Durbar (40 page)

So it was that I happened to be in the
India Today
office on the afternoon the news came that someone had tried to shoot Rajiv Gandhi when he was visiting Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, Rajghat, on 2 October 1986. The failed assassin was a twenty-four-year-old Sikh called Karamjit Singh, who was such an amateur that he used a country-made pistol as his weapon. They found him within minutes, sitting barely concealed behind some bushes, and he readily admitted that he was trying to kill Rajiv to avenge the Sikh massacres. He told the police that he had been particularly disturbed by Rajiv’s justification of the massacres in his ‘when a big tree falls, the earth shakes’ speech.

When I heard that Sonia had been with Rajiv at Rajghat, I called her to find out what had happened. She said that what had upset her most was that when they heard the shots the first people to duck were Rajiv’s new and supposedly highly trained bodyguards from the Special Protection Group. I must have mentioned our conversation in the
India Today
office that afternoon because immediately afterwards Aroon Purie summoned me to his room to ask if I could do an interview with Sonia Gandhi. He said that people were blaming her for the negative stories that were beginning to pollute the atmosphere around Rajiv and everyone was curious about what kind of person she was and whether she really controlled the prime minister as people said she did. Although she went
everywhere with the prime minister nobody knew anything about her at all. What did her voice sound like? How did she spend her days? What did she think of India?

I called Sonia and told her that
India Today
wanted to do an interview with her and emphasized that her image was really bad and that it might help her to give an interview and clarify some of the things that were being said about her. I told her that she was being blamed for interfering in government affairs and such things as throwing Arun Nehru out of the circle of Rajiv’s closest advisors. Many people saw this as a mistake because Arun had acted as a buffer, taking the blame for many things including the Sikh massacres. She listened in silence and remained silent for a few moments before saying that she would check with the prime minister’s media managers and see if they thought she should give an interview to
India Today
.

They did not think it was a good idea. So we agreed to do an interview disguised as a profile and that only Sonia and I, and of course
India Today
, would know that the profile was done with her cooperation. I asked her all the questions that Aroon wanted me to and produced a profile that was so anodyne that Aroon said, ‘I don’t mind being considered a
chamcha
of Rajiv Gandhi, but of Sonia…’ I pointed out that I had said right from the start that I would not be able to say anything negative about her since we were doing the profile with her cooperation. Aroon was unconvinced and said that the very least we should do was put in the things that people were saying about her. He suggested that we put some bite into the piece by getting my colleague Dilip Bobb to work with me so that if I had problems with Sonia afterwards I could put the blame on Dilip.

So on the cover of the 15 December 1986 issue of
India Today
there appeared a profile titled ‘The Enigmatic First Lady of India’. I am going to quote here the first two paragraphs and admit that the writing of them had more to do with Dilip than me. My contribution was to provide information about Sonia’s likes and dislikes, her friends and her life as the prime minister’s wife:

The article went on to charge Sonia with being the power behind the throne ‘plotting the downfall of opponents, through cabinet reshuffles [she didn’t trust Arun Nehru] and advising her husband on everything from the Kashmir coalition to Pepsi Cola’s entry into India.’

The profile was not flattering but it was not as bad as it could have been. Considering how much vicious gossip there was about the Quattrocchis by then, the piece was not unfair. There was only an allusion to her friends using her name when they threw their weight around Delhi’s drawing rooms and government offices. This was mentioned in passing. So, when I called Sonia to find out what she thought of the profile I did not expect the frosty response I got.

I asked her if she had seen the profile and what she thought about it, and I remember being surprised by the icy tone in which she replied that she did not think she was like the person I had described in the profile. In what way, I asked, and she mentioned the reference to her friends using her name.

I said, ‘Look, Sonia, there are people using your name. I don’t want to give you details over the phone. But let’s have coffee and I will tell you exactly what is going on and who is doing what.’

We agreed to meet the next day or the next, but an hour before our scheduled meeting Madhavan, her personal assistant, called to say that Mrs Gandhi was unable to keep our appointment as she was accompanying
the prime minister to Kashmir. He had been instructed to tell me that she would call when she returned to fix another time.

She never did. Some weeks later I wrote to her to offer condolences on her father’s death and got a polite handwritten reply in her neat, carefully formed handwriting. My New Year’s card in January 1987 was not written by hand and signed by both of them as it was the year before. It came from the prime minister’s office and was formally signed by Rajiv Gandhi. I had been dropped.

T
he trouble with serious political mistakes is often that they become obvious long after they were made. Or perhaps they were not as obvious to me then as they may have been had I been a wiser, more experienced observer of political issues. In 1986 my experience as a journalist was mostly as a reporter and I was so busy on most days of the week that I had little time to analyse the political events I was covering. This is my only excuse for not having understood sooner the gravity of the political mistakes Rajiv made even in his first two years as prime minister. But I was not alone in this. India’s honeymoon with Rajiv was a long one, perhaps because compared to the other leaders in South Asia in 1986 he was so much younger and so full of promise.

And, perhaps because he talked so much about computers and taking India into the twenty-first century he created an illusion of change that seemed so much more important than his mistakes. It should have been clear even then that the illusion of change was only an illusion because even though he talked about computerization he did very little to computerize governance or make it easier to import computers into the country. It remained almost impossible to do this until the nineties after the economy was liberalized. Computers were unheard of even in journalism and I can remember using an electric typewriter in the early nineties and not knowing a single Indian journalist who owned a laptop.

The men who started what was to become one of India’s most celebrated software companies, Infosys, remember well the trouble they had importing computers in the eighties. Why did Rajiv not notice that if he believed in computers he needed to make it possible for even students to import them easily and to do this he needed to change India’s archaic rules about
importing technology? I do not know. And I do not know why he never understood that there were many other outdated rules and regulations that needed urgent change and that it was by sheltering behind them that Indian bureaucrats had managed to make governance a labyrinth of red tape out of which only they knew the exit routes. Did he not change anything because he was too inexperienced a politician to challenge the bureaucrats? Did he fall into their clever little traps? I do not know.

What I do know is that politically in 1986 the most serious mistake he made was to throw away what was probably the last chance to find a democratic, domestic solution to India’s Kashmir problem. His mother’s reckless decision to get rid of Farooq Abdullah’s government was now seen as a mistake by everyone who understood the Kashmir problem. It could easily have been rectified in 1986. As in the rest of India, people in Kashmir looked at Rajiv as someone who brought with him the chance of new political ideas and hope. The expectation in the Kashmir Valley was that instead of the cynical solutions that other Indian prime ministers had used to suppress Kashmir’s legitimate democratic aspirations Rajiv would behave with sensitivity and understanding and show a real desire to find a solution to modern India’s oldest political problem. All that he needed to do in 1986 was to order fresh elections and make sure they were free and fair and the Kashmir Valley may have gone back to being the favourite film set of Bollywood’s film-makers and the favourite honeymoon destination of newly married couples across India.

Gul Mohammad Shah, who remained in power for twenty months with a lot of help from Governor Jagmohan, was seen as a usurper and was extremely unpopular. He was contemptuously called Gul-e-Curfew (curfew flower) in Srinagar because of the extraordinary number of days for which the city remained under curfew during his rule. To consolidate his fragile political power he tried to divide Hindus and Muslims and in the end his government was dismissed in early 1986 because of tensions caused by this. He left Kashmir a troubled place but the situation was far from irretrievable. A fair contest between Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference and the Congress Party would have resulted in a victory for him and the Congress could have done what Mrs Gandhi refused to allow it to do in 1983, play the role of a worthy opposition. The average Kashmiri’s faith in Indian democracy would have been restored.

Pakistan continued to be ruled by a military dictator who was nearly as hated in Kashmir as he was in his own country because memories of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s grotesque execution were still fresh. Under Rajiv’s youthful leadership India looked particularly good in comparison. I visited Kashmir regularly at the time and remember being surprised that despite the unjustifiable toppling of Farooq’s government old wounds created by decades of rigged elections and the imprisonment of Sheikh Abdullah had almost been forgotten. All Rajiv needed to do was prove that he believed in democracy.

Unfortunately, yet again, his faith in his trusted advisors got in the way. One of them, Wajahat Habibullah, admitted to me many years later that they had been wrong in persuading Rajiv to coerce Farooq into an electoral alliance with the Congress Party. But by the time he admitted this at a lunch party in a sunny Delhi garden thousands of people had died in an insurgency that remains India’s most intractable political problem. I remember the conversation with Wajahat as if it happened yesterday because I was stunned by how casually he said what he did. I remember thinking then that it was typical of the insensitivity that even the best Indian bureaucrats (Wajahat is among them) show towards the loss of human life. As if unaware of how many people had been killed because of the mistake made by him and Rajiv’s other advisors in 1986 he said that he had read my book
Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors
, which was published in 1995, and agreed with me that a crucial mistake had been made then. Once Farooq was forced to ally his National Conference with the Congress Party it automatically created a vacancy for less moderate Kashmiri parties.

By a funny twist of fate I happened to be in the remote city of Laayoune on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in March that year when I heard on the BBC that elections had been announced in Kashmir. It was a funny twist because what had brought me to Morocco was the decision by Rajiv’s government to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as a separate country. This was exactly as if Kashmir were to be recognized as an independent country. In the Sahara desert, in what used to be Spanish territory, a freedom movement led by the Polisario Front had existed since the seventies and its demands were almost identical to the demands of Kashmir’s secessionist groups. They wanted a referendum
and the right to self-determination under UN resolutions that recognized Western Sahara as disputed territory. The Polisario Front had the support of Algeria and other countries in the Soviet bloc but why Rajiv suddenly felt the need to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as a separate country in the first year of his rule will remain a historical puzzle. The country he recognized was what Morocco considers its southern provinces so King Hassan of Morocco was forced to break diplomatic relations with India.

Weeks after this happened I accidentally met the roving envoy of the King of Morocco, Ambassador Abdeslam Jaidi, in circumstances that had nothing to do with politics or matters of high diplomacy. On a very cold January evening in 1986, just as I was settling down in front of a heater with a book and a glass of red wine, my friend and one of Delhi’s most famous socialites, the late Raji Kumar, rang and virtually pleaded with me to come to dinner. He said he knew that this was a last-minute invitation but explained that it was a very last-minute dinner party. Someone had put Ambassador Jaidi in touch with Raji, who was an antiques dealer, to arrange for a shopping trip and to Raji’s surprise the ambassador accepted his invitation to dinner afterwards. Raji told me that he did not know many people he could call at two hours’ notice and the ambassador was interested in understanding why Rajiv’s government had recognized an integral part of Morocco as a separate country. ‘This man is very close to the king of Morocco,’ he said by way of incentive, ‘and I would really like you to come.’