Durbar (16 page)

I entered an enormous room. Gilded specks of dust danced in the beams of sunlight that came in through two high ventilators. The windows were closed and the curtains drawn. My first glimpse of the prime minister was through a carved Kashmiri screen of painted walnut wood. He was indeed seated at an imposing wooden desk that looked as if it could have been inherited from a Viceroy but had been given a socialist touch. The green embossed leather that would have once covered it had been ripped off and replaced by thick glass. Beneath it was a film of dust that nobody had bothered to clean in a long time. The prime minister looked up and when he saw me he greeted me with a polite namaste. He went back to examining his files. I sat down on one of the chairs in front of the desk waiting for him to finish.

He worked. I watched. He would take a pink or yellow cardboard file from the tray on his left that said ‘IN’, examine it closely for a few seconds, sign it and place it in the tray on his right that said ‘OUT’. He did this without any movement of his facial muscles and seemingly without breathing. I wondered whether along with his strange nutritional habits he practised yoga of the kind that enables yogis to hold their breath for a long time. While he proceeded with his yogic file clearance I glanced around and noticed how majestic the room was and how shoddily it was furnished. The furniture was new and badly made and the curtains and upholstery were the wrong colour, clearly chosen by an interior designer without any respect for the period in which the room had been built. At the end of fifteen minutes or so the prime minister looked up and said, ‘Yes?’

‘You sent for me.’

‘Did I?’

‘I am…from the
Statesman…
newspaper.’

‘Oh. Yes. Yes. I was expecting a man.’

‘Sorry about that,’ I smiled. The prime minister did not. He had recently given an interview in which he said (thinking, perhaps, of his predecessor) that women should not be allowed to rule countries.

‘I have nothing against women,’ he said, looking irritated. ‘I never said that women were not as capable as men. Only that women, when they enter politics, need to be careful because they tend to be of a more emotional nature than men.’

‘Margaret Thatcher? Golda Meir?’ I asked with feigned innocence. He realized I was being insolent and looked more irritated.

‘Anyway, I didn’t say that women should not be allowed in politics only that they should try to be less emotional if they went into it. But you journalists, you can distort anything. Now, look how you wrote about the three durbars.’

‘I wrote what I saw.’

‘You saw what you wanted to see. You wanted to make me look bad compared to Mrs Gandhi. Have you people forgotten the Emergency already? Have you forgotten censorship?’

‘No, prime minister. I just described what I saw.’

‘Well, next time maybe you should think before you write. Do you know the stress I am under? Do you know how difficult it is to be prime minister? The number of things I have to think about all day? And you people come along and write that I am heartless. What could I do for those people? Nothing. Why don’t you people write about the mess that Mrs Gandhi has left behind, about the fact that she was in power for so many years and did nothing for the people? Nothing at all. India would not be a poor country if we had followed better economic policies. Why don’t you write about those things?’

‘In this story I was just asked to compare the three durbars…’

‘What a stupid idea. And calling them durbars like that. Durbars are what kings and emperors have. We are ordinary people trying to do a very difficult job after a very difficult time. Do you know that I spent eighteen months in solitary confinement without newspapers or the radio? Do you know that others who were treated like this by Mrs Gandhi nearly went mad? They had to be hospitalized. Do any of you write about what we
went through for the country? Did you people fight censorship? No. None of you fought. When she asked you to bend, you crawled, and you think you can just come along afterwards and attack us for everything.’

When his monologue was done the prime minister fell silent and went back to examining his files. It was a cue for his aide to tiptoe into the room and indicate with a silent gesture that it was time for me to go.

W
hen I look back on that brief period when the Janata Party ruled India, two factors strike me as the main reasons why the Janata government failed to survive a full term in office.

The first and most obvious is that it was a coalition of different parties pretending to be a single party. This led to contradictions that quickly became impossible to reconcile. The Janata government may have lasted longer had it been an honest coalition. The second was their choice of prime minister. If by some lucky twist of fate Atal Behari Vajpayee had been made prime minister in 1977, instead of foreign minister, the political history of modern India might well have been very different. Vajpayee was not just the most charismatic Indian politician in the Janata Party’s motley team but as he was to prove when he finally became India’s prime minister, two decades later, he had a real talent for managing the disparate needs of a coalition. And he had an idea of India that had not been defined, as in Morarji Desai’s case, by long years in the Congress Party. As foreign minister, Vajpayee showed that even his ideas of foreign policy were different. In two years he did more to improve relations with Pakistan than anyone had done before. On the larger canvas of international relations he saw the need for India to move away from being an undeclared satellite of the Soviet Union (under the guise of non-alignment) and evolve a foreign policy that was more balanced. He took the first steps in this new direction.

It is even possible that, unlike his party colleagues, he may have had the wisdom to deny Mrs Gandhi the spotlight the Janata government continued to focus on her by persecuting her personally. A commission of inquiry, the Shah Commission, was set up to investigate the Emergency but instead
of allowing it to do its job quietly, the government took it upon itself to repeatedly attempt to throw Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay into jail on every charge it could fling at them. The charges brought against her ranged from misuse of power to breach of parliamentary privilege. Had Mrs Gandhi and her son been summoned before the Shah Commission and made to explain why they acted as they did during the Emergency, it would have been far more useful than sending them to Tihar Jail in the harsh glare of publicity. It was as if the Janata government had forgotten that Mrs Gandhi was voted out only because of the Emergency but remained a popular leader. And in the eyes of millions of poor and illiterate Indians she was almost a goddess. Or perhaps the new leaders remembered this too well and understood the need to destroy her. If this was so they went about it the wrong way.

By 1978 Mrs Gandhi was back in the Lok Sabha as the member of Parliament from Chikmagalur in Karnataka and was in the Lok Sabha on the evening of 19 December when a resolution was passed demanding that she be ‘committed to jail until the prorogation of the House and also expelled from membership of the House for serious breach of privilege and contempt’. She had been found guilty by the Privileges Committee of obstructing four officials investigating Maruti Limited.

Later on that cold December night I waited amid a small army of reporters outside the main entrance of Parliament House for Mrs Gandhi to appear and be escorted to jail. But since my newspaper already had a reporter inside Parliament, and Mrs Gandhi seemed to be taking a very long time to emerge, I was asked by the news editor to go to her residence to get details about the family that might add some colour to the story. So I arrived at 12 Willingdon Crescent to find the house in total darkness. There were no cars in the drive and apparently nobody there. I was about to leave when out of the darkness I heard the sort of ‘pssst’ you read about in comic books. I stopped and looked in the direction of the sound and discovered that it came from Romi Chopra who was peering out of the doorway of an unlit bathroom. ‘There’s nobody here but the children and me,’ he whispered dramatically. ‘Everyone left before the police arrived. We were forewarned, you know.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘Rajiv and Sonia have gone to Parliament House and I don’t know where the others are, but isn’t it thrilling? What a stupid mistake for this stupid government to make.’

I agreed with him but did not want to get into a discussion so I said, ‘I have to go. I have a deadline. I better get back to Parliament.’

As I left I heard a child shouting, ‘Romi Chopra, come here at once.’ He went off with a happy smile on his face.

The army of journalists gathered in the porch of Parliament House had swollen by the time I got back. But nobody seemed to have noticed Sonia Gandhi standing in the shadows in a long skirt, boots and an elegant coat, carrying a picnic basket in her hands. She smiled when she saw me and said, explaining the picnic basket, that it contained sandwiches and coffee in case Mrs Gandhi was forced to spend the night in jail.

As I remember it, this is the conversation we had that night.

‘Where’s Rajiv?’

‘He is waiting in the car over there, he doesn’t want to attract attention. If they don’t arrest her then we will just go home.’

‘And if they arrest her?’

‘We’ll go to the jail to make sure that she is all right.’

‘Are you even more horrified by Indian politics now than before?’

‘Oh, I am getting quite used to the way things work,’ she said, smiling. ‘I think I am getting to understand it better. My real concern is for the children. I would hate for them to be hurt by all this.’

‘I just saw them at the house. Romi was with them. They seemed all right…there were no policemen or anything…’

A sudden commotion caused us to stop talking as a large group of people rushed out of Parliament House. Police vans screeched up minutes later. Sonia said a quick goodbye and hurried towards the blue Matador van in which Rajiv was waiting. I moved towards the main entrance of Parliament and, in the melee, noticed my newspaper’s Lok Sabha correspondent. ‘What happened inside the House?’ I asked.

‘First Mrs Gandhi said her arrest was illegal since she was a member of Parliament and could not be arrested without the Speaker’s permission. Then she came out of the House and held a press conference.’ His eyes took on a bewildered expression and he stopped.

‘Then?’ I urged.

‘She said she was not afraid of going to jail…then she recited a poem.’

‘Which one?’

‘I didn’t know it, but it sounded like “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream”.’

‘No!’

‘Well, maybe not but it sounded like one of those nursery rhymes you learn in kindergarten.’

I discovered later that it was a line from a poem by Gracie Fields that Mrs Gandhi had recited. I think it was, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye; Cheerio, here I go, on my way.’ It served mostly to confuse her audience.

As an eyewitness to the drama of a former prime minister being arrested in Parliament, I found myself wondering why the Janata government did not see how their attempts to prosecute Mrs Gandhi were working so wonderfully in her favour. After the incident, she spent a week in Tihar Jail and emerged from it a heroine in the eyes of most ordinary Indians. Memories of the Emergency and its ‘excesses’ were beginning to fade.

In a column I wrote after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated I took credit for having advised him in the summer of 1978 to give his first interview to the media.

At the dinner parties where I would run into Rajiv and Sonia we now talked only about politics. For me this was a pleasant change from those endless conversations about children and holidays. There was at this time a lot of bad publicity surrounding Sanjay and it came up in these discussions, which is when I think I suggested the interview, mainly in the hope that Rajiv might let me do it. This was not to be. I was too junior a reporter and whoever Rajiv may have talked to about my suggestion must have said that he should give it to a more important journalist. This was how M.J. Akbar was chosen and I was asked to be the go-between.

I was, at this time, beginning to lose interest in the
Statesman
. So when I met Akbar, then editor of a weekly news magazine called
Sunday
, I considered his suggestion of writing for the magazine under a pseudonym on a freelance basis.
Sunday
magazine had begun publication in the early months of the Emergency but, like
India Today
, it came into its own after press censorship was lifted in 1977. Both magazines did more to seriously analyse the Emergency than the newspapers did. While
India Today
was
relatively conservative,
Sunday
magazine soon became famous for its radical political views and Akbar for being India’s rebel editor.

In any case, Romi rang me one day and said that Rajiv was happy to do an interview with M.J. Akbar and since I knew him, could I please make the arrangements. When I asked Akbar if he would like to interview Rajiv Gandhi, he thought at first that I was joking. When he realized I was serious he wanted to know how I was in a position to arrange an interview with Mrs Gandhi’s son. I said I knew him a bit. Akbar said he would love to do an interview with Rajiv Gandhi and added that it was worthy of being a cover story. Rajiv asked me to warn Akbar that he would not say anything that sounded like criticism of his family and Akbar said he had no problem with this.