Durbar (20 page)

For my part, I saw in the situation a great election story and when Rajmata Sahib went on her first election tour I went along with a group of reporters from Delhi. We travelled by train to Lucknow and then followed her cavalcade to Rae Bareli by road, although ‘road’ might be too grand a word to describe the broken strip of tarmac that led to Mrs Gandhi’s constituency. In some stretches the tarmac had completely disappeared and our Ambassador lurched from one rubble-filled ditch to the next, raising such large clouds of dust that we had to roll up the windows. Dusty trees lined the road and beyond lay villages of the most primitive kind.

We passed village after village of windowless hovels huddled together haphazardly with roofs so flimsy the first rain would have washed them away. In front of the mud huts skinny buffaloes stood chained to their feeding troughs staring listlessly into the distance and naked children with protruding bellies and hair bleached from malnutrition played beside them. They gazed at the Rajmata’s motorcade of white Ambassadors with the same expression as the buffaloes. Snot dribbled from their noses and mingled with the dust to become a paste that spread across their faces. They looked as if they had never been washed. Their mothers stood beside them in tattered saris with one end of which they half covered their faces. The men sat apathetically on string beds. All of rural India looked pretty much like this, I remember thinking, but surely Mrs Gandhi’s constituency should have looked better.

When the Rajmata stopped in the first village and rolled down her window to greet a group of villagers, we jumped out of our car and raced up to her to listen.

‘Ram, Ram,’ said the Rajmata.

‘Ram, Ram,’ replied an old man with a grimy turban and a wizened face who appointed himself spokesman for the group.

‘I have come because the fight we fought two years ago against Mrs Gandhi’s
taanashahi
(dictatorship) is not over. We’re still fighting that fight and I’m relying on you people to help me fight it. Can I rely on you?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man uncertainly.

‘We cannot allow Mrs Gandhi to win again because once more the country will be ruled by a dictator. Once more poor people will be bundled into trucks and taken away to be sterilized as if they were animals. Once more they will come and tear down your houses and tell you that you have to move elsewhere because that is the government’s wish. Are we going to let this happen?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have electricity in this village?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have drinking water?’

‘No.’

‘Water for your fields?’

‘No.’

‘Whose fault is this? Ours? We have been ruling for less than two years. It is the Congress Party who is to blame for this state of affairs. Thirty years after Independence, if Indira Gandhi has been unable to provide electricity and drinking water to people in her own constituency, can you believe that she will do it now?’

The old man looked around at the group of men who had gathered around him, waiting for one of them to speak. They stared silently at the Rajmata. When nobody spoke, she rolled up her window, joined her hands together in farewell and drove off.

We lingered to ask the villagers if they knew who she was. They responded with suspicious stares and silence.

‘We are reporters from Delhi,’ I said, ‘we are not from any political party.’

The only person prepared to speak was the old man. He said, ‘We don’t know her name, but we think it is the Maharani who has come to stand against Indiraji.’

‘Can she win?’

‘We will not know till the election is over,’ said the old man, with a crafty glint in his eyes.

We hurried on behind the Rajmata’s convoy past more dusty trees and mud-hut villages. There were many more roadside stops. Sometimes she talked to people without getting out of her car. Sometimes, if there were enough people, she got out and held impromptu roadside meetings. In every speech she reminded people that Mrs Gandhi was a dictator and that there would be another Emergency if she was voted back to power.

By late evening we were in some unrecognizable rural part of Mrs Gandhi’s constituency. Through the smoky darkness came the occasional gleam of a village identifiable only by the lanterns of street vendors selling roasted peanuts. Not one of the villages we had passed in the gathering dusk showed signs of electricity. We stopped finally in a bazaar and the Rajmata’s staff jumped out to ask for directions. This appeared to be the town we were to use for our ‘night halt’. It was lit by dusty streetlights and lined on both sides with rows of small shops in which electricity manifested itself in dim, yellow bulbs dangling on long wires. It was late in the evening so when we passed a dhaba that smelled of freshly baked rotis we resolved unanimously to return after we had found our lodgings for the night.

The Rajmata’s party had made arrangements for us in the local dak bungalow. In the days of the Raj these rural dak bungalows were used as rest houses for postmen travelling to deliver mail. From my childhood travels I remembered them as lovely old colonial bungalows with wide verandas and gardens filled with flowers. After Independence, they were allowed to decay while independent India’s officials made small fortunes from the construction of ugly, new government guest houses.

The bungalow we were staying in that night looked quite charming from the outside but no sooner did we enter than harsh reality dawned. There was no electricity. The only light came from kerosene lanterns held up by two barefoot old men in khaki uniforms who stood in a dark entrance hall that smelled of stale food and something else that we could not identify till we saw bats flying out of the eaves of the veranda. I was among those who shrieked and ran out into the garden. The Rajmata was unperturbed and told us, with a sweet smile, that it was better than Tihar Jail. In her own case it certainly was because as a frequent traveller in rural India she knew what needed to be done. So an advance party of maids had arrived ahead of us and from the glimpse we caught of the Rajmata’s candle-lit bedroom, we could see that it had been transformed. There were clean sheets on the bed, fresh flowers in vases and a spotlessly clean mosquito net.

Our room was what hers must have looked like before her maids arrived. It was large, musty and lit by a single kerosene lantern. Its feeble light did not penetrate the room’s dark corners that seemed to hide all sorts of moving creatures. There were two narrow beds in the centre of the room
covered with dusty green mosquito nets. Desperate to use the bathroom, I fought my terror of creepy-crawlies and, torch in hand, headed towards a rickety door at one end of our nocturnal cavern. When I pushed it open, an enormous cloud of mosquitoes rose out of the Indian-style WC and a rat as big as a kitten started racing around the room in panic.

I decided that I would be better off using a dark corner of the garden instead and more comfortable sleeping on the veranda. So did my colleagues. Like me they were young reporters but our limited experience of travels in what Gandhiji liked to call the ‘real’ India had taught us basic survival techniques. We asked for a bottle of water from the kitchen, washed up as well as we could in a corner of the unkempt garden, and used a darker corner in it as the toilet, keeping our fingers crossed that there were no snakes or scorpions. Then we drove back to the bazaar for dinner. We discovered from a man we met on the way that we were in one of the larger towns in Mrs Gandhi’s constituency. I no longer remember its name but to this day they all look the same: neither town nor village and with an absence of municipal amenities so stark they seem untouched by governance.

On the drive back to the dhaba we discussed the primitive living conditions we had seen in the villages and wondered why Mrs Gandhi had done so little to improve standards in her own constituency. As prime minister it would have been easy for her to insist on at least basic things like electricity and clean water. The roads could have been better. Lesser political leaders like Sharad Pawar had so transformed their constituencies that we heard tales of them in newspaper offices in Delhi, so why had she done so little? We concluded that it must have been a deliberate policy not to allow development because people living in extreme poverty tend to vote unquestioningly for whoever they are told to by religious and caste leaders even today.

The dhaba’s rickety wooden tables were laid out on a mud pavement that stank of the clogged drain running alongside it. Chicken feathers and onion skins lay around and in one corner there was a dark patch where chickens seemed recently to have been beheaded. Mingled with the stench of the drain came the distinct smell of human excrement. When I looked around to detect its source, I noticed three small children squatting by the drain over piles of shit. They were half naked but must have been from the dhaba owner’s brood because they looked well fed. There were two girls and a boy, and they grinned and waved when they noticed us looking at
them. Inside the dhaba was a mud oven for making rotis and a gas cooker on which stood three metal cooking pots. There was rice in one, dal in another and a mixed vegetable stew in the third. A comforting scent of spices wafted up when the skinny, bare-chested cook lifted the lids to show us what was on offer. We ordered a bit of everything.

We must have made a curious spectacle with our urban clothes and manners because before our food arrived dark figures started emerging from the shadows. Soon a crowd of male spectators gathered around us. The first to arrive was an elderly Muslim man with a white beard and a dark prayer mark on his forehead. Behind him came three tall, well-built young men wearing kurtas and lungis. They looked like his sons. Behind these men came a caboodle of boys of various ages and sizes.

‘
Aadaab arz hai
,’ the old man said in a courteous, educated tone.

‘
Aadaab
.’

‘My name is Aazim Ali Khan, I am the village headman. These are my sons.’

‘We have come from Delhi.’

‘Ah.’

‘We are travelling with the Rajmata of Gwalior.’

‘Ah.’

‘Well? Can the Rajmata win?’ one of us asked, getting straight to the point.

‘Who knows,’ the old man replied with a cryptic smile. It was a typical answer and we knew that we would only get more information if we persisted with our questions.

‘Oh, come on. You always know. At least tell us which way the wind is blowing.’

The old man smiled even more enigmatically and stroked his beard.

‘All right,
can
the Rajmata win?’ I asked. The directness of the question seemed for a moment to confuse him but by now his sons, who had been listening impatiently, decided to intervene.

‘Never,’ said the older bearded one emphatically, ‘never. Nobody associated with the Jana Sangh can win here – this is a constituency in which more than 35 per cent of the voters are Muslim.’

‘But what about the Emergency? What about compulsory sterilization?’

‘Oh, that is all in the past. We know that it cannot happen again. At least when Mrs Gandhi was in power there was some development, some
progress…in the past two years nothing has happened. Nothing at all. They haven’t even put in a new hand pump anywhere in this district. As for things like electricity and clean water, we have stopped hoping that we will get them.’

‘What about your new MP?’ I asked. ‘Did you not tell him your grievances? What did he do?’ Surely, I remember thinking, the proudly rural Raj Narain must have spent more time in Rae Bareli than Mrs Gandhi had.

‘We haven’t seen him since he became a minister in Delhi. Mrs Gandhi has come many times. But he hasn’t come here once, not even to his own village.’

‘So Indiraji is completely forgiven for the excesses of the Emergency?’

‘What is there to forgive? It wasn’t her fault. She had some bad people around her who did some bad things and she didn’t find out in time. She is a great leader. Everyone knows it.’

Our food arrived, and it was delicious. The spicy dal and hot, freshly made rotis made us momentarily forget the squalor of our surroundings. The villagers stared silently as we ate and when they noticed that we were not paying them any more attention they slipped away quietly into the night. We drove back to the dak bungalow and made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the wicker chairs and benches on the veranda. Nobody wanted to go back into the dark room with its creatures and its smell of dirty clothes. Besides, there were only a few hours left of the night.

Nervous about not finding a secluded place to perform my morning ablutions, I woke earlier than the others and wandered off into the garden with my bottle of water and my toilet bag. Luckily, one of the bungalow’s cooks spotted me and guided me to an outhouse in which there was a relatively clean toilet. Next door to it was a wet, dark bathing area, which looked completely uninviting, but the old man brought me hot water in a plastic bucket and I managed to have a sort-of bath. By the time the others woke I was dressed and drinking my first cup of tea, and happy to be their consultant on the local amenities.

We were in the middle of ordering breakfast when the Rajmata’s cavalcade of white Ambassadors pulled up in the porch ready for departure. The cars were filled with party workers and the roof of her car was covered in marigold garlands. She emerged from her room, greeted us with a smile
and a namaste and the cavalcade set off amid the sound of screeching tyres and slogans. We abandoned all hope of breakfast and raced after it.