Durbar (12 page)

The crowd was now hysterical. The clapping and shouting went on for many minutes. Atalji smiled with one hand resting on the podium, the other raised above his head and perfectly still. When he thought the applause had gone on long enough he raised both arms in the air and silence fell over the vast gathering. Yellow bulbs on long, drooping wires
provided some light in the front but most of the ground was in darkness. Despite the night being so chilly, and a thin drizzle starting again, nobody left. They listened to Atalji in complete silence.

Eloquently, in simple Hindi, Atalji told them why they must not vote for Indira Gandhi. I no longer have a copy of the speech he made that night, and he spoke extempore, but I paraphrase here what I remember of it. Freedom, he began, democratic rights, the fundamental right to disagree with those who rule us, these things mean nothing until they are taken away. In the past two years they were not just taken away but those who dared to protest were punished… The India that her citizens loved no longer existed, he said, it became a vast prison camp, a prison camp in which human beings were no longer treated as human. They were treated with such contempt that they could be forced against their will to do things that should never be done against a human being’s free will. The opposition leaders (he said ‘we’) knew that something needed to be done about India’s expanding population; they did not oppose family planning, but they did not believe that human beings could be bundled into trucks like animals, sterilized against their will and sent back. The clapping this remark evoked went on and on and on and it would be only on election day that I would understand why.

Long after Atalji finished speaking and the opposition leaders got back into their white Ambassadors and drove off the crowds stayed as if they had collectively decided that they needed to do more than applaud a stirring speech. So when party workers appeared carrying soggy sheets in which they collected donations everyone gave something. On that cold January night as I watched rickshaw-wallas and those who lived on a pittance from manual labour on Delhi’s streets donate what they could I got my first inkling that there was a chance Indira Gandhi could lose the election.

After the success of their first rally the opposition parties from the extreme left to the extreme right united to form a front against Mrs Gandhi’s Congress Party and called this new front the Janata Party. Initially, nobody believed that the Janata Party could stay together because the ideological differences ran so deep. There were Marxists, socialists, Gandhians, former Congress Party leaders, members of the rightist Swatantra Party and people from the Hindu right-wing Jana Sangh. Even when the Janata Party stayed together most political analysts said it had
no chance of defeating Mrs Gandhi and would certainly fall apart once the election was over.

As a very junior reporter I was not sent to exotic constituencies to report on the campaign. Newspaper owners in the seventies were notoriously stingy and thought of all travel as ‘junkets’. Most newspapers carried the bland reports on the campaign that their stringers sent so nobody in Delhi had a real idea of what was going on beyond the boundaries of the city. As this was the first election campaign I was covering I attended every rally I could in Delhi and spent more time than usual wandering about the streets of the old city. I heard rumblings of big change but every time I returned to the office and reported what I had heard to senior political analysts they laughed at me and said that there was no chance of Mrs Gandhi losing. They said they had heard from ‘reliable, high-level sources’ that Mrs Gandhi had announced the election only after intelligence reports assured her that their surveys indicated there was no chance of her losing. I conceded that they could be right after attending one of Mrs Gandhi’s rallies at the Boat Club in Delhi. The Boat Club is an expanse of manicured lawns that stretches from the square outside Parliament House almost down to India Gate. The size of the crowd was twice the size that had gathered for the first opposition rally on the Ram Lila grounds. As the prime minister, surrounded by all the trappings of power, she looked invincible even though she made a dull speech and got a half-hearted response.

Then about two weeks after the campaign began, some of the Congress Party’s senior ministers resigned from Mrs Gandhi’s government and joined the opposition. They held a rally along with the opposition leaders at the same Boat Club and this time the crowd was so huge that it disturbed Mrs Gandhi enough for her to send officials to break down the makeshift stage that had been erected for the speakers. But the opposition leaders chose to go ahead with their rally and use the broken stage as a backdrop. Atal Behari Vajpayee used the remains of the platform to mock Mrs Gandhi. He said, using a well-known Urdu phrase, ‘
Khandar bata raha hai, imaarat bulund thi
.’ (You can look at these ruins and see that it must have once been a fine monument.) His audience was delighted because they understood it was as much a reference to Mrs Gandhi and the ruins of her government.

Among the speakers at this rally was Mrs Gandhi’s aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who used all the authority of being Jawaharlal Nehru’s
sister to berate her niece for betraying the democracy that Nehru had worked so hard to leave as his real legacy. The others who made passionate speeches against dictatorship were those who had resigned from Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet. They absolved themselves of any responsibility for the Emergency. They had no choice but to go along with it, they said, because they had lived in as much fear as the ordinary Indian but the lesson they had learned was that when the people choose to express their will, the most powerful governments could be blown away like ‘cotton in a strong wind’. This particular expression is what I remember most from that rally because it came from Jagjivan Ram who, until he resigned, had been Mrs Gandhi’s most powerful minister. He had been in the Government of India since the time of India’s first Parliament and was famous for his administrative skills and for having forgotten to pay his taxes in all the years that he was in government. From the first days of the Emergency there were rumours that he had opposed its imposition. From time to time we would hear that the only reason he was not speaking out publicly against Mrs Gandhi was because he was under house arrest. What he said that afternoon in the Boat Club was easily believed by those who gathered to listen to him. And in the press enclosure there were many who predicted that he would be an excellent prime minister if the Janata Party won. As a Dalit he would have been India’s first prime minister from the former ‘untouchable’ caste.

As the campaign proceeded and opposition leaders across north India were greeted by huge crowds the possibility of Mrs Gandhi being defeated began to seem more real. In the reporters’ room I consulted as usual with the peons who told me fairly early on that the Congress Party was going to lose in Uttar Pradesh. They understood the mood better than most journalists did. Every ‘senior’ political correspondent I spoke to scoffed at my suggestion that there may be a wave against Mrs Gandhi and that it had remained an undercurrent because the Emergency had taught ordinary people to keep their political views to themselves.

The possibility of a defeat for Mrs Gandhi began to seem even more real to me after I attended a political meeting on the steps of the Jama Masjid toward the end of the campaign in early March. It was late in the evening and the steps of the mosque were lit so that the thousands who gathered in the narrow streets that led off on all sides of it could see their Imam as he ordered them to vote against the Congress Party.

Syed Ahmed Shah Bukhari was a large, bulky man with a white beard and a preacher’s booming voice. That evening he was dressed in his finest robes and when he stood on the steps of the mosque holding hands with RSS leaders the crowd responded with raucous slogans and huge applause. In the tone he used to deliver his Friday sermons he told the largely Muslim crowd that as their Imam he was commanding them to vote against Mrs Gandhi. Then in Urdu he asked them if they agreed to obey. The vast audience that spilled out from every narrow alley around the mosque shouted back, ‘
Manzur hai
.’ Across the road, in the shadow of the Red Fort, a few days later I heard an ancient Gandhian, Acharya Kripalani, who was so feeble he could barely stand, exhort an audience in his quavering voice to remember that the lesson from the Emergency was: ‘Don’t worship your leaders, they have feet of clay.’

Everything seemed to be going against Mrs Gandhi but even on polling day most people were unconvinced that she could be defeated. In Delhi’s drawing rooms and in the circles in which senior bureaucrats moved everyone remained certain that she would win. Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s friends continued to behave as if ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’. The slogan had been invented, in a moment of matchless sycophancy, by the president of the Congress Party, Dev Kant Baruah, at the height of the Emergency.

Summer came early that year and a hot, dusty wind blew through the city on election day. It tossed dead leaves and torn election posters against the windshield of my car as I drove to the office.

I had woken earlier than usual and reached the office before breakfast. Since the old city had by then almost become my permanent beat I had been deputed to cover polling there. I wanted to get going as early as possible because I knew that emotions were running high and there could be trouble if Congress Party workers tried to ‘persuade’ people to vote in a particular way or played their old game of dividing Hindus and Muslims. On the way to the old city I passed polling booths that were almost empty. Low turnout, I noted sadly, because that meant Mrs Gandhi would win. I had never covered an election before but was told by those who had that a high turnout usually signalled a win for the opposition. In Daryaganj I noticed queues at some polling booths and saw this as a small sign of hope.
But there was very little activity in the bird market and the Urdu Bazaar. By the time I got to a polling booth near Karim’s I had talked to several ordinary voters who said rumours were being spread that Mrs Gandhi had arranged for magic ink to be used on ballot papers that would tell her who had voted against her.

Then I heard shouts of ‘
Jai nasbandi! Jai
bulldozer!’ (Long live sterilization! Long live the bulldozer!) The slogan was not so much chanted as sung by a procession of young men that went by with dancing children in its wake. The crowd of slogan shouters stopped at every polling booth to shout ‘
Jai nasbandi! Jai
bulldozer!’ and every time they did people, reminded of the repression of the past two years, seemed to shake off their fear of voting against the Congress Party. Soon voters were repeating the slogans as they stamped their ballot papers. Some waved the ballot papers in the faces of the officials in the polling booths, shouting, ‘Look. Look who we are voting for.
Jai nasbandi! Jai
bulldozer!’ The election had turned into a carnival. The queues got longer and longer, the mood of the voters increasingly jubilant. By the end of polling they behaved as if Mrs Gandhi had already lost.

At some point Raghu Rai arrived there. He had been driving around the city taking pictures. I hitched a ride with him back to the office. Polling was over and the street that runs along the Zenana Women’s Hospital was almost empty except for an old man sweeping torn posters into a jute sack. Raghu stopped the car and for the next half an hour took pictures of the old man and his sack. When I asked him impatiently what he had found so interesting about the old man he said it could be a very important photograph if Mrs Gandhi ended up losing the elections. ‘It is a poster of Indira Gandhi being swept into a bag by a man who is obviously very poor, and on the wall behind him is a family planning slogan. It tells the whole story.’ Every time I covered a story with Raghu I learned anew that photographers have a way of seeing things that reporters quite simply do not.

On the day of the results I was assigned to a counting centre where votes for three Delhi seats were being counted. It was on the grounds of the Tees Hazari courts. Rough wooden tables stood in a quadrangle under a large tent that provided little shelter from the dust and heat of that warm March morning. At the tables sat the officials in charge of counting the votes, representatives of the different political parties and a supervisor. The arrangements may have been shabby for such an important moment in
India’s history but there was a certain order to the proceedings disturbed only by the army of reporters who had been allowed in. There were more foreign correspondents than local journalists and so much conviviality and chit-chat that when the big metal ballot boxes arrived with their red seals the senior supervisor ordered us to be silent or leave.

The boxes were placed on the tables and their seals broken amid silence and solemnity. Counting began. The officials had two trays on either side of them. On their left was the tray for ballots that Mrs Gandhi’s Congress Party had polled and on their right the tray for the opposition. From the first round it was the tray on the right in which the ballots piled up. By the time they got to the second round of counting it was clear that the Congress Party was losing. We reporters had watched silently until then but when we saw what was happening we were gripped by an insane elation. We rushed from table to table examining the trays and by the time the third round of counting began even the officials began to smile. The supervisors tried their best to enforce solemnity but failed completely. By late afternoon, when all the votes were counted and the Congress Party had lost all three Delhi seats we heard the sound of drums from outside the counting centre. Bhangra dancers appeared out of nowhere and along with them came huge crowds who cheered and danced.

When I got back to the
Statesman
office late that evening there were lights on in the whole building. Nobody went home that night. From the canteen came endless cups of tea and greasy snacks and the peons who brought them lingered in the reporters’ room to get the latest news to carry back to those who worked in the canteen. Later, a whole lot of us, reporters from the
Statesman
and the
Hindustan Times
, the only other newspaper with offices in Connaught Place, drove in a convoy of Ambassadors to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg where thousands of people had gathered outside the
Times of India
building to follow the results coming in from all over the country. The latest results were displayed on billboards suspended high so they could be seen from a distance. There were so many people there that night that traffic had to be halted at both ends. When in the early hours of the morning the news finally came that Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi had lost, Mrs Gandhi to her old tormentor, Raj Narain, and Sanjay to an unknown Bharatiya Lok Dal candidate called Ravindra Pratap Singh, a huge roar of approval went up. And the sounds of drums, cheering and people dancing continued to reverberate in the old city right through the night.