Durbar (43 page)

In the towns the situation did not appear to be as bad as I had expected. At least there was food available. There were shops selling potato chips and spicy snacks for those who could afford to buy them, and there were free kitchens, such as they were, for at least some of the children. It was when I came to the villages that I saw the real horror of the famine. To get to them I had to walk uphill along a dirt trail for more than two hours. On the way I saw stunted, scrawny, half-naked men walking down the trail carrying clay toys to sell in the towns. When the single crop failed, as it had that year, they made the clay toys in the hope of selling them
to survive. They would have sold them for no more than a rupee or two if they managed to at all but this was the only form of commerce they seemed to know.

When I stopped to talk to them they explained, through my Oriya driver who acted as translator, that there was no food in their village and they had been surviving on birdseed and grass for months. While I was talking to them a government doctor came by after having visited some villages in the hills. He confirmed that most people he had met had not eaten a proper meal in months. The doctor was angry. He said, ‘I have been sending report after report to Bhubaneshwar for months and they send me antibiotics and quinine tablets, and all these people need is food. The only food they have is birdseed and wild grass.’

When I got to the villages at the end of my long, dusty walk I found children dying slowly on the mud floors of mud huts. Their bellies were distended, their eyes glazed and the only sound they could make was a whimper. They had neither food nor clean water. Their parents had nothing to eat either, and were forced to just sit and watch their children starve slowly to death. To this day I think of it as one of the most horrible stories I have ever covered.

When I returned to Delhi the first thing I did was to try and get through to the prime minister to urge him to go to Orissa and see for himself the horror of what was happening. Rajiv was busy but I managed to meet the minister for human resource development, Arjun Singh, through someone who knew him well. He was the same man who had been chief minister of Madhya Pradesh on the night when poison gas leaked from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal killing thousands of people as they slept. His reaction, from all accounts, had been to flee with his family to a safer place. His inability to provide even basic relief to the victims of the worst industrial disaster in history remains a monstrous example of inhuman governance. But nobody seemed to think this then, least of all the prime minister, and it did not surprise anyone except a handful of journalists that the delinquent chief minister was re-elected after the gas disaster. It was just the way India was. Most voters were illiterate and voted for reasons that were often hard to understand.

Arjun Singh looked at me with expressionless eyes as I gave him a list of the villages in which the starvation deaths were occurring. The list of villages, my detailed account of children starving slowly to death on the
mud floors of huts seemed to make not the slightest impression on him. He promised to make sure that the prime minister went to Orissa, and he kept his promise. The prime minister and his wife went to Koraput and Kalahandi with Chief Minister J.B. Patnaik by their side. The chief minister made sure they only met people who were not starving. The prime minister then went on national television to pronounce that the reports of starvation deaths were nothing but ‘opposition propaganda’.

It turned my stomach. It disgusted me to see Rajiv and Sonia smiling happily on Doordarshan, turning starvation deaths into a photo opportunity. The main purpose of the TV crew who followed the prime minister on this tour was to prove to the world that children were not starving in Orissa. When my story appeared on the front page of the
Sunday Times
I got angry reactions from Rajiv’s friends. It bothered them that I had ‘spoiled’ India’s image in a foreign newspaper, but it seemed not to bother them at all that children were starving to death under the rule of their friend. India’s ‘image’ was more important because in their tawdry little lives it was only the death of children of their class that made a difference. My disenchantment with people I had grown up with and always thought of as decent multiplied after this.

In the years that have gone by since that terrible famine in Orissa I have found myself often trying to understand why Rajiv failed to respond with more compassion to the tragedies that happened on his watch. I have not been able to come up with a satisfactory answer except that the officials, who were by then his main political advisors, kept him insulated in the bureaucratic cocoon they built around him. It was a necessary cocoon from their viewpoint because had he broken through it he may have noticed their flaws and the colonial disdain with which they treated ordinary Indians. But this does not absolve him and nor is it my intention to absolve him. I continue to believe that had he responded more compassionately to the famine in Orissa he would have been forced to examine the hopeless, leaky anti-poverty programmes his government wasted so much money on. He would have been forced to acknowledge that the lives of all the children who starved to death in Orissa could have been saved just by ordering the chief minister to set up free kitchens in every village where starvation deaths were being reported.

If it is much harder today for children to die of starvation than it was in the eighties it is because of the vigilance of private television channels.
But malnutrition among children remains one of India’s most shameful problems. Nearly half of India’s children are considered malnourished by international standards, despite mountains of grain rotting in the open at the end of every harvest. There are solutions but Indian officials never come up with them because the political will to change things does not exist and because officials usually prefer massive, unwieldy social welfare programmes since the chances of money leaking into the wrong hands are limitless.

Could Rajiv have changed these things? I believe that no prime minister had a bigger mandate to do this than he did.

B
y 1987 I was not alone in my disappointment in Rajiv. His honeymoon with India ended when in April that year the Bofors scandal broke. By the time news of bribes being paid to Indian officials by the Swedish arms company Bofors AB became public I already had an inkling about a ‘big arms deal’. It came from my friend Akbar who had stayed in touch with some of the people he met when he was Sanjay Gandhi’s lieutenant. Some of them had reinvented themselves as friends of Rajiv and it was because of a chance encounter with one of these people in London that Akbar discovered that Rajiv’s government had just signed ‘a huge arms deal with a Western country’. Most of India’s defence purchases at the time were from the Soviet Union with whom we had a peculiar barter system that passed for trade. They would give us tanks and guns at throwaway prices and we would swap them for Indian consumer goods that few other countries wanted to buy. The ex-friend of Sanjay Gandhi who told Akbar about the arms deal gave him no details but hinted that a huge amount of money had been made by the prime minister and his friends. When Akbar told me this I paid no attention. There was no reason to, because one of the things Rajiv had done after becoming prime minister was to ban middlemen in arms deals. It had added to his image of being Mr Clean.

The story that a Swedish company called Bofors AB had paid Indian officials bribes to sell their 155mm Howitzer guns was not broken by the Indian media but by a Swedish radio station that revealed it in an obscure programme whose primary intention was to put Bofors in the dock for using dishonest methods to sell their guns. But it was in India that the revelation had its most devastating effect. No sooner did the news spread through Delhi’s gossipy, murky corridors of power than the
defence minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, declared that he had every intention of finding out who the bribe-takers were. When this happened Rajiv started behaving as if he had been caught in the act of personally accepting a bribe. It is possible that his personal image would not have suffered so much if he had not behaved from the first news of the deal as if he were guilty.

There is an expression in Hindi, ‘
chor ki daadhi mein tinka
’, which translated literally is ‘in the thief’s beard is a sliver of wood’. Less literally translated it means that when you announce that the thief can be identified by the sliver of wood in his beard, the person who starts shaking his beard can easily be identified as the thief. Rajiv started to shake his metaphorical beard from the moment the scandal broke. He ordered Arun Singh, who was still in the government as a junior minister in the Defence Ministry despite the severed relations between Nina and Sonia, to make a statement in Parliament denying that bribes had been taken. He himself made a statement in the Lok Sabha in which he said that neither he nor any member of his family had been bribed by Bofors. At this point it was unnecessary.

V.P. Singh, meanwhile, continued to investigate the story with gleeful enthusiasm. His image was that of a man of impeccable integrity. When he was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh he had allowed bandits to kill his brother rather than pay a ransom. He had a reputation for being incorruptible. As finance minister in Rajiv’s government, a job he had before being moved to defence, he had become famous for income tax raids on rich and powerful businessmen and for treating them like common criminals. Among those raided were friends of Rajiv and financiers of the Congress Party so V.P. Singh was shifted to the Defence Ministry, where he started digging into shady defence deals even before the Bofors scandal broke.

V.P. Singh’s eagerness to find the officials who had taken bribes from Bofors was matched by Rajiv’s public reluctance to do so. When Bofors officials came to Delhi and offered to reveal the names of those they had bribed, V.P. Singh had no hesitation in saying that this would be in the best interests of India. Rajiv, for his part, seemed to become very nervous about the possibility of revelations and refused to let the Swedish officials name any names on the tenuous grounds that this would be a threat to national security. It put him in direct confrontation not just with V.P. Singh
but with his friend Arun Singh, who found himself in the very difficult position of having lied in Parliament. He agreed with V.P. Singh and Chief of Army Staff General K. Sundarji that it was in India’s interest to find out the names of the bribe-takers and if this meant cancelling the deal with Bofors then so be it.

In Delhi’s drawing rooms whenever I heard someone mention Bofors it would be in the context of Arun Singh’s unhappiness over the way it had been handled. This was usually said in a manner that implied that as a man who valued his integrity above everything else if Arun was unhappy with the Bofors deal it had to mean he was sure he knew who may have taken the bribes and that this somehow implicated his former friend.

Arun and Nina continued to live in the house next door to the prime minister’s on Race Course Road but a permanent frost had settled over their friendship. Rajiv and Arun continued to meet in a professional capacity but there seemed to be no friendship left between them. The Bofors scandal seemed to physically change the lives of Arun and Nina Singh. Even the atmosphere in their elegant home changed. Like Sonia next door Nina had transformed her government house by filling it with beautiful things and restored the old colonial character it must have had before the PWD imposed upon it a socialist aesthetic. From being a happy home filled with the sound of children, laughter and dogs and a place of garden parties and cosy dinners, it became an unwelcoming, tense sort of home. Nina looked unhappy and worried all the time because she was aware that Arun was planning to resign from government and was not sure what would happen to their lives after this. I did not see much of Arun, but whenever I did he looked as if the burdens of the world rested on his shoulders.

After returning from one of my trips to Amritsar, around the time that the strain over Bofors was building, I tried to warn Arun that Sikh militants, who had regrouped in the Golden Temple, were spreading rumours that he was personally responsible for planning Operation Blue Star. He listened to what I said with a half-smile and shrugged his shoulders afterwards as if he did not care one bit that there could be a threat to his life. He never talked to me about Rajiv or Bofors but from speaking to Nina and Mapu I managed to glean that he was deeply upset that Rajiv had put him in the position of making a false statement in Parliament. Meanwhile, V.P. Singh continued to investigate the Bofors case with unconcealed determination and was so passionate in his pursuit that
Rajiv found it necessary to sack him from his government. This added to the impression that Rajiv knew who had taken bribes and was terrified that this knowledge could become public.

Bofors was India’s first major corruption scandal and inevitably became the biggest story where the media was concerned. The
Indian Express
and
The Hindu
were the two newspapers that went out of their way to find out who had taken the Rs 64 crore that had been paid through a series of shell companies. It would be ten years before Swiss banks revealed that a large share of the bribe money was paid into accounts that belonged to Ottavio Quattrocchi and his wife, Maria.

Years later, when Sonia Gandhi became the most powerful political leader in India, she tried to distance herself from the Quatrocchis by pretending that she barely knew them. But in the year that the Bofors scandal shattered Rajiv’s image of being Mr Clean everyone from Delhi’s drawing rooms to its corridors of power knew that the Quattrocchis were as close to the Gandhis as it was possible to be. They went on holidays together and Quattrocchi liked to flaunt his closeness to the prime minister. At dinner parties he was often heard boasting about his influence with Rajiv’s government and those to whom he boasted did not hesitate to spread the word around because the Quattrocchis were not popular in Delhi’s social circles. They were not a pleasant couple. Ottavio was loud and full of bluster, and Maria had a coarse, bossy manner. If they were invited everywhere it was only because of their obvious closeness to Rajiv and Sonia.