Durbar (50 page)

It was a bad time to hold another general election so soon after the last one and in such a fraught atmosphere. And Rajiv, sounding magnanimous and statesmanlike for the first time since his defeat, offered to use his 197 MPs in the Lok Sabha to support (from the outside) a government led by Chandrashekhar. So Chandrashekhar finally became prime minister, but only after making a humiliating compromise. With no more than 64 of his own MPs, he became head of a government that relied totally on Rajiv’s grace and favour.

Chandrashekhar did not last long as prime minister. He was sworn in on 10 November 1990 and by March of 1991 was forced to resign because it became impossible for him to rule at Rajiv’s behest. He remained caretaker prime minister till 21 June 1991 but was a real prime minister for only the first three months. Even in those months he could take almost no decision without Rajiv’s permission. Rajiv’s immaturity as a politician became more evident during the months of Chandrashekhar’s rule than at any other time. He behaved like a spoilt prince whose kingdom had been wrongfully taken away from him and took to ordering the prime minister around as if he were an underling.

Chandrashekhar had inherited a government that was nearly bankrupt.
The financial situation was so bad by early 1991 that there were rumours that the Government of India was on the point of dipping into its gold reserves to pay its debts. Chandrashekhar’s inflexible socialist worldview prevented him from coming up with new ideas or imaginative solutions to the crisis. But even if he had he would have been allowed to do little by Rajiv Gandhi who in Parliament and in public made it clear, often and loudly, that Chandrashekhar was prime minister only as long as he wanted him to be. When Chandrashekhar tried to think for himself or do something without Rajiv’s permission, Rajiv always made it clear who was in charge.

His interference reached absurd levels when the first Gulf War began. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait happened while Chandrashekhar was prime minister and Chandrashekhar decided that it was in India’s interest to allow American warplanes to refuel in India. Rajiv saw this as a departure from the anti-American foreign policy he had inherited from his mother and threw a public tantrum about Chandrashekhar’s disobedience. He then flew off to Moscow to try and get Mikhail Gorbachev to prevent the Americans from launching a ground war against Saddam. It was a foolish thing to do since not even the Russians were on Saddam’s side by then. His sycophantic advisors deluded him into believing that even if he was no longer prime minister, he was so important a world leader that he could stop the United States from launching a ground war.

In the end it was not some grand act of disobedience that caused Chandrashekhar’s government to fall, but the silliest reason imaginable. After Rajiv lost the election, he and his family moved from the prime minister’s house on Race Course Road to a smaller house, 10 Janpath. This house would one day become famous as the most powerful address in India, but that was more than a decade away. In the spring of 1991 it was just another large house at the edge of a roundabout on one of Delhi’s busiest roads. As soon as the Gandhis moved in the gates of the house that opened on to Janpath were sealed and high walls built for reasons of security. The only entrance to the house that remained open was through a heavily guarded cul-de-sac.

One morning Rajiv decided that the prime minister was violating his privacy by posting two constables from Haryana in his house to spy on him. If the prime minister of India wanted to spy on someone he would not
need to rely on ordinary constables. In Delhi, in the paranoid atmosphere that Mrs Gandhi’s horror of the CIA had created, there was a huge and very discreet infrastructure that could have been used. But Rajiv was adamant and went public with his charges.

These new accusations were so odd that they appear to have made Chandrashekhar realize that his position as prime minister was not much more exalted than one of Rajiv’s flunkeys. Gathering together what remained of his tattered dignity he surprised everyone by going quietly to a Doordarshan studio and announcing on national television that he was submitting his resignation as prime minister and ordering the dissolution of the Lok Sabha. Chandrashekhar’s decision to resign appeared to take Rajiv more by surprise than anyone else. Political pundits agreed that all Rajiv had been trying to do was assert his dominance over the prime minister, not cause the government to fall. But perhaps what was happening was beyond the power of mere human beings, perhaps there were energies in the cosmos that had come into play that were bigger than we knew.

When Chandrashekhar announced his resignation, the first hot summer winds were beginning to sweep through Delhi, bringing people like me intimations of the nightmarish journeys that lay ahead on the campaign trail. My plans were to start my travels in Rajiv’s constituency in Uttar Pradesh. but I did not expect to interview Rajiv in Amethi. I had not seen either Rajiv or Sonia socially or at a personal level in a long time and responses to my requests for an interview with Rajiv could have frozen a Delhi summer. Then unexpectedly something happened.

My friend, Louise Fernandes, a colleague from my days in the
Telegraph
, had married Salman Khurshid, a Congress Party politician. Louise covered south India for the newspaper and after coming to Delhi to marry Salman did some legal reporting for the
Telegraph
until the pressures of bringing up four children (including a set of twins) and being married to a politician made her abandon journalism altogether. In 1991, Salman and Louise lived in a house that was directly opposite 10 Janpath. I had kept in touch with Louise as she sank into domesticity and often, when I dropped in for a meal or coffee, she would urge me to end my ‘hostilities’ with Rajiv. I always told her truthfully that the
hostilities were not of my making and it was not in my hands to end them. She suggested that an accidental meeting be arranged at a social event so that I could talk to him and find out why he was angry.

Louise arranged such an ‘accidental’ meeting just after Chandrashekhar resigned. It was the month of Ramzan, and Salman and Louise were having an Iftaar party. Rajiv had promised to come and Louise suggested that I come as well. I knew there would not be too many people at their Iftar party and agreed that there could not be a better chance for me to try and resolve my differences with Rajiv. I made it a point to arrive early so as not to miss him. A little too early, I found, because I reached as the maulvi led the prayers before the breaking of that day’s fast. The men had gathered to pray in Louise’s kitchen garden, the sun gilding the tops of mango trees and flights of parrots wheeling about noisily. I watched with the wonder of an unbeliever at the faith that inspired so many millions to starve themselves for so many days every year. The thought of fasting for a whole month made me hungry.

By the time dates were brought around with glasses of juice for the believers to break their fast, I had already filled a plate with delicious, spicy kebabs and was about to start devouring them when Rajiv arrived. The prayers were still in progress so I was among a handful of people who noticed his arrival. He came surrounded by armed commandos but I found myself face to face with him as soon as he walked in. He smiled cheerfully when he saw me and I grabbed the chance to speak with him alone. This is how I remember the conversation we had.

‘When I have criticized you,’ I said, ‘it has been in your role as prime minister or leader of the opposition. There isn’t anything personal about this and I can’t understand why you should behave as if it were a civil war.’

His smile widened and he said that he never saw it as a civil war and there was no problem at all as far as he was concerned. Pushing my luck as always I told him that I was going to Amethi in a few days and would love to interview him if he was going to be there. He said he was and that I should call R.K. Dhawan and fix a time for the interview. Mrs Gandhi’s old stenographer had not only been totally exonerated of the charge that he was involved in her assassination but had been rehabilitated, extraordinary though this sounds, as a member of Rajiv’s personal staff. I said I would call Dhawan the very next day. That is all I had time to say before Rajiv was swept away by a crowd of adoring guests. I noticed from the glazed
expressions on their faces that he had lost none of his famous charisma, at least for the people in this Delhi garden.

The next day when I called Dhawan to fix an appointment in Amethi he said that Rajiv had spoken to him about an interview and it would be arranged. I think I asked him why if it was so easy to get an interview with him now it had been so difficult all these months, and he said something like ‘there are problems on the domestic front’. This became abundantly evident from the icy reception Sonia gave me when I turned up with my television crew at Lucknow airport in readiness for the drive to Amethi. When I saw her that morning, she was standing among a crowd of women political workers and ignored me pointedly when I tried to speak to her. So I stopped trying and spent the day following them around the villages they visited. Rajiv drove himself and Sonia sat, her head covered, beside him in the front of an SUV. Every time they stopped to meet people, or for a roadside meeting, I would leap out of the rickety Ambassador I was in and urge my cameraman to take every shot he could from every angle. Whenever I caught Sonia’s eye, she looked the other way. She was so obviously displeased to see me lurking at every turn that I was beginning to worry that my interview with Rajiv would be cancelled. This meant that I would have wasted not just my time but the time of the crew who had come along to record the interview for the video magazine that I worked for at this time. In the end I did get my interview. But it was brief and Rajiv seemed uncomfortable because in the small dak bungalow in which we talked, Sonia would almost certainly have been able to hear every word from the next room.

It was the last time I saw Rajiv.

Two weeks later, on 21 May 1991, the last day of the election campaign, Rajiv Gandhi went to Sriperumbudur, a town in Tamil Nadu that almost nobody had heard of.

Afterwards, Congress Party campaign managers told me there was no reason for him to have gone there. It was late in the evening and from all accounts Rajiv was exhausted and running an hour late, so it was not till around 10 p.m. that his convoy of white Ambassadors arrived at the rally that was being held to support his candidate, Maragatham Chandrasekhar.

It has continued to puzzle those who investigated the assassination how Mrs Chandrasekhar survived, as did every other senior Congress leader at the rally. Usually when an important political leader arrives at a public meeting the people who surround him include the candidate and other local leaders. But among the fourteen people who died with Rajiv that day there were no Congress leaders. In the huge crater that Dhanu, the human bomb, made they found mostly the bodies of his security personnel. This has inevitably led to conspiracy theories that have never been proven. A Tamil journalist, who shall remain anonymous, tried to conduct his own investigations into Rajiv’s assassination and was warned to stop. He never told me who warned him but did say that he had been puzzled by the material he had gathered because it revealed that Dhanu was on surprisingly friendly terms with Mrs Chandrasekhar’s daughter, Latha Priyakumar. They had been on picnics together and met often enough for Dhanu to have been allowed into Rajiv’s innermost security perimeter.

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination came at the end of the first phase of the election campaign and helped his party win more seats in the second phase than they were expected to. But not enough for the Congress Party to return to power with a full majority. Sonia Gandhi was given her first chance to appoint the prime minister of India. She had no official position in the Congress Party then but her authority was taken for granted. She chose P.V. Narasimha Rao, whose loyalty to the Gandhi family had never wavered.

After Rajiv’s death Congress Party leaders announced that the only person they considered worthy of taking over India’s oldest political party was the dead leader’s widow.

Sonia was born in Italy, did not become an Indian citizen for nearly twenty years after coming to live in India, spoke almost no Hindi, understood little about Indian politics or India and yet was considered the tallest leader in the Congress Party by men who had ruled large Indian states. When they offered the leadership of India’s oldest political party to Sonia Gandhi they set a dangerous new precedent but, for reasons I have never understood, nobody objected. The media behaved as if it were perfectly normal for an Italian housewife to become the prime minister of India and the few small voices, like my own, that were raised in protest were shouted down by everyone, including opposition politicians. My own objections were based not just on Sonia’s foreignness, and these were strong, but on her having always been not just apolitical but against all things political. Why would someone who had never expressed anything but disdain for Indian politicians and politics decide to become an Indian politician?

Sonia, more aware of her limitations than the men who offered her the job of leading the Congress Party, chose for a year to keep away from public life. She lived in semi-retirement behind the high walls of 10 Janpath. But her retirement was so very semi that her picture appeared on the front pages of Indian newspapers almost every day. She was never out of the public eye, because news photographers always seemed to be present when foreign dignitaries came to visit her. They visited her more often than the prime minister she had chosen as her proxy, P.V. Narasimha Rao. Rao
was prevented from getting too big for his very small boots not just by her but by everyone in the Congress Party. Even small-time leaders defied him openly all the time and got away with it by going afterwards to pay obeisance to Sonia. For someone ostensibly uninterested in politics, she seemed to be meeting politicians all day during her period of mourning. I pointed this out in my column in the
Indian Express
more than once and more than once got berated by her friends.