Durbar (35 page)

I was beginning to wonder if the courtier had deliberately forgotten about me when a car drove up and an American journalist hopped out with a sunny smile and a cheerful wave. He demanded to know where the candidate was, and when I told him that I had not seen him yet he said with feigned horror that ‘no candidate would dare keep a journalist waiting in the US’. He was about to barge into the palace demanding to see ‘the candidate’ when the courtier reappeared with a liveried waiter behind him bearing steaming cups of tea on a silver tray. He was more charming to the American journalist than he had been to me and said His Highness would be down shortly. He added that he had talked to HH and the plan was for me to travel with Scindia in his car for the first part of the day and to exchange places with the American journalist for the next part of the trip. This way we could get separate interviews.

No longer did we have to wait in the cold. The courtier led us through the courtyard with its white crystal fountain, past carriages from another time into a smaller courtyard and to a small, warm drawing room. The American journalist stared at the portraits of bejewelled princes on the walls, the Persian carpet and the Lalique drinks trolley and had begun a discussion about how well the maharajas lived despite the poverty of their subjects when Scindia appeared surrounded by party workers. He acknowledged our presence with a smile and a brief nod and headed straight for the cavalcade of white Ambassadors, with us racing after him. He indicated that I should sit in the back of his car with him. In front, beside the driver, sat an attendant with an old Louis Vuitton picnic box on his lap. The car smelled of marigold garlands and some sort of scent.

On our way to the first meeting, which was in the city, Scindia asked if I was staying next door. When I said I was he said with what seemed to me genuine feeling that he was sorry that his sister had been forced to contest her first election from a seat she had no chance of winning because there was a ‘Rajiv wave’. I conceded that there was a wave and that if Vasu had a choice she would not have contested from Bhind but pointed out that she could not possibly have defied her mother. He nodded but seemed unconvinced. Before the conversation could proceed further we turned into a street of old-fashioned houses with wooden balconies on which women stood with baskets of rose petals that they showered on our convoy. In the street were party workers in white who shouted, ‘
Har vote pe naam likh diya
, Madhavrao Scindia!’ On every vote we have written the name Madhavrao Scindia. In Hindi the slogan has a resonance that is lost in translation.

Scindia got out of the car and joined his hands in greeting. Masses of rose petals instantly showered down on his head from the balconies of the houses on both sides of the street. When I looked up I noticed that the women throwing them from the balconies smiled flirtatiously and half covered their faces. Party workers became increasingly frenzied as the narrow street filled up with passersby who stopped to see their maharaja. As I watched them I wondered if their enthusiasm was for Scindia, as their maharaja, or for Rajiv. He seemed to read my thoughts because when he got back into the car he said, ‘See what I mean? It’s like no other election I have ever seen. But I think it is more for Rajiv than for me, all this enthusiasm.’

I asked if he thought this was because of a ‘sympathy wave’ and he said without hesitation that his impression was that people wanted change. They wanted everything to change, he said. They wanted the officials who misused their power and failed to deliver public services to be curbed, a new kind of younger politician to take charge and for their lives to improve visibly. They believed all this would happen overnight after Rajiv became prime minister, he added, and admitted he was worried that Rajiv would not be able to live up to such expectations. As someone who had been a politician for more than a decade by then he knew how entrenched the old system was and how difficult it would be to get rid of those who had a vested interest in keeping it intact.

Gwalior in the eighties was a very small town. The old city, built in the days when it was still ruled by princes, consisted of an orderly collection of whitewashed, low-roofed houses and bazaars in the area that lay between the Jai Vilas Palace and the fort. At its edges were beginning to appear extensions of the town built in more recent times. These consisted mainly of rows of houses for officials of the government of Madhya Pradesh. They were identical, built with minimum imagination and at a deliberate distance from where the people lived. We drove down one of these newer roads and before we knew it were outside Gwalior’s municipal limits, driving on a bumpy road past small splashes of rice fields in an otherwise cheerless countryside with signs of desperate poverty in the villages.

The road got bumpier the further we got from the city and every now and then Scindia’s cavalcade would stop to greet villagers who waited by the roadside bearing garlands. After an hour or so we drove off the main road on to a dirt trail just wide enough for a car to travel on. Scindia said his first rural meeting that day was in a small village where he used to come with his father for hunts. ‘Shikar’ was just an excuse, he said, for his father to spend a few days camping in the rural wilds to hear and understand the problems faced by people in the villages.

As we got closer to this village the road became narrower, the countryside wilder. The neat patches of green disappeared and we were suddenly in a dun-coloured landscape of dunes and sandy valleys that undulated and rose in asymmetric disorder. After a few minutes the dirt road became too narrow for Scindia’s convoy and we stopped. A group of villagers materialized out of nowhere, leading a small black horse that
they offered Scindia. He gave us an embarrassed smile and said he had to get on it or they would think he did not know how to ride a horse. So he rode and the rest of us followed on foot. Our procession swelled as we went along, joined by swarms of young men and small boys. After walking for about half an hour we arrived at the village in which the meeting was due to be held. Small children in rags played in its constricted alleyways oblivious to mounds of fresh cow dung and rotting garbage. The American journalist looked horrified but for us Indians there was nothing unusual about half-starved children and rural squalor.

Scindia got off his horse in the village square and was instantly surrounded by villagers who fell at his feet, joining their palms in a gesture of both supplication and greeting. Some just stared in wonder. A very old man with deep wrinkles on his face and thick glasses stood up and addressed the maharaja, his hands joined as if in prayer.

‘Your Highness, why did you take so long to come to us?’ he said. ‘Why did you not come earlier to see how we have suffered since the days when your respected and honourable grandfather, Madhav Maharaj, came to our village regularly just to make sure his officials were not cheating us? What days those were, days of plenty and prosperity. If the harvest failed or the crops were damaged by bad weather Madhav Maharaj would excuse us from paying taxes.’

When he finished Scindia stood up and raised his hands above his head in greeting. It was as if the whole village had come to hear what he had to say. Conscious that some of the adulation was for him personally, as the heir of the maharaja they revered, he spoke first of the old days.

His speech went something like this. ‘This may be the first time I have come to this village but we know that my family has connections that go back more than half a century. As a child I came here with my father, and to this day I remember how delicious the food was that we would eat here at the end of a day’s shikar.’ His audience applauded. He smiled. ‘But now I come to you not as a maharaja but as an ordinary man who wants your vote so we can bring about in India a generational change under the leadership of our young and dynamic new leader.’ The applause was loud and long. I noticed that the emphasis of Scindia’s speech was on the new rather than on what had passed. After his speech was over he got back on the horse and our procession wended its way back to the main road where the cars waited. Then we were off to the next village, and the next.
By late afternoon my American friend had seen as much as he needed to of local colour and we agreed we should go back to the city.

We drove back in his car and I asked to be dropped off in a bazaar that was not far from the Rani Mahal and wandered about trying to gauge the mood. I was already certain that Scindia would win but knowing that Vajpayee was very popular I wanted to see if urban shopkeepers, the traditional voters his party banked on, were still on his side. It did not take long to discover that although Vajpayee had supporters in this town, they were upset with him for having been an absentee MP. They resented his almost total absence since the previous election and said that even now with the campaign nearly over he had not held a single meeting in Gwalior. They said they had heard he was somewhere in southern India and that he had broken his leg but they hoped he would not use this to get their sympathy. They were willing to give Vajpayee a chance but it seemed to me that they had made up their minds to vote for Scindia.

That evening, when Vasu arrived defeated and drained from having spent yet another discouraging day travelling around Bhind, I told her this. She suggested that we tell Rajmata Sahib that Atalji should not begin his campaign in Gwalior by using his broken leg as an excuse for not having come earlier to his own constituency. This we did at dinner that evening and Rajmata Sahib said, without looking up from the simple vegetarian meal on her silver thali, ‘I know that my son is going to win.’ This sent her lieutenant and political mentor Sardar Angre into a fury and, as he always did at the mention of Scindia’s name, he started to spit venom about his ‘cowardice’ and his unsuitability to be a maharaja. It was the sort of thing Angre said so often about Scindia that none of us reacted but after dinner was over Vasu decided that we had to find some other way to get a message through to Vajpayee.

By a fortuitous coincidence Jaswant Singh arrived in Gwalior later that evening. He was at the time a relatively unimportant member of the BJP but was known to be close to Atalji so Vasu and I tried to convince him that he should advise Vajpayee not to begin his campaign speeches by making excuses for his broken leg. Jaswant Singh, who went on to hold important portfolios like external affairs, finance and defence in Vajpayee’s government, appeared not to have taken our advice seriously for when Atalji addressed his first public meeting in Gwalior he pointed to his plastered leg and said he would have been there earlier had it not
been for his leg. He sounded defensive and apologetic and the speech he made was one of the most uninspired I had ever heard him make. He spent the rest of the election canvassing support from door to door, telling people how he was as much from Gwalior as the maharaja was, but came from an ordinary family and understood what it meant to be deprived because unlike his opponent he had not grown up in the privileged cocoon of a palace.

It made no difference. When Rajiv arrived for Scindia’s grand finale, just before campaigning ended, the rally he addressed was so huge that people said they had never seen such a big election meeting in Gwalior. For me a new feature at this rally was the visibly heightened security. When Mrs Gandhi used to travel she usually had one escort car with a handful of sleepy policemen in it. Rajiv Gandhi and Arun Singh, who was now Rajiv’s closest political aide, arrived in a convoy of white Ambassadors, most of which had their rear doors ripped out with commandos in black combat fatigues pointing automatic weapons in all directions.

What I remember most about Rajiv’s speech was his attack on the opposition leaders whom he described as ‘enemies of India’. He explained, as he had done in speeches throughout the campaign, that his reason for charging the opposition leaders with treason was because they had allied with the Akali Dal and other secessionist forces. Mixed with this unfair attack on legitimate opposition leaders and political parties were promises of change and a shining new future for India. He spoke in stilted, unsure Hindi but the vast crowd was not there to hear him so much as to see him. Compared to the aging, unattractive politicians that most Indians were used to he looked so young, so handsome, as he stood next to an equally young and handsome Maharaja of Gwalior that the aura of the young leaders was palpable even to us cynical hacks in the press enclosure.

The next time I saw Rajiv Gandhi was after he had won the largest mandate in Indian parliamentary history. Out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha he ended up winning 416 with the second largest party being N.T. Rama Rao’s regional Andhra party, the Telegu Desam, with 30 seats. The Marxist parties came third with 22 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party was reduced to a humiliating 2 seats.

The election results came on a cold winter morning. I remember waking up to find a fog so thick and white outside the windows of my barsati that I could not see the plants on my terrace. Delhi has short winters, but there are days in December and January that can be so cold that anyone who has the option chooses to stay home glued to the nearest heater. This was one of them. If it were not for the election results I would have stayed at home.

There was another reason I did not look forward to going to the office that day. I was certain that Rajiv would win convincingly and knew that this would inevitably cause more tension between Akbar and me. Akbar had convinced himself, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that there was no ‘Rajiv wave’. I had discovered by then that his political analysis could often be based on emotions rather than on empirical evidence and for reasons that were not entirely clear he was at the time of the general election in 1984 a passionate supporter of the opposition parties and against the Congress Party.