmes despite competition from hundreds of private channels. In the early eighties it was much worse.

As an ambitious young journalist eager to enhance my career by working for television, I tried from time to time to suggest new ideas to Doordarshan but was thwarted at every step by officials drunk on their
petty power. I was not the only one. Other journalists I knew complained that whenever they went to Doordarshan with new ideas for programmes they were treated with disdain. Almost the only way to get a programme on one of Doordarshan’s channels was if you had a hefty string or two to pull. Then you would find doors opening magically and perhaps even end up getting twice as much money for a programme than you needed. I did not know any high officials and had to often wait outside in the corridors with the peons until the Doordarshan potentate I had come to see thought it was time to grant me an audience. Then I would usually find myself treated to a long lecture on how little I knew about the differences between print and television journalism. The assumption being that someone trained in the Indian Administrative Service automatically knew more.

I remember, in particular, a woman official to whom I suggested we do a series called
Interview with History
in which we could interview political leaders who had been witnesses to the important events that had formed modern India. I mentioned Sheikh Abdullah and Jayaprakash Narayan as possible interviewees. The official looked at me over the tip of her protruding nose and said, ‘Why do you think ordinary Indians would want to watch a programme like that? Don’t you see that they would much prefer to see a long interview with a rickshaw-walla?’ I never tried making programmes for Doordarshan again, comforting myself with the thought that in any case it was pointless making good programmes that would be telecast in snowy, black-and-white images when the whole world was watching colour television. In 1982, thanks to the Asian Games, Indians finally discovered the joys of colour television even if Doordarshan’s offerings continued to be as dreary as ever.

The only cloud over the Games was Bhindranwale. He saw them as an opportunity to draw attention to himself, something he excelled at in the worst of times. In those weeks, when Rajiv and his friends were working long hours to make the Games a success, the Sant spent his time making menacing speeches. He warned of disruptions and disaster in such clear terms that he had to be taken seriously, so once the Games were ready to begin Delhi’s borders were sealed. Instructions to the policemen who manned the borders were to search all Sikhs coming into the city. The policemen, who were mostly peasants from Haryana and unskilled in detecting terrorists, did their job in the clumsiest, crudest way. They stopped all buses coming in from Punjab and searched every Sikh.

War heroes and retired bureaucrats were treated like common criminals. Dignified old soldiers who had helped India win its wars against Pakistan and China were pulled off buses and trains, stripped and ordered to take their turbans off in a manner so humiliating that many turned around and went home instead of coming to Delhi to watch the Games. They took back tales of humiliation and shame, and when their stories reached the ears of the Sant he was delighted. This was just what he needed to inject life into his movement for Khalistan. He called a press conference to declare that Sikhs could not live in a country in which they were treated like second-class citizens. It was a signal for the violence to grow and it did. Horribly.

But first we saw the Asian Games on our new colour television sets. Everyone I knew from socialites and politicians to journalists and people who could not afford their own television sets found some way to watch the opening ceremony. It was not just the Games they were interested in but the drama of seeing them in colour. It was the first time that Indians got a chance to see the first family of the country in full colour. Mrs Gandhi sat proudly with Rajiv beside her, a handsome prince, and Sonia, so beautiful with her perfectly made-up face and her blow-dried hair. Behind them, in the VIP enclosure, sat friends from the inner circle in carefully pressed clothes and expensive sunglasses.

Once Rajiv joined politics he no longer came to the usual dinner parties and I saw him less and less. If I wanted to see him I would have to call in advance and set up an interview. I saw Sonia more at cosy lunches in Nina Singh’s elegant farmhouse where, often, it was Sonia who would go into the kitchen and make something delicious for us to eat. She was a very good cook. Sometimes we would meet for coffee and talk of this and that though never about politics.

What puzzled me about Sonia in those early days was her complete lack of interest in doing something worthwhile as a response to the dreadful poverty she saw every day of her life in her husband’s country. Sometimes she would go with Nina to one of Mother Teresa’s homes for abandoned children but for someone married to the Indian prime minister’s son she had a remarkable indifference to social causes and to India in general. It is true that none of the people in the circle in which the Gandhis moved had much interest in India’s problems either but I expected, perhaps wrongly, that having spent all her time in India in
the prime minister’s home Sonia would have developed a deeper sense of social consciousness. Especially because her mother-in-law liked to flaunt her concern for ‘the poor’ so much that it virtually defined her politics.

It was around the time of the Asian Games that I went to the Golden Temple to meet Bhindranwale.

The Guru Nanak Niwas where he was staying was a bleak, ugly building full of dank corridors and small, smelly rooms. It was in one of these rooms that I first met him. He wore long underpants covered by a long dark blue kurta, with a kirpan dangling from a strap over it and a blue turban. He had a silver arrow lying beside him in brazen imitation of Guru Govind Singh. In one corner of the room, two foreign women, converts to Sikhism judging from the white veils and turbans that covered their heads, were boiling milk on a small kerosene stove.

To establish my Sikh credentials, I had worn as many emblems of the religion as I could lay my hands on, including a steel bangle on my right wrist and a big gold
khanda
on a chain around my neck. When Sandeep Shankar, the photographer who was doing the story with me, started to take pictures I noticed that Bhindranwale liked having his picture taken. Without appearing to be posing, he posed and kept a close watch on where the camera was. It was not vanity but narcissism, as I was to discover when I got to know him better.

Pilgrims came in small groups to pay obeisance by kneeling before him and bowing so that their foreheads touched the floor. Sikhs are supposed to do this only before the Guru Granth Sahib but he did not stop them. He accepted their obeisance in the manner of a practised guru. When the interview began, I asked him to explain what he thought his problems were with the Indian state. It was a bad first question because it set him off into a tirade that lasted several minutes. As my bureau chief, Kewal Sahib, had predicted, Bhindranwale’s complaints were mostly about the police and their ‘atrocities’. He summoned one of his followers, who he claimed had been beaten up by a policeman, and asked him to lift up his shirt to show me the bruises. He then asked the bruised man to name the policeman who had done this to him and repeated the name loudly for everyone to hear. ‘Govind Ram.’ When some weeks later I heard that a
policeman by that name had been killed by Sikh gunmen I realized I had witnessed the Sant ordering an execution.

It was at the very end of this first interview with Bhindranwale, that I asked him if it was true that the Congress Party had paid him a large amount of money to make trouble for the Akali Dal. The question angered him and he ended the interview.

I wandered out of the Guru Nanak Niwas and ran into the two white women who had been boiling milk in the Sant’s room. They wore black turbans under their white veils, which only fanatical Sikh women do in some kind of bizarre imitation of Islam’s injunctions for women to cover their hair. When the white women noticed me staring at them with undisguised curiosity, one of them asked me what I had thought of their Sant. I replied truthfully that I did not believe he had understood the Sikh religion at all. This annoyed the new converts and we got into a discussion about what Sikhism meant. At some point, slightly fed up with their limited knowledge, I may have said something provocative because one of the women turned on me angrily and said, ‘What would you know about Sikhism, you who pluck your eyebrows?’ I told her that I had been brought up steeped in the Sikh religion and knew for certain that there was nothing about plucking eyebrows in it. There is not a single word in the Granth Sahib about not cutting your hair either. It was the tenth Sikh guru who had instructed Sikhs to not cut their hair and he had meant it for a limited period. I reminded them that no injunctions relating to the creation of Guru Govind Singh’s Khalsa army had been put into the Guru Granth Sahib and that this was deliberate.

I was still instructing the ladies in the finer details of the Sikh religion when Sandeep came racing down the stairs and said, ‘I think we should get out of here fast. The Sant didn’t like your last question and is asking who you are and all sorts of other things.’ Sandeep, who had stayed on to take more pictures after I left, had heard him ask one of his followers who I was and how I had dared to ask him about receiving money from the Congress Party.

‘So?’

‘So we should go. A journalist who annoyed the Sant was stabbed in the thigh not long ago and we don’t want any trouble.’

It was the first of many unpleasant encounters with Sant Bhindranwale. They became more frequent as the violence in Punjab grew.
The first incident in which Bhindranwale’s men targeted Hindus, came a few months after I met him. It was in October 1983. A night bus was stopped by masked gunmen late one night. They boarded it, surveyed the passengers, and asked the travellers to identify themselves by religion. Men who said they were Hindu were ordered to get off the bus. Then, in full view of the women and children they were lined up in a field and shot in the back of their heads.

Kewal Sahib woke me up at 4 a.m. that morning and ordered me to leave immediately for Punjab. ‘Sandeep has already left for your house. He should be there in half an hour,’ he said.

‘What happened? What exactly do we know so far?’

‘We know only that the killers were Sikhs and the victims Hindu. And that it was a night bus that was going from Kapurthala to Jalandhar. I am not even sure of the name of the village where this happened, but it’s closer to Kapurthala, I think.’