Durbar (39 page)

When Pitroda suggested creating rural telephone services in India and setting up STD/ISD booths in villages and small towns to make services available to those who could not dream of getting a private telephone he brought about a telecommunications revolution. He was able to do what he did not just because he had a good idea but because he was able to cut through the red tape, in which most government work was trapped, and report directly to the prime minister’s office. Rajiv was so impressed with Pitroda that he gave him charge of not just rural telephone exchanges, but drinking water, the greening of India and other intractable problems. Pitroda called them ‘missions’ and from his fancy office in the Akbar Hotel in New Delhi tried to implement them with missionary zeal. But these were serious problems that needed massive investment as well as institutional and administrative changes that Rajiv seemed unaware of so most of the missions fell by the wayside.

As prime minister Rajiv soon showed a weakness for the English-speaking, Doon School-educated Indians with whom he had grown up. Unfortunately, like him, they were apolitical and unfamiliar with the complexities of ruling a country as diverse and difficult as India so none of them could help bring the changes that the country so desperately needed. Even in his choice of bureaucrats Rajiv was inclined towards Doon School types like Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was given charge of his relations with the media. But he was a bumptious ex-Marxist with an offensive manner that did little to endear either him, or the new prime minister, to journalists and Rajiv paid a heavy price for this later when his troubles began.

In those exhilarating months it was as if nothing could go wrong with the world. It was a time when all the people I met, from Delhi’s drawing rooms to the squalid alleys of the slum colonies his brother had created, seemed to have become devotees of Rajiv Gandhi. A handsome, young
prime minister had a special allure where Delhi’s socialite circles were concerned and I could go nowhere without running into some attractive woman or other who believed she was on the verge of having an affair with Rajiv. A woman, married into a political family, and who went on to become a well-known politician later but at the time was just an aspiring socialite, took every chance she got to tell everyone how charmed Rajiv was by her beauty. ‘He notices everything about a woman,’ she liked saying coyly. ‘The other day he asked me why I had changed the colour of my nail polish.’ Droves of attractive young women began to haunt the Congress Party office offering their services to the new government. Rajiv remained totally oblivious to their charms but the same could not always be said of his aides. As a result more aging bimbos entered the portals of Indian politics then than ever before or ever since.

The foreign press loved him almost as much as ordinary Indians did and endless articles were written about the ‘Indian Camelot’. I started to write regularly for the
Sunday Times
, London, after Mary Anne Weaver went back to New York, and I found that although it was difficult to interest London in most Indian political stories I could always get in a story about Rajiv and Sonia. The fact that his wife was Italian and that they made a handsome couple added to their allure where the foreign press was concerned.

The only people who remained unimpressed were human rights activists. In Delhi, living in wretched conditions, were more than 3000 Sikh widows. Their stories were told by the activists in detailed reports on what happened in those terrible three days after Mrs Gandhi was killed. The reports were published as pamphlets and found their way into drawing rooms and government offices.

In the camps, the Sikh widows told their stories over and over again to anyone who cared to listen. They told of the involvement of policemen and politicians in the massacres and named the Congress Party politicians whom they had seen leading the mobs. The Sikh widows had powerful supporters. There were lawyers, journalists, college professors, leftist politicians and high-minded officials who brought them food and clothes and set up makeshift schools for their children. As a Sikh I did my bit by going to the camps as often as I could even if nobody in my newspaper was interested in more Sikh massacre stories.

Among the people who went regularly to the camps was Mala Singh, a friend of Sanjay Gandhi, a journalist who was less famous for her journalistic skills and more for her skills as an influential society hostess. Mala is married to Tejbir Singh, grandson of Sir Sobha Singh, who along with my grandfather was one of the five prominent contractors who worked with Lutyens to build New Delhi. She had inherited a robust social conscience from her parents, Ramesh and Raj Thapar, who had once been friends of Indira Gandhi but had fallen out with her when she suspended democracy. Mala was appalled that Rajiv’s government had made no effort to order an inquiry into the Sikh massacres. So I think it was she who suggested one evening that I call Sonia and arrange a meeting to tell her about the importance of a judicial inquiry into the violence. But the suggestion that we talk to Sonia may just as well have come from Mapu in whose house the meeting was eventually arranged.

Sonia came with Nina. I think it was the first time that Mala had met her, because she looked a bit intimidated at first – unusual for Mala – but once she started talking there was no stopping her. She told Sonia about the conditions in the camps and that people were beginning to think of Rajiv’s government as insensitive to so immense a tragedy. Sonia said nothing but listened very carefully. We realized how carefully she had listened when two weeks later an inquiry commission was set up under Justice Ranganath Misra. It served mostly to whitewash the Congress Party’s role in the violence but that it was set up at all was significant for the prime minister had gone out of his way to justify the massacres.

It soon became clear that Rajiv’s closest aide, his most trusted ally and his only true friend was his wife. She understood little of politics and made no effort to hide her contempt for Indian politicians, but she became a power centre because she controlled access to the prime minister’s house and made sure that only those she approved of entered its portals.

In the first few months after Rajiv became prime minister Sonia spent most of her time decorating the new house in Race Course Road. Mrs Gandhi’s old home opposite the Gymkhana Club was now hallowed ground. So many people came to see where she had been killed and where she had lived that it became necessary to turn her home into a
memorial. A walkway of crystal was created where she took her last steps and her room was preserved as she left it on the last day of her life. Two large bungalows were found on the other side of the Gymkhana Club, on Race Course Road, for the new prime minister to live in. They were large government bungalows with gardens on all four sides, but because politicians liked living in Gandhian austerity the houses and gardens had fallen into a state of decay. Sonia spent the first few months of 1985 making improvements to her new home and after that amused herself in the long hours that Rajiv was away by learning to restore old paintings in the National Museum.

Sonia seemed to play no political role, but where social matters were concerned she played an increasingly important one. She began a process of weeding out from Rajiv’s inner circle people whom she considered unsuitable or those she took a sudden dislike to. Among the first to go was Nina. As far as I knew Sonia had continued to see Nina for long lunches nearly every day so it came as a shock when I first heard that there was trouble between them. Arun and Nina were so close to Rajiv and Sonia that they were given a house on Race Course Road next door to the prime minister’s new residence. A small gate in the dividing wall made it possible for them to go to each other’s houses without needing to go out of the main gates. The first rumour I heard, not long after the meeting at Mapu’s with Nina and Sonia, was that Sonia had locked the gate on her side of the wall.

Nobody knew why this had happened and none of their close friends talked about the closing of the gate. I did not know Nina well enough then to ask her straight out, and Mapu was too discreet to open his mouth about anything connected with his family. But in Delhi’s drawing rooms gossip had it that Nina had been dropped because she was too outspoken and Arun too moralistic about anything to do with collecting money for political purposes. He had always made it clear, people said, that he would help Rajiv with his politics as long as he was never expected to handle party funds.

Arun continued to work for Rajiv’s government till the Bofors scandal broke but he and Nina were no longer included in the intimate social circle that surrounded Rajiv and Sonia. In this circle were Amitabh Bachchan, now a member of Parliament from Allahabad, his wife Jaya, his brother
Ajitabh and Ajitabh’s wife, Ramola, Satish Sharma and his wife, Sterre. The closest to Rajiv and Sonia were Ottavio and Maria Quattrocchi. When Mrs Gandhi was alive she discouraged her daughter-in-law from inviting foreigners to the house, so the Quatrocchis were kept at some distance from the prime minister’s residence. But after Rajiv became prime minister the Quattrocchis had privileged access to the new house on Race Course Road. There were stories, spread by the prime minister’s security guards, that when one of them had tried to use a metal detector on Mrs Quatrocchi, during a routine security check, she had kicked him and thrown a tantrum.

From the old inner circle, Romi, Vicky, Nimal and Thud, and sundry others remained. But the cosy lunches and dinners of yore came to a swift end once Rajiv became prime minister. If the Gandhis entertained at all it was mostly for official events. I heard of dinners for visiting celebrities that were carefully choreographed by Sonia to give them an elegance that social events by the Government of India usually lacked. Meals started to come course by course instead of all jumbled together and from those who attended these dinners came tales of a European touch to the food.

By Rajiv’s second year in power stories about Sonia’s shopping sprees began to circulate in Delhi’s drawing rooms. The most dangerous gossips in Delhi are traditionally the sellers of shawls and carpets who wander from house to house with their wares. So it was from a Kashmiri shawl-seller that I first heard that the prime minister’s wife was buying shahtoosh shawls in large quantities. It was not an environmental crime then to wear shahtoosh but to buy a shahtoosh shawl was the equivalent of buying expensive fur. Only very rich Indians could afford to. Then, from diplomatic sources in distant Moscow, where the prime minister and his wife made their first foreign visit, came the story of Sonia buying an expensive sable coat. In Mrs Gandhi’s time this kind of personal expenditure would either not have happened, or would have happened so discreetly that nobody ever found out. Sonia’s sable coat travelled back on the prime minister’s flight, and people saw it and talked about it. According to the story I heard Sonia’s taste in fur coats was so refined that she was not satisfied with Soviet tailoring and had the coat sent to Rome to be redesigned by the Italian fashion house, Fendi. These were the sort of stories that are never possible to confirm, but gossip rarely needs confirmation to be believed.

Other small sartorial signs of a gradual move away from ‘socialism’ soon became evident. Rajiv started to wear an expensive, gold Rolex watch and carry a Mont Blanc pen in the pocket of his humble khadi kurta. This elegant new touch was imitated instantly by other young members of the Congress Party. The style was not just imitated but embellished. Suddenly it became fashionable to add a pair of Gucci loafers to clothes made of Gandhian khadi. India had been through so many decades of enforced socialist behaviour that in the eighties there were not many Indians who would have recognized international designer labels. Certainly, there were no journalists in Delhi who had any acquaintance with them but what they did start to notice quite soon was that Rajiv’s friends were all doing very well for themselves. Rumours of crony capitalism, an expression we only half understood then, started to spread. Contracts to export rice to the Soviet Union were said to have been handed to some of their friends and all sorts of other deals to others.

To those of us who still saw Rajiv and Sonia’s friends in the drawing rooms of Delhi it was instantly obvious that they suddenly had a lot of money. No longer did they travel economy when they went abroad and no longer did they stay with friends in London and New York. They stayed in expensive hotels and this was so new and wondrous an experience for them that they liked slipping names like Claridges and the Meurice into accounts of their travels. I remember on a trip to Washington being astounded to discover that one of Rajiv’s poorest friends spent a month occupying two suites in the Watergate hotel. Friends of Rajiv who had lived on salaries that barely enabled them to afford a small Indian car now drove around in foreign cars and in their drawing rooms suddenly appeared expensive works of art and antiques. Nobody asked too many questions because Rajiv was still very popular but rumours of ‘deals’ started to filter into newspaper offices.

By the middle of 1986, my relations with M.J. Akbar had become so fraught that I decided I was better off going freelance. I was writing regularly by then for the
Sunday Times
, London, which brought in more money than I earned at the
Telegraph
. I came to an arrangement with Aroon Purie, owner and chief editor of
India Today
, to do some freelance work for him as well and with a considerable degree of pleasure sent Akbar
my resignation. His tantrums and sulks had now become so routine as to make constant difficulties for me professionally.

The final straw came when Sant Longowal, Bhindranwale’s old adversary in the Golden Temple, was killed within weeks of signing an agreement with Rajiv in July 1985 to start a peace process in Punjab. Kewal Sahib’s immediate reaction was to send me to Punjab and I would have left as soon as possible if Akbar had not been having one of his dinners. On this particular evening Akbar was in a bad mood. At some point someone mentioned that I was leaving later that night for Punjab to cover the Longowal story and he responded icily that this was out of the question. I was not to go, he said, because he had already decided to assign the story to someone else. He chose a reporter who spoke no Punjabi and had never been to Punjab before. He did this with such obvious spite that I made up my mind to leave the
Telegraph
as soon as I could find a way to. We were barely on speaking terms by the time I resigned and he did not bother to ask why I wanted to leave.