Durbar (38 page)

‘I would love some.’ He signalled to a servant who had slipped into the room and was standing quietly by the door.

‘What do you think could be the reason? Have you heard anything?’

‘No, nothing more than the usual conspiracy theories.’

‘What are these theories?’ he asked with genuine interest.

‘Oh, the usual kind. CIA, rumours that people high up in the party wanted Mrs Gandhi out of the way because they felt she was no longer capable of winning elections.’

‘Who could win instead? She was the only leader, the others are pygmies compared to her.’

Tea arrived on a silver tray. I drank it while Dhawan smoked incessantly, his hands shaking as he put out one cigarette and lit another. After fifteen minutes or so I realized that there was little more that he could tell me, so I left. I got the impression that he barely noticed my departure. The rain had stopped but I unfolded my umbrella anyway and put on a pair of sunglasses. And, in what I thought was the manner of a skilled spy, I looked cautiously around as I stepped out of his house. There did not seem to be anyone around so I walked back to my apartment.

That afternoon, when I got to the office, a man who identified himself as Mr Sharma called and said he was part of the commission of inquiry into Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and that he would like to meet me.

‘Oh. Of course,’ I said eagerly, thinking that I had found a source for inside information about the assassination inquiry.

‘Can I come right away?’

‘Right away? Is it urgent?’

‘Not really but it would be good if we could meet soon.’

‘Sure. Come to my office. It’s in the IENS building on Rafi Marg.’

‘I know. I will be there in ten minutes.’

He arrived so quickly that I had no time to discuss my meeting with R.K. Dhawan or Mr Sharma’s telephone call with anyone in the office. Mr Sharma was middle-aged with gray, thinning hair and a sagging face
and body. I noticed that his eyes darted about the office taking in everyone and everything. He wore a terylene bush shirt and badly cut trousers of indeterminate colour. But for that unusually alert look in his eyes he could have been any one of the thousands of government officials who work in Delhi. He did not waste time on niceties or small talk.

‘You know R.K. Dhawan,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘You also know the prime minister?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you last meet him?’

‘After he won the election, when he had his first press conference.’

‘No, no what I mean is you know him personally, don’t you?’

I answered in the affirmative but his line of questioning was beginning to puzzle me. His next question confirmed that there was more to Mr Sharma’s visit than I had thought. ‘You also know Farida Ataullah. Right?’

‘Yes.’ Farida was a Pakistani socialite whom I had not met in years but had once known well through Salmaan. When we lived briefly in Sharjah we stayed with her. Munir Ataullah, her husband, was a close friend of Salmaan. I knew that she had gone on to become a friend of Sonia. I had heard, from someone who was present, that the friendship began when Sonia admired a Cartier bag she was carrying and Farida instantly emptied her things out of it and presented it to Sonia as a gift. She was introduced to Sonia by Nimal Thadani, who was married to Rajiv’s friend, Thud.

‘Where did you meet her last?’

‘With Mrs Oberoi at the Oberoi Hotel.’

‘How long ago?’

‘About five years. But why are you asking me all these questions?’

He dropped his inquisitional manner and replaced it with an obsequious smile. ‘Oh, madam, it is nothing really. But I need to talk to you a little more so can we meet again somewhere quieter?’

‘All right,’ I said, not sure what else to say. ‘Come to my sister’s house on Jantar Mantar Road the day after tomorrow. I’m busy tomorrow with a story.’

‘Certainly, madam, certainly. What time and what number is the house?’

I told him, and he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared. I noticed that my colleagues were giving me curious looks and partly to avoid
answering any questions, partly because I needed to go to the Press Information Bureau for information on a story I was writing, I left the office. I walked up Rafi Marg towards Shastri Bhawan puzzling over the questions Mr Sharma had asked and wondered if I should warn Rajiv and Sonia that questions were being asked about one of their close friends by people investigating the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. Then, in one of those coincidences that make you believe there is more to life than we know, a white Ambassador pulled up beside me at the roundabout near Rail Bhawan. Inside it was Sonia.

‘Can I drop you somewhere?’ she asked, rolling down a shaded window.

‘Sonia. My goodness…you’re the very person I want to see. This man came to see me just now, asking funny questions…’

Before I got any further she put her finger on her lips indicating silence and pointed to the man sitting beside the driver in the front seat.

‘When can we talk? It’s important.’ I mouthed the words without saying them.

‘Come to the new house this evening,’ she said. She was in the midst of decorating the prime minister’s new house on Race Course Road, which has now become the prime minister’s permanent residence.

It was not possible for me to go that evening because there was a dinner party for M.J. Akbar and like other members of the bureau I was expected to attend. I told her that I could not come that evening but would talk to Mapu and get him to pass on to her what I had to say. So I rang Mapu and told him what had happened and he passed on the story to either his brother or to Sonia, and he called me back to say that on no account should I see Mr Sharma again. But I had already made an assignation to meet him in my sister’s house for the day after so Mapu told me to be sure not to ‘say anything’. An unnecessary injunction since I had absolutely no idea about any larger plot involved in Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.

What puzzled me more than anything was that Farida, a close friend of Sonia, was being considered a suspect. She was as empty-headed a socialite as I have ever met and to think she could be involved in an international conspiracy to assassinate a prime minister was beyond absurd. In any case as a friend of Sonia she should have been eliminated from the list of suspects. But knowing that intelligence agencies in Delhi often worked at cross-purposes I did not give it much thought until that night. I had barely fallen asleep when the phone rang. When I picked it up there was a long
moment of silence, so I said ‘Hello’ many times over. I was about to put the receiver down and go back to sleep when a man’s voice came on and said in fluent English, ‘You bitch. You think you’re very clever, don’t you? Talking to higher-ups thinking you can protect yourself. We will fix you unless you keep your mouth shut. Understand?’

‘Who is this? Who is speaking?’ I asked, trying to sound confident. It was hard not to be frightened by the threatening tone in the man’s voice.

‘I could be anyone,’ he said. ‘Let’s say I am Peter, will it make a difference? Whoever I am I warn you that it will not help you to talk to anyone.’

‘About what?’

‘You know exactly what. Please cooperate or there will be consequences.’ He put the phone down.

The conversation with ‘Peter’, whoever he was, left me feeling very uneasy about the meeting I had fixed with Sharma. But I was not sure how to get out of it. I slept badly that night, troubled by the thought of another telephone call or perhaps even a midnight visitor. Like every other journalist in the city I knew that intelligence agencies were not to be trifled with.

When I met Mr Sharma again in my sister’s garden I let him do all the talking. He spent the fifteen minutes we were together asking if I knew who had killed Mrs Gandhi. I told him that really it should be me asking him this question but if he was looking for conspiracy theories he should do some investigations in the Congress Party, which was bursting with conspiracy theories and rumours that Mrs Gandhi could not have been killed without the help of ‘insiders’. We parted without learning anything important from each other but when I refused to agree to any more meetings with Mr Sharma I was sent a summons to appear before the Commission of Inquiry. The summons was worded in a manner that implied that I knew something about the assassination and was concealing vital information. I knew nothing but what worried me was how little the investigators seemed to know.

If there was a wider conspiracy in the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, it was never made public. What became clear to me from appearing before the commission was that someone seemed to be trying to put the blame on Rajiv and Sonia by implicating their friends. The questions I was asked
when I showed up at the commission’s shabby, makeshift courtroom in Vigyan Bhawan were all to do with my visit to Pakistan. The man who questioned me made it a point to do so in Punjabi, as if to inject a note of familiarity, and the inquiry went like this.

‘You went to Lahore recently?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you stay?’

‘At the Faletti’s Hotel.’

‘Where is the Faletti’s Hotel?’

‘I have no idea but I am sure that if you checked with someone who worked there they might be able to tell you?’

‘You know Farida Ataullah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does she stay with you in Delhi?’

‘No.’

By the end of the inquisition I found myself seriously worried about the standard of our intelligence agencies. It did not surprise me when, some months later, the investigation into whether there had been a larger conspiracy to kill the prime minister of India was allowed to quietly die away.

In that first year of Rajiv’s rule it was as if everyone wanted to forget the violence and bloodshed that had defined1984 as one of the most horrible years in India’s democratic history. Rajiv’s youth and his image of being Mr Clean brought to the jaded, cynical atmosphere of Indian politics such a sense of renewal and hope that nobody noticed that he was doing almost nothing to change the policies that had kept India mired in poverty for so many decades.

He did nothing to loosen the controls of the licence-quota-permit raj that his mother’s socialism had imposed on the economy. That would happen under another prime minister a wasted decade later. He spoke of improving education, but instead of making the big changes that were necessary he tinkered around. Indian government schools were in bad shape. What was needed was a change in direction that would have made primary education compulsory and other radical changes in policy. Instead, Rajiv ended up
building a handful of new schools that were called Navodaya or New Dawn schools. They were better than the average state school but too few to make a difference.

Early in 1985 when the euphoria of the election still infected the political atmosphere and Rajiv seemed to represent hope and change and magic he made a powerful speech at a party convention in Mumbai in which he attacked the ‘power brokers’ who had taken over the Congress. He seemed to indicate in this speech that the party would become more democratic in future and not rely on the courtiers and sycophants whom his mother had preferred to those who had real grassroots political support. But he did nothing to get rid of the ‘power brokers’. When they realized that his speech was just a speech these men became more skilled at playing their power brokering games. The only thing that would have reduced their power in the Delhi durbar was if Rajiv had introduced a system of genuine elections within the Congress Party so that people who really deserved to be in public life rose to the top instead of courtiers. He did not.

Rajiv may have noticed the scum that had risen to the highest levels of political power because in those first heady months of being prime minister he attempted alternative methods of bringing change. He tried to reduce the power of politicians and bureaucrats by bringing in professionals and management types who worked directly under the prime minister’s office and did not follow the usual, turgid rules of governance. They brought with them a semblance of urgency that for a short while fooled people into believing that the situation was really changing. It was not. This was mainly because Rajiv seemed unable to make the drastic administrative reforms that were necessary for India’s unresponsive, colonial system of governance to improve.

New recruits, like the NRI businessman Sam Pitroda, who had built a thriving business in the United States, came back to India to try and help Rajiv improve telecommunications. In the eighties it sometimes took years to get a telephone connection. And, hard as it is to believe now that every other Indian has a cell phone, all of rural India was bereft of telephonic connections. In the cities the only people with easy access to telephones were politicians, senior government officials, rich Indians and those, like journalists, for whom special quotas were reserved on account of the nature of their professions. But even the Indians lucky enough to have a telephone depended on services that were so bad that lines went dead
inexplicably and remained unrestored for days. It was a time of ‘trunk calls’ that could take a whole day to connect and if you were desperate you booked a lightning call that cost you twice as much. When I first went to England to train as a reporter on the Slough
Evening Mail
in the early seventies I was amazed that I was expected to ‘phone copy’ from the magistrate’s court I was assigned to cover. This was unheard of in India. Filing a story meant finding a post office with a telex machine and then waiting, sometimes for hours, before your turn came to slowly key your report into the noisy, ancient machine.