Durbar (47 page)

It was during this trip to Pakistan that I met Benazir for the first time in Sindh after spending a day following her around as she raced about the countryside in her Pajero trying to ensure that polling was free and fair. When I caught up with her she seemed tense and preoccupied and said she would answer all my questions after polling was over. Later that evening at the Bhutto family home in Larkana she gave a short audience to the army of foreign correspondents that had gathered and we were bewitched by her beauty and by that elusive quality called charisma that she exuded. She did not say much but what she said reflected her passion for democracy and the years she had suffered to bring it to her country. She seemed so much more intelligent and political than Rajiv that it was a contrast I found hard not to notice. She may have come to power because of her family name, as he had done, but unlike him she had fought a long and difficult political battle to get to the top. She carried on her fight for democracy even after her father was executed and spent many years in jail because of it. This gave her a gravitas that Rajiv did not have but in the end she could
do little to make a new beginning with India because she was prevented from interfering in foreign policy by the generals in Pakistan with a vested interest in war rather than peace. A new initiative could only have come from India and did not because the know-all bureaucrats who surrounded Rajiv made sure that a real change of direction did not happen. India’s foreign policy has been consistent since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, they liked to say, as if this were something to be proud of.

While relations did not improve with Pakistan, they deteriorated seriously with Nepal and Sri Lanka. The only foreign policy triumph Rajiv could boast of was that he saved the government of the Maldives from being overthrown in a coup by Tamil mercenaries led by disgruntled Maldivian political leaders.

Once more I found myself in a toothpaste tube of a military plane that took seven hours to take us to Male. There were Indian soldiers everywhere and they were heroes in the eyes of the local people because they had prevented Male from being taken over by men who came at dawn to attack with rockets and heavy artillery. Despite the trauma of the attempted coup and the presence of soldiers everywhere this country of tiny islands did not lose its holiday atmosphere. We Indians accustomed to the dreary, socialist tourism facilities India offered in those days were startled by how far ahead of us this country in the Indian Ocean was on the tourism front.

We stayed in a resort called Kurumba that was a collection of whitewashed bungalows covered in bougainvillea. The island was so small that every bungalow had a view of the emerald and turquoise sea. We ate an Italian meal that night in a restaurant built under a large, thatched roof and not only was the food delicious but a bottle of fine Chianti wine was available at a reasonable price. Such a meal would have been nearly impossible in India in 1988. Rajiv had followed his mother’s policy of not encouraging foreign tourists to come to India either because the economic benefits did not occur to him or because his advisors viewed foreigners and foreign tourists with suspicion. It was not until after the economy was liberalized in the nineties that foreign tourists started coming to India in large numbers. By then countries like the Maldives and Sri Lanka, and most of Southeast Asia and China, had long understood the enormous benefits that tourism could bring to a country’s economy.

While Rajiv was preoccupied with building his image abroad his former defence minister, V.P. Singh, spent his time travelling in the villages of north India spreading poisonous propaganda against his former boss. V.P. Singh set himself up as the anti-Rajiv, homespun hero who not only spoke Hindi perfectly but could break into rural dialects with fluency. Instead of the glamour and glitz that Rajiv and Sonia had come to symbolize, V.P. Singh went out of his way to show that he was just an ordinary man despite being a raja by birth. He travelled in a dilapidated Fiat and his driver was often a smalltime journalist whom I knew slightly and who invited me along on one of the tours.

We started in Lucknow where V.P. Singh was staying in a squalid guesthouse. I did not know then that the humble accommodation was part of the image he was cultivating. The journalists who surrounded him were not from big national newspapers but from small, mofussil papers and the fact that V.P. Singh had given up power and pelf to be with them in humble, if smelly, hostelries appealed to them. They followed him everywhere he went and spread his message far and wide. On the day I went with him we left Lucknow at dawn and travelled in a dusty convoy of rattletrap Ambassadors. We drove past Lucknow’s ruined mosques and palaces and it saddened me to see another great Indian city destroyed. Most Indian cities had fallen to ruin after Independence because of the socialist disdain for aesthetics and town planning that our political leaders affected.

My father was posted in Lucknow in his army days and my childhood memories were of a city in which refinement had been carried almost too far and defined even the most mundane activities. As a child I remember being fascinated by how the city’s scents changed with the seasons. In summer when we wore white muslin and pastel colours our clothes smelled of vetiver, tuberose, wild roses and jasmine. When the rains came the attar would become warmer and smell of wet earth and rain-washed evenings, and our winter clothes smelled of musk and ambergris. When people argued they did it in words usually found in poetry. Once I rejected a pavement seller’s mangoes because they seemed a bit rotten and the old fruitseller said, ‘Take them, your highness, they are pining in your memory.’ Then in the eighties a rough, new breed of politicians came to power and sold chunks of the city to developers who built ugly new ‘colonies’ that paid no attention to the architecture of the old city.
It did not take long for the older, more beautiful part of the city with its mosques and minarets and quaint bazaars to get squeezed from all sides by the ugly, new city that rose like a vast shanty town around it.

Within minutes of driving out of Lucknow, that morning, we found ourselves in rural surroundings of the usual primitive kind. Women washed clothes at the edge of a drain, children defecated, dogs and chickens raced about and old men sat on string beds smoking hookahs and reading Hindi newspapers. Clouds of big, aggressive flies harassed us as we walked to the village’s main square where an audience of villagers sat patiently under the shade of a magnificent old banyan tree. There was no stage, no microphones, none of the paraphernalia of a normal political rally. V.P. Singh climbed on to the little cement platform that surrounded the tree and made his speech. The audience consisted of about five hundred people. Women with veiled faces sat in the front, men in dusty kurtas and dhotis sat behind them and children, barefoot and half naked, scrambled about restlessly right under the platform the leader spoke from.

His message was simple and he wasted no time delivering it.

Rajiv was corrupt and had betrayed the people by not bringing about the changes he had promised. So the solution was to vote for V.P. Singh and his newly formed Jan Morcha because he would do all the things that Rajiv had failed to do. And he promised that within ninety days of his becoming prime minister he would catch the ‘Bofors thieves’. The audience in that first village was unresponsive and silent. But as the day went on things improved and late that night when we stopped in a town whose name I no longer remember V.P. Singh’s message was greeted with raucous slogans and an enthusiastic crowd. I returned to Delhi convinced that V.P. Singh could be prime minister one day.

As the end of his term drew closer Rajiv began to look more and more like a comical, half-witted prince with no idea of the country he was ruling or its problems. In the durbar around him there were now only sycophants. There were bureaucrats, like Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had long broken the boundaries that keep the civil service apart from politics. There were journalists, like M.J. Akbar, who had decided to give up journalism for a ticket to contest elections from Rajiv’s Congress Party. There were sleazy businessmen whose only interest was in currying favour with the prime
minister to further their business interests. And, there were those friends from the old days who had benefited hugely from being courtiers in Rajiv’s durbar. Rajiv himself had little time for them because of the pressures of prime ministerial duties, but Sonia, still an apolitical if powerful housewife, had all the time in the world at her disposal. And they had all the time in the world for her because they knew that without her permission there was no access to the prime minister’s house.

I saw these friends less and less partly because I was no longer in the same set and partly because there was so much political turbulence in the country that I seemed to spend all my time at political meetings. Rajiv had unleashed such terrible forces with his decisions to give Muslims their own personal law in matters of divorce and Hindus a new focal point for Hindu revivalism in Ayodhya that it was hard to keep up with the changes that were happening.

When it came to using Hindu revivalism as a political weapon nobody could beat the Bharatiya Janata Party and suddenly this political party was back in business. After having been reduced to two seats in Parliament by the wave that swept Rajiv to power in 1984 it had become a spent, forgotten political force until the Shah Bano case. When Rajiv allowed the unlocking of the Babri Masjid for Hindus to worship Ram the BJP could almost not believe its luck. The unlocking of the masjid’s gates was a result of a court case in which a Hindu appellant had demanded the right to worship in what he said was a temple. A wiser prime minister would have found some way to defuse the tensions that inevitably arose. As Rajiv did nothing this was interpreted, by most political analysts, as an attempt to cultivate Hindu voters and when it comes to this the BJP is always hard to beat. Suddenly public meetings began to be held in Delhi in which tired old slogans like ‘
Gau-Mata ki Jai
’ (Hail Mother Cow) were shouted along with new ones like ‘
Boliye Sri Ram Janmabhoomi ki Jai
’ (Hail the temple where Sri Ram was born). At these meetings there were so many saffron-robed priests and weirdly dressed sadhus that it was often hard to tell if these were religious gatherings or political. But political they most certainly were since political leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishan Advani were always present. The new religiosity forced even someone like Vajpayee to announce that he was a proud member of the RSS and that he believed that the Babri Masjid should be ‘bulldozed’.

This was at a meeting in Delhi’s Ram Lila grounds in April 1989 and I remember being as stunned by Vajpayee’s new mood as I had once been moved by the speech he had made on these very grounds at that first rally after the opposition leaders were released from jail in the winter of 1977. I had followed his career closely in the years that had passed and got to know him well personally, so I knew that he was uncomfortable with Hindu revivalism but he seemed to have no choice but to flow with the tide.

At this meeting, ostensibly held to commemorate the birth centenary of the founder of the RSS, Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a priest called Mahant Avaidyanath announced that the reason why ascetics like him had been forced to give up their prayers and meditations and return to ‘real life’ was because Hindu unity was in danger. ‘There are those who say what problems can Hindus have when they constitute 80 per cent of the population, but let us not forget that this country was enslaved at a time when Hindus constituted 100 per cent of the population. How did we become slaves when we were at the height of our civilization? Only because we were disunited.’

In the speech he made that day Vajpayee did not target Muslims quite so directly but suggested, in a subtle reference to Muslims in Indonesia, that they had changed their religion but not their culture and continued to celebrate the Ram Lila every year. And, he added, the ancient capital of Thailand is called Ayodhya and their kings have been called Ram ever since the influence of India’s mighty civilization spread to that country in ancient times. The implication was not lost on anybody and especially not on Muslims. Under Rajiv there had been terrible communal riots in Bhagalpur and Meerut but Muslims continued to see the Congress Party as basically on their side and the BJP as the enemy. The rise of Hindutva and the new aggressive language from supposedly moderate BJP leaders like Vajpayee fuelled hostilities which would two years later explode into the horrific violence that followed in the wake of L.K. Advani’s ‘rath yatra’ to Ayodhya. It would also in a later election take the BJP’s seats in the Lok Sabha from two to more than a hundred.

What helped reignite the BJP’s engines more than anything else was Rajiv’s decision to allow Muslims the use of Islamic law in matters of marriage and divorce. Even irreligious Hindus, uninspired by the campaign to turn the Babri Masjid into a temple, objected to Muslims being governed by a separate law. Ordinary people whom I talked to on my travels quoted
the BJP slogan ‘
Ek vidhan, ek samvidhan
’ (One law, one constitution) to me as if they had thought it up themselves. Many asked why Muslims wanted only a limited implementation of the shariat law. Why should Islamic punishments like chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning adulterers to death not apply as well? Less liberal Hindus remembered that India had been broken once before in the name of Islam and this could happen again if Rajiv was allowed to ‘appease’ Muslims. Appeasement was a word I heard so often those days that I got tired of hearing it but there was no escape from it because everywhere I went I saw signs of a resurgent Hindutva and the return of the RSS through its morning meetings called
shakha
s in cities and small towns across India.