Durbar (22 page)

When I try to remember if Rajiv and Sonia said anything about Sanjay’s rise to iconic status I cannot think of a single conversation in which either of them said anything derogatory about him. Sonia often hinted that she did not like Maneka but even this would come out in oblique ways. I remember a conversation with her about a film called
Network
in which Faye Dunaway used her television network as a tool of power. The Gandhi family went, en famille, to see this film and Sonia was horrified that Maneka thought well of Dunaway’s character and said she would like to be that kind of person.

The conversation made a special impression on me because in newspaper offices stories were already circulating about Maneka Gandhi’s propensity to throw her weight around. According to these stories Maneka, in the last months of the Emergency, had taken to threatening journalists who did not please her. There were rumours of her marching into the offices of senior editors and telling them what she thought about them. I cannot vouch for any of these stories since the
Times of India
and the
Hindustan Times
never defied censorship during the Emergency and one of the stories of Maneka’s arrogant ways emerged from the
Times of India
office. What I can report are my own unexpected problems with Maneka.

Soon after the Janata government came to power in 1977, the facsimile of a cheque from a Swiss Bank account mysteriously appeared in the offices of the
Statesman
and circulated among senior correspondents before being passed down to us in the reporters’ room. It was for a very large amount of money and was in Maneka Gandhi’s name. It seemed authentic enough to us, who had no idea what cheques from Swiss Bank accounts looked like, so I, ever the diligent reporter, called Maneka to inform her about the cheque and ask her opinion of it. She was polite and friendly on the telephone and I duly recorded what she said, but when the
Statesman
’s news editor, S. Sahay, heard that I had tried to verify the authenticity of the cheque he had a fit and accused me of ‘alerting’ the Gandhi family. So I rang Maneka back and told her that I would not be able to use her comments on the cheque. I thought I had behaved quite correctly until I heard from Sonia and Akbar that she had told them awful things about me
on account of this incident. From what they told me, it became clear that Maneka blamed me for not publishing her comments on the cheque, which, as it happens, turned out to be fake, and accused me of being a dishonest journalist. I never got a chance to explain what really happened.

Meanwhile, in newspaper offices, reactions to Sanjay’s increasing political authority were mixed. While there were those who worried about his thuggish side and his lack of education, there were many journalists who admired him as a ‘doer’. What India needed in order to achieve better standards of governance, they said, was someone who could get government officials to do their job properly. Sanjay was seen as someone who could demand results and get them even from the slothful clerks who manned the creaking machinery of government. In retrospect, it needs to be said, he was completely acceptable to the majority of Indians as their future leader.

Mrs Gandhi seemed to involve herself fully in only those aspects of governance that Sanjay either did not understand or that did not interest him. Like foreign policy. South Asia was going through a problematic, turbulent time, and Sanjay would not have known what to say had he been asked what India’s policies should be towards our immediate neighbours.

Pakistan was in the middle of one of the most difficult moments in its short, difficult history. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been executed in April 1979 and General Zia-ul-Haq, who was responsible for this, calmed political dissent by invoking and strictly enforcing Pakistan’s raison d’etre: Islam. He imposed an early version of radical Islam on his country with shariat laws controlling the rights of women and men being publicly flogged for Islamic misdemeanours. Mrs Gandhi knew Bhutto well from the time of the Bangladesh war and the Simla agreement she signed with him to end hostilities and enable the return of the more than 90,000 prisoners of war who were still in India. Like most Indians she had been appalled by the execution of a democratically elected prime minister. She had tried to get Morarji Desai to make a statement against it on behalf of India and had publicly expressed her disapproval that the Government of India said nothing. She took a dim view of the military dictator who replaced Bhutto and relations between her and the General next door were frosty.

If radical Islamism in Pakistan was not disturbing enough for India more instability came with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan just weeks before Mrs Gandhi became prime minister again. India needed
to make its position clear on whether or not it supported the invasion of a friendly country. Sanjay Gandhi would probably not have had the slightest idea what India’s stand should be so it was left to Mrs Gandhi to deal with Leonid Brezhnev when he came to Delhi seeking India’s support. On the political grapevine I heard that she treated Brezhnev with unusual coldness. The story told to me by an official who was present at the meeting was that she continued to doodle on a little pad on her desk while Brezhnev made his case, and when he finished she got up and left the room without a single word. But she had a complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. As we were to find out decades later through the memoirs of a KGB spymaster, Vasili Mitrokhin, many senior members of Mrs Gandhi’s government were compromised by the KGB. In the end India backed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

None of the turmoil in Pakistan and Afghanistan concerned the average Indian or even most Indian journalists much. India is such a huge country with so many problems of her own that the problems of other countries rarely cause concern. So even as the seeds of radical Islam were being sown next door and even as the Soviet Union, with its invasion of Afghanistan was hastening its own collapse and the end of the Cold War, in Delhi domestic political changes mattered more. Winter turned quickly to spring in Delhi that year, more quickly it seemed than usual, because of the excitement of a new government and the rise of a new young leader. Not a day seemed to go by when Sanjay Gandhi was not on the front pages of national newspapers. Sometimes addressing a public meeting somewhere, or meeting people at his morning audiences, sometimes driving himself to the flying club for his flying lessons, and often just seated beside Mrs Gandhi as she gazed proudly at him.

He surrounded himself with young men who talked loudly and had about them a reckless air. Their very presence indicated a new order but there were other changes as well. Sanjay’s men still wore white khadi kurta–pyjamas but it was now more a fashion statement than a tribute to Gandhiji’s use of handspun cloth as a weapon against the British Empire. His friends had no interest in paying lip service to any of the things that the Congress Party had treated as sacrosanct. Not for them the pseudo-socialist rules that made Indian politicians look scruffy in the interest of showing humility, nor the pretence of meeting their political associates in cheap coffee houses in Connaught Place. Instead, it was in the faux-Mughal
lobby of the glamorous new Taj Mahal Hotel, or its fashionable coffee shop, Machan, that Sanjay’s friends had their political meetings.

Sanjay was good to his friends. Some he made ministers, others like Akbar he made his personal aides. They were more powerful than any of Mrs Gandhi’s colleagues including her once powerful stenographers. Bureaucrats kowtowed to them, businessmen fawned over them and before winter had time to change to spring there was a new court in Delhi with a new set of court favourites.

Among Sanjay Gandhi’s new favourites was Vasundhara Raje’s brother, Madhavrao Scindia. I cannot remember exactly when I started seeing him in political and social circles in Delhi but it would have been after Sanjay became India’s de facto prime minister. It was either through Vasundhara or at some Delhi party that I first met him and took an instant liking to him. He was intelligent, funny and a maharaja in the nicest sense of the word. Since we met mostly at social events I cannot remember discussing politics with him till much later. But I remember conversations with him about his mother and the ‘evil influence’ he thought his uncle, Sardar Angre, had on her political beliefs. He was convinced that it was because of this uncle that his mother had said during the election campaign that had she lived in older, feudal times she would have had her son’s head crushed under an elephant’s foot, as a ruler of Indore, Ahilya Bai Holkar, had done. The remark harmed her more than it did him.

By the time summer came that year, my interest in politics and journalism had waned on account of my having met and fallen madly in love with a Pakistani called Salmaan Taseer. He came to Delhi to promote a book he had written on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and what was meant to be a short interlude turned into a much longer relationship when I discovered that I was pregnant and he was married. It was a relationship that was doomed from the start but I was in love and I followed him to Pakistan, Dubai and London.

We were in London in the last week of June when Sanjay Gandhi was killed but I was in Delhi soon afterwards and pieced together the story of what had happened from talking to friends and reporters. The first thing I heard, from either Vasundhara or Madhavrao himself, was that the only reason the young Maharaja of Gwalior had not been on the plane with Sanjay was that he was late that morning. So Sanjay took off in his
little aircraft with only a pilot for company and, as usual, flew in a most reckless way. It is one of life’s macabre ironies that Madhavrao Scindia died in another plane crash twenty-one years later.

Those who saw Sanjay’s aeroplane come down on the morning of 23 June 1980 said they had seen the aircraft performing somersaults and flying dangerously low before it crashed. The crash occurred not far from Safdarjang Airport from where it had taken off minutes earlier. Reporters who went to the site of the crash came back with stories of how Mrs Gandhi had arrived shortly afterwards and searched Sanjay’s pockets for something, and then driven away. Political gossips in Delhi spread rumours that the prime minister had come looking for the keys to a bank locker. It was the sort of story that was easily believed as were the conspiracy theories that he had been killed by a foreign intelligence agency that did not want India to have a strong leader. Since Mrs Gandhi was very cosy with the Soviet Union this could only mean the CIA. Another equally implausible theory was that he had been killed by Mumbai’s gangsters.

From Akbar I heard of the thousands and thousands of ordinary people who lined the streets of Delhi on a day of searing heat when they took Sanjay’s body to be cremated on the banks of the Yamuna. Akbar had been sitting on the gun carriage that bore his body and admitted that even he had not realized how popular Sanjay was till he saw the crowds waiting in the burning heat. From colleagues who attended his funeral, I heard that Mrs Gandhi proved that she was a ‘real leader’ by displaying no emotion at all during the cremation. Pictures in the newspapers show her wearing big dark glasses that half covered her face but did not conceal the expression of deep sadness about her mouth.

Sanjay Gandhi’s untimely and tragic death caused even his political opponents to become unusually emotional. Atal Behari Vajpayee memorably commented that it had brought ‘darkness at noon’, and journalists who had not liked him much when he was alive became quite poetic about his death. I remember a report in one of the newspapers in which the reporter used this verse in Urdu to express his feelings: ‘
Ai gulcheen-e-ajal tujh se nadani hui, phool voh tora ke gulshan mein veeranee hui
.’ He translated it as, ‘O gardener of Death, what a mistake you made. You plucked that one flower and turned the garden into a wilderness.’

Sanjay’s death affected Mrs Gandhi profoundly. It was as if something inside her died. I met her a few months later in Abu Dhabi where my
travels with Salmaan had taken me. I was quite bored of just hanging about in situations of domesticity when I heard that Mrs Gandhi was coming on a state visit. A few quick inquiries revealed that R.K. Dhawan, her ever faithful factotum, was on the trip as well so I called him and asked if I could meet her or at least join the press party for the events she was attending. He seemed happy that I had called and explained why before I could ask.

‘Yes. Yes. Good, good,’ he said. ‘You see, she is going to be visiting the Sheikha Fatima for tea this afternoon and only women are allowed in the palace. There is only one woman journalist from a Hindi paper travelling with us so I can arrange for you to go as well.’

So it was that I found myself in the Sheikha Fatima’s palace by the sea. Never having had any experience of purdah in India I was fascinated by this purdah palace in which only women could enter. Young women veiled in black robes led me through smoky verandas that smelled of frankincense and had the most magnificent view of white beaches and the Arabian Sea. I remember thinking what a waste the private beaches were since it was hard to imagine the black-beaked young women (the beaks are the severest form of a burqa) frolicking in bikinis by the sea.

They led me and the other woman journalist to a drawing room with gilded cornices and gaudy furniture. The chandeliers were so enormous and so bright that instead of just lighting the room they seemed to take it over. We were led to a corner of the room where there were two gilded thrones, on one of which sat the Sheikha Fatima, as befitted her status as the wife of the emir of Abu Dhabi. She wore a beak and black robes underneath which glistened a surprisingly low-cut silk gown in pistachio green. The Sheikha’s décolletage was decorated with a diamond necklace that glittered as brightly as the chandeliers. All the women were veiled except two ladies in Western clothes who explained to me that they were from Kuwait and did not follow the same traditions as women in Abu Dhabi.