Durbar (33 page)

The next day the violence got worse and it was no longer safe for my sister to continue living in her house on Jantar Mantar Road. She took the children and moved to the house of a Hindu friend. On the way there she had to disguise her two boys as Hindus by making them wear caps and heard her older son tell his six-year-old brother, ‘Don’t take off your cap on the way or they’ll cut off your head.’ They did not encounter any mobs, which was lucky for the mobs because my sister’s instructions to her driver were to drive right through them instead of stopping. Other members of my family tried hiding in the home of a Hindu politician whom they thought they could trust, only to find that he had alerted the killers instead of protecting them.

Everyone I knew who had friends in political circles called them and told them what was happening in the city. They told them about the police refusing to register cases and the local administration doing absolutely nothing to protect citizens. But the new prime minister did nothing. Not even when senior political leaders like Chandrashekhar and Gandhiji’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, went to the home minister personally to urge him to call out the army for help was anything done in those first three days of November to stop the violence.

What we suffered in more genteel parts of the city was nothing. It was from across the Yamuna, where ‘resettlement colonies’ now formed an endless landscape of shanties that the worst stories came. By the evening of the second day it was clear that we were talking about thousands being killed in the colonies across the river so it was that I went with a group of reporters to East Delhi. Rajat Sharma, not then a famous TV anchor, was among them.

We saw the first bodies as soon as we crossed the river. They looked at first like logs, piled one on top of the other and burning in a large, circular fire that was still smouldering. Sunlight glinting off a gold ring made me look closer and I noticed that what I had thought was a piece of wood was a human arm. We stopped and got out of the car and Rajat started counting.

‘Twenty at least,’ he said quietly, ‘and look over there. On that street are probably the killers.’ We were in a small bazaar and behind the shops stood a group of young men and small boys. They grinned and waved at us and the boys pointed to the bodies and then flexed the muscles of their skinny arms like wrestlers.

‘They are proud of what they did,’ Rajat said with horror in his voice. ‘They think they did a good thing.’

We drove through empty streets and bazaars that smelled of burned flesh. There were so many bodies and burned cars that the municipality had given up trying to move them. Rajat said there was no point in picking them up anyway because the morgues were full. He had seen bodies piled up to the ceiling in a morgue that day. Police vans patrolled main roads but in the narrow lanes that led to bazaars and apartment buildings the killers wandered freely, exultant and cheerful.

‘It’s sick,’ I remember Rajat saying, ‘it’s like the day after Holi. You don’t sense any remorse at all.’

One of the other reporters, a Brahmin, tried to analyse the violence by blaming it on the Dalits, who he said had been treated so brutally by high-caste Hindus for centuries that they had no qualms about killing anyone. It was a stupid theory because most of the victims in East Delhi were Dalit Sikhs from Rajasthan.

We had heard that of the resettlement colonies the one that was worst affected was Trilokpuri because the police helped the killers by forcing Sikhs into their homes and then allowing the mobs to burn down their houses. So it was to Trilokpuri that we headed that morning. Trilokpuri is one of the wretchedly poor suburbs that grew out of the wasteland in which Delhi’s ‘slum dwellers’ were dumped when Sanjay Gandhi wanted to ‘beautify’ the city. There they built themselves one-room, windowless hovels. It was to resettlement colonies like Trilokpuri that new immigrants to the city came because an absence of low-cost housing made rents in more central parts of Delhi prohibitive.

As we got closer to Trilokpuri’s narrow alleys, we fell silent. The windows of the car were open and the smell of burned human flesh was so strong we had to cover our mouths and noses. Packs of street dogs foraged in what seemed to be piles of burned garbage. It took us a while to realize that it was bits of human bodies that they were retrieving. I saw a dog chewing at a child’s arm. In silence, we parked our car in a street in which every house had been burned and wandered through the roofless husks that remained. In every house there were communal pyres and half-burned bodies.

After the first few houses I decided I had seen enough, and I went back and sat in the car. A policeman walked by, smoking a cigarette, seemingly unperturbed by the carnage. When I asked why the police was not clearing the bodies he said, ‘We cannot. The morgues are full and so we will have to cremate them here.’

‘Where have the survivors been taken?’

‘Women and children have been taken to camps and some are hiding in the gurudwaras.’

‘Do you expect more violence?’

‘Who knows,’ he laughed, ‘it depends on what the people at the top want.’

The day before Mrs Gandhi’s funeral the violence stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Army trucks appeared in areas where the massacres had
taken place and in minutes the mobs vanished. The killers went back to being tailors and carpenters, butchers and political workers. Nobody was punished, no questions asked. Most Indians believed that the Sikhs deserved to be punished as became evident from the massive mandate they gave Rajiv in the election that was to follow. Rajiv Gandhi reflected this mood when some weeks after his mother’s funeral he justified the violence. ‘When a big tree falls,’ he said, ‘the earth shakes.’

It took Atal Behari Vajpayee to refute this extraordinarily insensitive comment by responding that Rajiv was a child and did not understand that it is when the earth shakes that trees fall. But Vajpayee as the election was to soon prove was not as much in tune with the times as Rajiv was. And Rajiv was correct in describing his mother as a ‘big tree’. She was more than that. Whatever her flaws she continues to be remembered by ordinary Indians as one of the country’s greatest prime ministers. What appealed to middle class Indians was her strength and what appealed to illiterate, rural voters was her concern for their needs. She may not have succeeded in lifting them out of poverty but she more than succeeded in convincing India’s poorest citizens that she was their leader. Their only leader.

S
hort of ordering the sun to rise Rajiv Gandhi could have done almost anything when he began his career as prime minister. It is hard to think of another leader who could have started with more goodwill, love and hope. There was so much that needed to be done. So much he could have done. He could have changed the economic policies that had kept India poor. He could have got rid of the corrupt courtiers who surrounded his mother and created within India’s oldest and most important political party a culture of sycophancy and servility. He could have made up for the biggest failures of his mother and grandfather by investing in the areas they had neglected and for which India was already beginning to pay a heavy price. Education, health care, planned urbanization and modern services in rural India. Why he did not take even a tentative step towards a new direction remains a mystery.

For me there was personal disappointment almost from the start. He did nothing to stop the massacre of the Sikhs in those first terrible days of his rule and then went out of his way to justify the barbarism we saw unleashed on the streets of Delhi. I found myself wondering whether the goodness I had always seen as his finest quality had been a deception. The Rajiv I thought I knew would have stopped the bloodshed and would have risked his own life to do so. He would at least have been capable of the ordinary compassion that made my other Hindu friends form vigilante squads in Delhi’s more genteel residential areas to defend Sikh families against the mobs. But Rajiv and his close aides showed neither concern nor horror at what happened.

When I personally approached a very important member of Rajiv’s inner circle on the second day of the violence, I was dismissed as if I were
wasting his time. I ran into this gentleman on the grounds of Teen Murti House where Mrs Gandhi’s body had been laid in state for the period of public mourning. He was wandering about with an officious air and a walkie-talkie in his hand. When I stopped him and tried to tell him how terrible the violence was in the city he said, ‘We know, we know. We’re doing something about it.’ Then he went back to talking on his walkie-talkie, dismissing me with a wave, as if he had more important things to do than worry about massacres in the streets of Delhi. The killings continued until the arrival of important foreign leaders for the funeral of Mrs Gandhi made it necessary for the violence to end.

The day after Mrs Gandhi’s funeral I got a call from Aunty Sita, Arun and Mapu’s mother, asking if I would come and see her in her daughter-in-law’s family home in Nizamuddin. She was calling a few people, she said, to discuss the ‘violence’ and what could be done to stop it. Gita Mehta, the writer and Naveen’s sister, was invited as well so we went together and Naveen came along out of curiosity. When we arrived we found that the other guests included the maharajas of Patiala and Kapurthala, a cousin of the Maharaja of Patiala, Randhir Singh, Romi Chopra, a Sikh businessman called Parvinder Singh who owned the pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy, and Sudhir Kakar, a psycho-analyst and cousin of Nina.

It was a curious gathering and it seemed obvious that Aunty Sita could not possibly have thought it up on her own. Aunty Sita remains for me one of the loveliest people I have met. She was married into the Kapurthala royal family when she was a girl of thirteen who spoke no English and had grown up somewhere in the wilds of rural India. The Kapurthala family were slavish Francophiles. Her father-in-law was so affected by Versailles that he ordered a palace just like it to be built in his Punjabi kingdom. Aunty Sita’s husband took his child bride to Paris where she was taught French and English, dressed by Mainbocher and photographed by Cecil Beaton. She counted among her friends Barbara Hutton and the Duchess of Windsor, and was among the famous beauties of the thirties. After her husband died she behaved as a traditional Indian widow would, wearing only white, and filling her life with prayers and religious ceremonies. But I would always talk to her about her ‘buried life and Paris in the spring’ and then she would be full of stories and fun. In all the years I had known her I had only once heard her talk about anything vaguely political and
this was when she told me about the violence in Kapurthala after Partition and how she and the other royal ladies did their best to help the refugees that were pouring in from across the border. What had persuaded her to call a meeting to discuss political violence?

Nina’s mother lived in a small house in the shadow of the tombs of two of Delhi’s most famous poets, Amir Khusrau and Mirza Ghalib, but the house was built without any acknowledgement of history or Delhi’s architecture. It was modern and Punjabi. Aunty Sita and her guests had gathered in the drawing room where tea was being elegantly served. After some preliminary pleasantries she came quickly to the reason why she had summoned us. She said simply that she wanted to know how ‘the violence could be stopped’. We thought she meant the massacres of the Sikhs but she explained that what she meant was the violence that had led to the assassination of Mrs Gandhi.

At this point Gita Mehta, who had been with me to the East Delhi colonies on one of my trips to the killing fields, said in shocked, angry tones that ‘the killing of thousands of Sikhs in the past three days had trivialized the death of this one woman’.

It was enough to send Romi Chopra into a hysterical fit. In a voice shaking with rage he berated Gita for saying what she had and then said, ‘The Sikhs are on trial. They have to prove their loyalty to this country.’

This outraged all the Sikhs in the room, including Parvinder Singh who was a close friend of Romi. It angered the usually mild-mannered Maharaja of Kapurthala enough for him to say, ‘Look. I don’t know who you are but I would like you to know that I have put my life on the line for this country in two wars.’

Romi lapsed into a smouldering silence but there was no stopping the other Sikhs present from telling Aunty Sita that they believed that the violence that had to stop was the violence being done against ordinary Sikhs. The Maharaja of Patiala, Amarinder Singh, said he had driven down from Simla the day after Mrs Gandhi was killed and throughout Punjab he saw villages that were lighted up as if it were Diwali. ‘If I told you that there was grief over Mrs Gandhi’s assassination I would be lying,’ he said.

Aunty Sita’s tea party deteriorated rapidly into a discussion of the possible consequences of the Sikh massacres and the frightening tensions that they had caused between Hindus and Sikhs. Nobody mentioned Mrs Gandhi any more. On the way out there was a small moment of levity.
Randhir Singh pointed to a painting of the god Krishna as a plump, naked child and told Naveen, ‘And this I suppose is the great Hindu stud?’

Did Arun Singh call this meeting on Rajiv’s behalf? Or was it just an initiative that Aunty Sita thought was necessary? This bizarre meeting was the first clue I had that Rajiv knew what was happening in Delhi.

Then came the Congress Party’s election campaign and I began to wonder seriously whether I had completely misunderstood Rajiv. But, like the rest of India, I was still prepared to give him a chance. Why? Why did India so easily forgive Rajiv for violence that, as prime minister, he was directly responsible for? Why have other leaders, like Narendra Modi, never been forgiven for presiding over similar massacres? I have asked myself this question many times and the only answer I have been able to find is that it was perhaps because Rajiv, for a brief shining moment in Indian history, became for most Indians a living symbol of hope. It was the people who invested him with this hope because there was certainly nothing he said during the election campaign that indicated that he had moved away from the cynical, negative politics that his mother had come to represent in her last years.