Durbar (18 page)

‘Yes, yes. Please go ahead,’ the bureaucrat said with another low bow. ‘I just wanted to tell you that I think that your friend’s 5-Point Programme was the most visionary programme I have seen in my long years in government.’

Even as the Janata government was in the process of finding all sorts of cases to file against Sanjay Gandhi, he and his circle of friends seemed to become more powerful by the day.

At the edge of this circle of friends was a group of Doon School boys who wanted to get closer to him by showing him how important they were in the political circles of Punjab. They were mostly from Sikh feudal families with little to do other than manage the affairs of their rundown estates. One of them, Anant Bir Singh Attari, was an old friend of my brother-in-law, and I had met him at parties in Delhi without knowing until much later that he had dabbled in Sikh politics in his student days. Anant Bir had a famous ancestor called Sham Singh Attariwala, who had for a brief period been Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s governor in Kashmir and had married one of his daughters to Ranjit Singh’s son. Sham Singh Attariwala went on to become a great Sikh hero for his skills on the battlefield. His
estates lay in Attari, between Lahore and Amritsar, and it was there that Anant Bir spent most of his time. Since he had been in the Doon School around the same time that Sanjay was briefly a student there, he hovered on the outer circle of his friends when he came to Delhi.

By 1978 there were clear signs that Sanjay was more important politically in the Congress Party than Mrs Gandhi herself. While she amused herself with organizing such events as a Save India Day in Delhi, or travelling to the remote village of Belchi in Bihar on an elephant to meet Dalit victims of a hate crime, Sanjay concentrated on a comeback strategy for the Congress. A small part of his political master plan was to find a way to defeat the Akali Dal in Punjab. And this is where Anant Bir and his friends came in.

When the Punjab problem began in the eighties many believed that its roots lay in the support that Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale got from Sanjay Gandhi and the Congress Party. Rumours of this were so widely believed that when I first interviewed Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple in 1982, I asked him if he had ever been paid by the Congress Party to create trouble for the Akali Dal. He was furious that I had dared to ask him such a question and brought the interview to a quick end by virtually ordering me out of the room.

It was many years later that I discovered that Bhindranwale had not been paid by the Congress Party but had certainly been lured into politics by Anant Bir and his friends who hoped to impress Sanjay. By then Operation Blue Star, which led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and a decade of terrorism in Punjab, had already happened. But the story of what happened remains important if only as a footnote. Anant Bir’s story as he told it to me is that, having been head of the Akali Dal’s student wing, the All India Sikh Students’ Federation, he knew that the best way to beat the Akalis was by beating them at their own dangerous game of mixing politics with religion. It was with this idea in mind that they began looking for a religious figure to use against the Akalis.

Sant Bhindranwale was at the time making a name for himself as an itinerant preacher. He was head of an important Sikh seminary, the Damdami Taksal, and spent his time wandering from village to village urging Sikhs to follow his simple ideas of faith. Do not cut your hair. And stay away from drugs and alcohol. This was what he understood as the
fundamental message of Sikhism. When Anant Bir and his friends first approached him, in 1978, to play a more political role he refused. He told them he did not want to divide the Sikh community.

They persevered. When they next went to see Bhindranwale they took with them a
khanda
(a double-edged sword) that had once belonged to Sham Singh Attariwala and had come to be in Anant Bir’s possession by way of inheritance. According to Anant Bir, Bhindranwale was so overwhelmed to be in such close proximity to a weapon that had belonged to the great Sikh hero that he was moved to tears. He bowed before it reverentially and saw the weapon as a sign that he should play a more active role in politics in order to save the Sikh community. What he wanted to save the Sikh community from was something he never explained to the end of his days, but his desire to save it was sincere.

Punjab was going through a bad time economically. Decades of land reforms had reduced the size of Punjab’s farms to very small holdings that did not need every son in a farmer’s family to work fulltime. So the villages were full of idle, unemployed young men who whiled away their time drinking and experimenting with drugs. Bhindranwale’s message to them to give up intoxicants and become baptized Sikhs fell upon receptive ears and his following among young Sikhs grew and grew. Bhindranwale was sincere in his faith that the Sikh religion’s tenets be followed to the letter and remain unpolluted and it was this that made him see the Nirankari sect as his first enemy.

The tenth Sikh guru, Guru Govind Singh, had ordained that after him there would be no more living gurus and that the Granth Sahib, the holy book, was to be the only guru for people of the Sikh faith. Bhindranwale had little understanding of the deep Sufi philosophy that is the basis of the Sikh religion, but he adhered with passionate fanaticism to the tenets that the tenth Sikh guru had put in place to create the Khalsa army. Finding it hard to create an armed struggle against Mughal repression because every time his soldiers were arrested they would say they were Hindu and not Sikh, Guru Govind Singh found the need to create an identity they could not deny. He ordered his soldiers to stop cutting their hair, to wear a steel bangle on their wrist and always carry a dagger called a kirpan. It was these tenets that Bhindranwale believed were the fundamental tenets of Sikhism. He carried his devotion to Guru Govind Singh to the bizarre degree of ordering his followers to dress in medieval attire. He and the
young men who followed him started wearing blue turbans and long kurtas over loose shorts that stopped just above their calves.

The Nirankaris were Sikhs who had disobeyed the tenet that there should be no more living gurus. The sect was founded in 1929 by a man called Baba Buta Singh and although he started by refining the Sufi philosophy of the Sikh religion to make it more spiritual, by the sixties the sect was headed by Baba Gurbachan Singh who projected himself as a living guru. He published a text called
Avtar Bani
in which he described himself as a new
avtar
with divine powers. In the eyes of Bhindranwale, this was apostasy and all Nirankaris apostates. He fought them publicly every chance he got. It did not help that whenever there was a public clash that turned violent, the police and administration usually sided with the Nirankaris because their guru was a man with powerful connections.

Other than the publicity he got from fighting the Nirankaris, since Bhindranwale had acquired a significant following in the villages of Punjab, he was in a good position to take on the Akali Dal which, as a semi-religious Sikh party, had a small army of preachers in their employ. Anant Bir and his friends persuaded Bhindranwale to contest in the elections for the committee that controls Sikh temples and other religious institutions, the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, in 1978. His candidates lost all the seats they contested and he retired briefly from politics. Later he was persuaded once more to play a political role, this time by more senior Congress leaders like Zail Singh, who went on to become President of India. It is hard to believe in retrospect that the wooing of this man, who would go on to create one of India’s most serious political problems, started as a sideshow. A game played by amateurs with no real understanding of politics or religion.

While Sanjay and his friends were working on their comeback strategy Rajiv and Sonia continued to live in apolitical obscurity. I saw them regularly at those same dinner parties and came to know them quite well. I discovered that Rajiv had enormous charm and now that we had broken the barrier on political discussions, he was happy to talk about anything with quite remarkable frankness. He never commented on his brother’s politics and it was clear that although they got on reasonably
well their paths were quite different as were their friends. Sonia was more difficult to get to know because of her reserve but I discovered, quite by accident, that she would go out of her way to help people whom she considered her friends.

She had absolutely no interest in politics. The only comment on politics I remember her making was on a night when Rajiv and she were dropping me home after a dinner party. I asked her if she would like her children to be in politics some day, and she said, ‘I would rather my children begged in the streets than went into politics.’

This conversation remains vivid in my mind not just because of how much changed afterwards but also because the words she used to describe her disdain for politics were so fervent when she spoke them. We were driving past Race Course Road, where she moved when Rajiv became prime minister and where the prime minister of India continues to live, when she made the remark. She was sitting beside Rajiv who was driving, and I was in the back seat, and she turned around to look at me when she said she would rather her children begged in the streets than enter politics. There was something about the look on her face that made me wonder for the first time if she was not a stronger person than she gave the impression of being.

But, to come back to how I discovered that she could be a good friend. Madhu Jain, a colleague who had asked me to collaborate with her to write a book on the growing influence of Hindi cinema, called me one day to say that Khushwant Singh had become editor of a new magazine called
New Delhi
and wanted us to do a story on Bollywood. The only problem was that he wanted an important section of the story to be on a day in the life of Amitabh Bachchan. This was when Bachchan was at the height of his stardom and so much in demand that he was being described as a one-man film industry. Madhu said it would be impossible to get to spend a whole day with him unless we had the right introduction.

I told her that I knew nobody who knew him and she pointed out that I did. Sonia Gandhi. Amitabh Bachchan’s family was from Allahabad, like the Nehrus, and he and his brother had grown up with Rajiv and Sanjay. In 1968, when Rajiv and Sonia were married, Mrs Gandhi was prime minister and since it would have been inappropriate for her son to get married to a foreigner in Italy the wedding had to be held in Delhi. In searching for a bridal home for Sonia, the automatic choice seems to have been the
Bachchan home and the Bachchans became Sonia’s Indian family. I knew that she treated Amitabh and his brother Ajitabh as her brothers.

When Madhu suggested I ask Sonia to introduce us to Amitabh Bachchan, I hesitated because I had never asked her for a favour. But since it was our only hope of getting an interview with him I called Sonia. When I asked if she could introduce Madhu and me to Amitabh Bachchan she was more than ready to help. She said that ‘Amit’ was going to be in town soon and she would take us to meet him. One morning soon after, she rang to say that we should come to Amitabh’s parents’ house, next door to the Gandhis’, in 13 Willingdon Crescent.

Madhu and I reached the Bachchan home, more than a little overwhelmed to be meeting the biggest star in Bollywood. I think we may have stared speechlessly like villagers when we went into the drawing room and saw him sitting there with Sonia. We were so starstruck, at least I was, that it took us a few moments before we explained that we needed to spend a whole day with him for an article on the film industry. Amitabh was charm itself. He said there would be no problem at all. All we would need to do when we got to Bombay was call his secretary, Rosy, and she would set it up.

After I had wiped the stardust out of my eyes, I remember thinking how odd it was that the Bachchan family should remain so close to Indira Gandhi and her family even after he became Bollywood’s ‘angry young man’. India’s symbol of rage against the government, the political system and the injustice of the established order of things. Because if there was injustice in the established order it was entirely due to the Nehru–Gandhi family.

But I remember this meeting in the Bachchan drawing room mostly because it was the first time I saw Sonia’s ability to go out of her way to help a friend. I was to see it again, many times, and must record that this was her finest quality.

Madhu and I arrived in Bombay some weeks later and I became instantly fascinated by the illusions and unreality of Bollywood. This world filled with beautiful people and artificial light was so different to the real India that the people who lived in it seemed to belong to another planet. After long days spent wandering from studio to studio, we would find ourselves invited in the evenings to a Bollywood dinner or event, or we would just sit in a Juhu cafe and watch the sunset. To my eyes, unused
to the changing colours of the sea, these gaudy orange sunsets were so perfect over the dark grey waters of the Arabian Sea that they seemed as much the creation of a Bollywood art director as the effects we saw when the lights went on in dark studios.

There were very few stars in the Indian firmament at the time. Politics had only Mrs Gandhi and her family and sports only a handful of cricketers so those that shone in Bollywood glittered so brightly that they tended to become obsessed with their own celebrity. They behaved as if they lived in the stratosphere, high above the dark realities of poverty, misery and repression that were the defining characteristics of India at the time. One night we found ourselves in the house of Rajesh Khanna who, until Bachchan burst upon Bollywood in his ‘angry young man’ persona, was the biggest star of the Hindi film industry. Rajesh Khanna lived in a house by the sea decorated in the hues of a Bollywood film set. That night we could well have been part of some bizarre Bollywood plot because the first thing we were introduced to in his living room was his mother’s gallstones. They drifted in a murky liquid in a jar. The jar had been placed on the bar next to bottles of liquor and was the centre of all conversation, since among the guests that evening were the doctors who had extracted the stones. Rajesh Khanna gazed at the jar lovingly and, between sips of his Scotch and soda, told us how much he loved his mother and how he had brought her all the way from Amritsar so she could be operated on by the finest doctors in India.