Durbar (30 page)

It was in my view an accurate description of what I had seen and since I had always opposed Bhindranwale’s activities with brutal honesty, and at considerable personal risk, I did not think that anyone would read it and challenge my patriotism. I was wrong. The next time I met Suman Dubey, who was still a journalist and not yet one of Rajiv’s personal aides, at a dinner party in Delhi, he made it a point to ask me how I could have ‘written something like that piece in the
Sunday Times
’.

‘What was wrong with it?’ I asked with genuine surprise.

‘You shouldn’t have written an article criticizing the government in a foreign newspaper,’ he said.

I never found out if he was speaking for himself or on Rajiv’s behalf. What I did find out soon enough was that the general view in Rajiv’s circle of friends was that Operation Blue Star had been a resounding success and any criticism of it amounted to treason. It took me a while to discover that the reason for this hyper-sensitivity was that Rajiv and his friends had been personally involved in advising a military assault on the Golden Temple. Mrs Gandhi’s ‘south Indian advisors’ had gone along with the plan, but from all accounts were not the ones who initiated it. Was this Rajiv Gandhi’s first serious political decision? Nobody will ever know, but by the middle of 1984, when Operation Blue Star happened, he had become the prime minister’s closest advisor.

T
he rains came late in that long, hot summer of 1984 and those of us who could not leave Delhi suffered the intensity of long, still days that caused white vapour to rise from the road and make normal activity almost impossible. It was on such a day, when I was on my fifth lukewarm nimbu pani, staring dejectedly at the blank sheet of newsprint in my typewriter, that I heard that Mrs Gandhi was planning to topple Farooq Abdullah’s government in Kashmir. It had been elected only the year before.

The news came from a reliable source in the Home Ministry and even he admitted that it was a mad idea. ‘First Punjab…now this,’ the official said. ‘It doesn’t make sense with Punjab still on the boil.’

It really made no sense at all that almost exactly a month to the date from Operation Blue Star Mrs Gandhi should go ahead and topple Farooq’s government for reasons that were too flimsy to be valid. What was worse is that it was almost as if she acted out of pique rather than for political reasons. From the time Farooq became chief minister Mrs Gandhi and her circle of close advisors maligned him for being ‘anti-national’ for reasons so silly that they were laughable. On a visit to the Golden Temple he had spent some time chatting to Bhindranwale and this was portrayed as an act of treason. He organized a conclave of opposition chief ministers in Srinagar and this was seen as an attempt to thumb his nose at Delhi. But even if the reasons had been valid the timing of the move against his government was insane. Why would Mrs Gandhi, with her supposedly legendary sense of timing, destabilize two sensitive border states within a month of each other? It is something I have not understood to this day.

The plot to topple Farooq’s government did not take into account that Kashmir had a long history of stolen elections and denied democratic rights nor did it take into account that Farooq was still very popular. He had brought levity to Kashmir’s gloomy political history and ordinary Kashmiris loved him for it. His critics may have taken to calling him ‘Disco chief minister’ but ordinary Kashmiris loved his sense of fun and his irreverence. In his year as chief minister he had done little to improve anything, but people liked to see him riding his motorcycle around the streets of Srinagar and stopping to listen to the complaints of ordinary citizens. This was something important politicians did not usually do. He liked defying Delhi and this they especially loved because of Kashmir’s peculiar history as a reluctant member of the Union of India.

While we in Delhi’s newsrooms were still debating whether Mrs Gandhi would add to her political problems by destabilizing Kashmir within weeks of Operation Blue Star, Farooq was removed in an act of barefaced political chicanery that did little to enhance the image of Mrs Gandhi or Rajiv. In a midnight manouvre 13 members of his legislative party went to Raj Bhawan and told the Governor they were defecting from the National Conference in order to lend their support to Farooq’s brother-in-law, Gul Mohammed Shah, whom Farooq had earlier expelled from his party and who had gone on to set up his own party, National Conference (Kashmir). Kashmir’s governor was none other than Mrs Gandhi’s old hatchet man, Jagmohan, the same man who had so faithfully obeyed Sanjay’s instructions during the Emergency. Jagmohan had replaced Mrs Gandhi’s cousin B.K. Nehru, who had refused to cooperate in this cynical exercise on the stated grounds that he would not help subvert a sensitive border state. Shah would not have succeeded in forming a government if the governor had not cooperated fully.

Gul Shah, married to Farooq’s elder sister Khalida, had always thought of himself as the real political leader in Sheikh Abdullah’s family and bitterly resented Farooq from the time Sheikh Abdullah anointed him as his heir two years earlier. I remember from Farooq’s ‘coronation’ how unhappy Gul Shah had looked when Sheikh Abdullah announced at that rally in Iqbal Park that he was placing on Farooq’s head a ‘crown of thorns’. A little investigation was all it took to find out how much Shah resented being passed over. He had been Sheikh Abdullah’s comrade
and stayed in Kashmir while Farooq went to live in England in the years Sheikh Abdullah was in prison to come back only when his father became chief minister.

Farooq, oblivious to the plot against his government, happened on that day to be in Pahalgam, where my parents and sister were holidaying with her children and my son, Aatish. My sister told me later that Farooq had spent the day taking the children for rides on his motorcycle and returned to Srinagar late that evening.

As the resident Kashmir expert and since I had covered the Kashmir election the year before, Kewal Sahib decided that I should go up to Srinagar as soon as possible. I arrived two days after Farooq’s government was dismissed on 2 July 1984. On my flight were Inder Gujral, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna and other opposition politicians who were going there to lend moral support to the dismissed chief minister.

Sitting next to me on the flight was Bahuguna, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and a man who had been one of Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted lieutenants. They fell out after Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency. Bahuguna was a small man with a distinctive stoop and a face that looked like a withered raisin. He was highly intelligent and had a permanent twinkle in his eyes, as if he saw politics as a sort of absurd game. ‘Now she has really gone and blown it,’ he said to me with a smile. ‘Kashmir is going to be the last nail in her coffin… Sadly it will also create problems for the nation.’ He did not sound sad at all.

‘What do you think will happen?’ I asked, in search of a comment for the story I had to file that evening.

‘Well, for a start this will prove to be a big boost for the secessionist organizations. They’ve been dormant for nearly ten years because they have no role to play in Kashmir if there is democracy. When the choice is between a military dictatorship in Pakistan and a democratic India, Kashmir will opt for India. It is when democracy is denied that people start remembering that they are Muslims.’

‘Why do you think Mrs Gandhi did this?’

‘They say it isn’t her decision,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve heard at the highest levels in Delhi that she is almost in retirement and it is now her son and his friends who are calling the shots. And they obviously don’t fully understand the consequences of their actions.’

‘What do you think of Rajiv and his friends?’

‘He is a sweet boy. Not very intelligent, but good. The problem is that he is not at all political and it’s very difficult to rule India if you are not political.’

‘What do you mean by not being political?’ I persisted.

‘Well, for a start, someone with even minimum political sense would never have toppled Farooq’s government, especially not now with Punjab in flames. Someone political would never have attacked the Golden Temple because a political person would have found a political solution to Punjab instead of a military one.’

‘Punjab is now irretrievable and they go and destabilize Kashmir,’ said one of the other opposition leaders. He was a Punjabi Hindu and said he had driven through Punjab a week earlier and seen the beginning of a much more serious problem than had so far existed.

We flew over high mountains, half khaki, half covered in snow, and a little frightening in their cold beauty. As we began our descent, the countryside softened and below us lay fields filled with yellow mustard flowers and peridot rice paddies. From the first time I had come to Kashmir as a child I had marvelled at how Kashmiri rice fields were a lighter, more luminous green than anywhere else and on this sunny day they glistened as if someone had woven threads of gold into an embroidered landscape.

The scent of flowers greeted us as we stepped out of the aeroplane. It came from almond trees heavy with white blossoms, which we could see beyond the barbed wire that cordoned off the tarmac. Srinagar airport had changed since I was last here a year ago. Farooq believed that tourism should be the core of Kashmir’s economy and in pursuit of this goal had transformed the arrivals lounge in the airport from the tin shed it had once been into a wood-panelled hall in which stalls advertised hotels, taxi services, trekking and fishing trips. A glass wall partitioned off the arrivals from the departures lounge and I noticed that the departures lounge was bursting with travellers who seemed slightly panicky. Women with small children formed the largest group. Was there already trouble in the city?

It was the first question I asked Shaukat, whose taxi was used so often by visiting journalists that it had a press sticker pasted permanently on the windscreen.

‘Curfew,’ he said. ‘There’s been twenty-four-hour curfew since midnight. I got here only because I rang your office in Delhi and asked them to ensure that I got a curfew pass.’

‘Any violence?’ I asked as we drove past the garden of almond trees.

‘Not yet. But people are angry; they are saying Kashmir will never get democracy under India. Farooq has become a big hero now.’

‘Where is he? Is he in Srinagar?’

‘Yes. They say he is under house arrest because they won’t allow anyone to drive down Gupkar Road. It’s been closed even to journalists. They say he is going to come out this evening and drive through the city with the opposition leaders who are coming from Delhi.’

‘What time?’

‘Around five I’ve heard.’

‘Great. We have time. Let’s dump my luggage in the Broadway and try and get to his house.’

Police cars patrolled the deserted streets but there was a strange absence of tension, almost as if there was a holiday in the city. Kashmiri men in peaked caps and loose coats stood chatting and drinking tea, women shopped for groceries and in a field on the banks of the Jhelum children played cricket in the sun. When we got to the Broadway Hotel I noticed a bus leaving with a large group of tourists. The holiday atmosphere appeared to have fooled none of them into staying. Srinagar was known to explode suddenly and the first means of transport to stop functioning was usually India’s one and only airline. Visitors could end up stranded in Kashmir for weeks.

My parents, sister and the children were among those who had decided to leave that afternoon on the earlier of the two Indian Airlines flights to Delhi. I was meant to take the one that left later in the afternoon but when I got to the Broadway Hotel I ran into Chaitanya Kalbag, who worked at the time for Reuters, and he pointed out that it would be madness to go back to Delhi on a day that Farooq could be arrested. Raghu Rai, who had made the mistake of leaving Amritsar two days before Operation Blue Star, agreed that it was better to stay and risk not being able to file my story than to go back to Delhi and find that Farooq had been arrested. So the first thing we did, on the way to Farooq’s house, was to go to the Indian Airlines office and change our tickets, even though Raghu and I had sent our luggage ahead to the airport to be checked in by other journalists travelling on the same flight.

The entrance to Gupkar Road was blocked by a barricade. A group of Kashmiri policemen stood smoking and chatting. When I showed them my press card they smiled and waved me cheerily towards Farooq’s house. They told Shaukat that the car would have to wait at the barricade, but he said something to them in Kashmiri and they laughed and moved the barricade and let us pass. The opposition leaders from Delhi had got there before me and were sitting in Farooq’s garden amid beds of fat, overblown roses and chrysanthemums, drinking Kashmiri tea. When Farooq saw me he smiled and indicated with a wave that I should join them.

‘Welcome. Welcome. You’ve come just in time. In half an hour we are planning to drive to the old city and cross the Jhelum to show people I am still their chief minister and will not be deterred by curfews and such things.’

‘Don’t you think they will arrest you?’

‘I hope they do,’ he said with a laugh.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘When did you know that your MLAs had defected?’

‘The next morning,’ he said with a bitter little smile. ‘And guess which ones went? The Jammu Hindus to whom I gave tickets because I thought it would make Mrs Gandhi happy to know that I was choosing what she calls mainstream politicians and not secessionists as she accuses us Muslims of being.’