Durbar (25 page)

‘Anything else? Like if there were any indications that they were connected to Bhindranwale?’

‘They apparently shouted “Long live Khalistan” but I don’t know this for sure.’

It took us four hours to get to the village of Dhilwan, where the massacre had occurred. It was a cold, early winter morning and a wet mist hung over the countryside. The bus still stood on the highway with frightened survivors huddled inside. The relatives of the dead sat beside the bodies in a farmer’s field. A boy of about eleven was sitting beside the body of his father. He seemed to be waiting for someone to tell him what he should do next. When I asked him what happened he said in a whisper, ‘I was sleeping. Then these men with their faces covered came on the bus and asked my father if he was Hindu. When he said yes they told him to go with them. I tried to go too but they didn’t let me. Then we heard shooting and someone told me my father was dead.’

We drove on to Amritsar. In the Golden Temple Bhindranwale was addressing a meeting in a large hall when we arrived. He wore a white kurta and a blue turban and around him stood a group of young men carrying Kalashnikovs. Next to Bhindranwale and his bodyguards stood two young Sikh boys in white turbans and white kurtas with beatific expressions on their faces. When the audience of Sikh pilgrims settled down and a hush fell over the gathering, the two boys in white started to sing a Punjabi song.

‘It is a time for sacrifice,’ they sang with their eyes closed, ‘it is a time for sacrifice. The community is troubled and needs healing. Only sacrifice will heal…’ I was reminded absurdly of a scene from the film
Cabaret
in which a blond Nazi youth sings ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’.

When the song ended, Bhindranwale rose to address the congregation. He spoke in abstractions. ‘These are troubled times for the Sikh community. There is violence everywhere and nobody knows how to control it. We do not believe in violence but our Gurus have taught us that when rulers resort to repression and injustice then it is the duty of every true Sikh to fight. It is better to die fighting for justice than to leave the field of battle like a coward. Only that man can be called a hero who has the courage to let himself be cut to pieces in the field of battle rather than abandon the cause of righteousness. S
ura so pehchaniye jo lare deen ke heth, purza, purza kat mare, kabhi na chhade khet
.’

When he finished speaking, Sandeep and I went up to the stage to try and speak to him. He saw us and stood up abruptly, saying, ‘I am not giving any interviews today.’

‘Please. Just a comment on the bus massacre,’ I said as Sandeep took his pictures.

‘Why should I comment?’

‘They say the killers were Sikhs.’

‘So? What does it have to do with me?’

‘Do you think they did the right thing? Do you think it is right to kill people just because they are Hindu?’

‘I don’t want to say anything because you will twist what I say. If I say something you people write that I am encouraging violence. But Bal Thackeray can say that Sikhs and Muslims must be killed and you people never write anything against him.’

I tried once more to ask my question. ‘Do you condemn what happened?’

‘Why should I condemn it? Who am I to condemn it?’

A month later there was another massacre on a bus travelling from Amritsar to Chandigarh.

After this, the Punjab government stopped buses from travelling at night and police cars started patrolling the highways. But the violence did not stop. It spread. The killers began to target Hindus living in villages. They would arrive at night on foot, kill and disappear into the fields. Because they always seemed to know which house belonged to Hindus the police
suspected that they had local support, and were probably local youths, but nobody dared identify them. Everyone knew that the killers were Bhindranwale’s men and that they took shelter in the Golden Temple and other Sikh temples but nobody was ever caught.

My trips to Punjab became weekly events as the violence grew. Hindu families left their villages for the relative safety of towns, so masked killers started to visit the crowded bazaars of Jalandhar, Amritsar and Patiala. People stopped going out in the evenings, and in the countryside it was as if the rule of law no longer existed. Nobody dared drive on the highways after dark because you never knew when armed men would appear and surround your car and perhaps kill you. Everyone knew that Bhindranwale was behind the violence. He talked openly about Khalistan from his pulpit in the Golden Temple. Nobody stopped him.

By the end of 1983, violence in Punjab had become almost routine and every time I went to cover the latest incident, someone or the other, from officials to ordinary people, asked me why Delhi was doing nothing to control the violence. Many said they thought it must be because Mrs Gandhi wanted the Sikhs and Hindus divided so that she could ‘consolidate’ the Hindu vote. Conspiracy theories, rumours and fear turned Punjab quickly from India’s most prosperous state to its most dangerous.

I was among those who did not understand why nobody in Delhi was doing anything to stop Bhindranwale, and when I came back from one of my trips to Amritsar I asked Rajiv if I could see him. We met in the new office he shared with Arun Singh on Motilal Nehru Marg. It was a crumbling, old colonial bungalow that had been spruced up. Big glass windows had been added, new Kashmiri carpets covered broken terrazzo floors and pretty pictures had appeared on freshly painted walls. What must have once been a drawing room was converted into a large office crammed with desks and Godrej cupboards. It was here that Rajiv’s secretaries worked. The man in charge was V. George, a man from Kerala, who eventually rose to great heights of political power but at the time seemed to be just a gofer.

Rajiv’s office was in a large room with a lovely view of the garden. Arun had a similar office on the other side of the corridor. Rajiv was by now general secretary of the Congress Party and acknowledged as his mother’s heir. I remember thinking when I saw him in his new office that politics had made him more assured and confident.

He was charming, as always, and quite keen to hear about what I had seen in Punjab. I told him that what seemed to be worrying a lot of people was the government’s refusal to act against Bhindranwale despite his involvement in the violence being quite obvious. ‘People are beginning to say that this refusal to control Bhindranwale is quite deliberate,’ I remember saying, and a look of exasperation crossed his face.

‘I’ve told Mummy so many times that we should do something,’ he said, ‘but she listens to her senior advisors and they tell her that she shouldn’t do anything that would upset the Sikhs.’

‘But the Sikhs are even more upset that they are being blamed for the violence.’

I took the chance to do a full interview with him on various political issues. When I came back to the office, I told Akbar excitedly that I had an interview with Rajiv Gandhi, thinking that he would be pleased. He was not. He looked quite irritated that I had managed to get an interview and wanted to know how it had come about. I told him that I had actually just dropped in for a chat about Punjab and had taken the opportunity to ask questions on other issues. Later, I discovered through the office grapevine that Akbar had been trying to get an interview with Rajiv for many months and had not succeeded. My interview was not used on the cover but buried obscurely inside the magazine in an issue published some weeks later. Rajiv gave very few interviews, so it was something of a scoop for
Sunday
magazine but Akbar, who was editor of both
Sunday
magazine and the
Telegraph
, did not think so.

In the interview Rajiv said some things that remain interesting even from the perspective of history. On the economic policies of his mother’s government he said, ‘I think we have drifted a little too far to the right today. I also feel that where we’re making a mistake is that we have too many taxes…in the sense that a substantial amount of the taxes that the government levies are paid by the government itself. For example, if you tax copper and if you see where it is used – it is used by the telephones, by power and by defence. For example, we tax fuel, petrol, but I’m sure 80 per cent of the petrol is consumed by the government or by companies where the expenditure is tax-deductible, so we’re putting up a lot of machinery to transfer money from our left pocket to our right pocket.’

When I asked him what he thought should be India’s priorities, this was his answer: ‘I think the biggest priority is population control. Without that
there’s no question of survival. On a long-term basis, I think the second priority is education, where I think our system has…I wouldn’t say it has failed, but I don’t think it is standing up to the pressures that it is being put under. Third, I think we need a major breakthrough in agriculture. We’ve been on a sort of plateau of agricultural production. We need a strong push. The development of energy is another vital sector but population and education are much more important because without these two we’re not going to last more than twenty or thirty years.’

India did not move economically to the right until after Rajiv’s death and it may not have done so even then if Rajiv had lived to become prime minister again, since, judging from this interview, his economic views were similar to those of his mother. And, when Sonia Gandhi became India’s de facto prime minister in 2004, she presided over two governments that stopped the process of economic liberalization and brought back the leftist economic policies that Mrs Gandhi had followed in the name of ‘the poor’. But Rajiv’s acolytes and the sycophants that the Congress Party breeds in huge numbers continue to credit Rajiv with ending the licence-permit raj that debilitated India for so many decades. As for population control being at the top of his list of political priorities for India, it shows Rajiv’s naivety in political matters. Today, India’s vast population of young people is considered one of its greatest assets. Education remains of utmost importance and needs radical changes, but no government has dared to make them. It remains dragged down by the red tape of the licence raj and is one of the last bastions of government control.

In the summer of 1983 there were elections in Kashmir. The first elections to the legislative assembly after the death of Sheikh Abdullah. The election campaign was at its height when I accidentally ran into Rajiv in Srinagar. I was walking out of Nedou’s Hotel and he was driving by and stopped. In the short time we chatted I tried to warn him that reports he would have read in Delhi newspapers about a possible Congress victory in Kashmir were wrong. I told him Farooq Abdullah would win because this was something the people of Kashmir felt they owed the old Sheikh.

Sheikh Abdullah spent almost all his life in and out of jail and became for ordinary Kashmiris a symbol of Kashmir. I met him only once, a
year before he died, when Farooq invited me to Srinagar to cover his anointment as the Sheikh’s heir. It remains in my mind one of the most extraordinary political events I have ever covered because of the effect that the Sheikh had on the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris who poured into Srinagar to hear him speak at the rally where he declared Farooq his heir. He did it with these words, ‘The crown that I put on your head, Farooq Abdullah, is a crown of thorns.’ The Sheikh died in September 1982 and I never met him again.

Since this was the first election I was covering on my own I worked harder than I ever had, travelling to every constituency in the Valley, other than the border district of Uri, which somehow I never managed to get to. Wherever I went people said that this was the first election that they were participating in as Indians and secession was not an issue. They felt that as far as they were concerned the historical Kashmir problem was over.

The trouble was that most of the journalists who had come from Delhi to cover the election were determined to keep history alive. They treated press conferences with Kashmir’s leaders like inquisitions at which they demanded from people like Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, one of Kashmir’s most important religious leaders, that he condemn secession. When he did not, they spread rumours that there was a secret secessionist agenda that lay hidden beneath the surface calm of the campaign and hinted that Farooq Abdullah was part of it. These journalists worked closely with Congress Party leaders in Srinagar, so they managed to convince themselves and the Congress Party leaders that the party had a real chance of winning. They travelled to cover mostly Congress rallies and in Srinagar’s Nedou’s Hotel, where most of them stayed, I saw them being regularly entertained by local Congress leaders.

Mrs Gandhi continued to believe the lies she was told as much by the newspapers as her own party. When Farooq’s National Conference won with a full majority, the misreporting of the election became a story in itself. It was the first time I saw journalists behave as if they were representatives of the Government of India and not just reporters. They did this for reasons of ‘nationalism’. The correspondents of the main national newspapers in Srinagar even joked about their role in the Valley being that of ‘India’s viceroys’. It was only later, when Kashmir started producing its own reporters, that things changed.

When I returned to Delhi after three weeks in Kashmir I met Rajiv at some social event and tried to persuade him that Farooq Abdullah had won the election fairly and it would be a terrible mistake for the Congress Party to create trouble. Sadly, we had this conversation surrounded by his newly ‘political’ friends and they convinced him that I was talking rubbish. The clinching argument they offered came from someone who shall remain nameless, who said, ‘I know for sure that the elections were rigged by Farooq because my servants in Kashmir voted three times each.’