Durbar (4 page)

As I did not write in Hindi at that time my choices were limited, as before, to the four English-language newspapers that were published in Delhi. I discovered quickly the reasons why there existed an open prejudice against women. The women who joined journalism took a man’s job without doing it in full measure, and usually left once their priorities shifted to marriage and babies. I tried freelancing, and sent off a few long and passionate articles to the
Illustrated Weekly
, the famous Indian magazine, and received brutal rejections from Khushwant Singh who was its editor.

After many months of rejection I succeeded in getting an article published in a youth magazine that the
Times of India
used to bring out. But when I asked its editor, Anees Jung, for payment she laughed in my
face and said that I should be grateful that she had been good enough to publish the article. I could hardly believe my luck when I got my first job with the
Statesman
, a small but influential English newspaper, and when I finally set foot in the red brick offices of the newspaper on a hot day in the first week of May 1975 it was with gratitude and great excitement.

It was a month before Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency. I had been in England for nearly three years and it was only after joining the
Statesman
that I became aware of the political turmoil caused by a general unhappiness with Mrs Gandhi’s rule. There had been student riots in Gujarat the year before that sparked off a larger movement called Nav Nirman, protesting against rising living costs and corruption, that forced Mrs Gandhi to get rid of the state’s chief minister Chimanbhai Patel. The movement found its echo in Bihar where Jayaprakash Narayan, a veteran Gandhian, led a movement that he called Total Revolution or Sampurna Kranti against corruption in public life. His movement was supported by most opposition parties. By May 1975 the opposition leaders had begun to hold angry rallies in Delhi, which made Mrs Gandhi very nervous. Then came the judgement of the Allahabad High Court on 12 June 1975 anulling Mrs Gandhi’s win in the Lok Sabha elections of 1971 and disallowing her from holding elected office for six years. The complaint against her had come from a man called Raj Narain, who had contested against Mrs Gandhi in Rae Bareli and after his defeat had gone to court, charging her with electoral malpractice.

It was on the day that this judgement came that I met Sanjay Gandhi for the first time in his political avatar. I had seen him two or three times at parties in the days when he was more interested in making an Indian car for the masses than being in politics. Charges of nepotism were made by opposition leaders and the press when the Congress government in Haryana donated many acres of land for Sanjay Gandhi’s car factory. But for all the bad publicity Sanjay Gandhi seemed only to become a more glamorous figure. In Delhi’s social circles he was the more popular of Mrs Gandhi’s sons because of his reputation for liking fast cars and fast women. He was small, slightly pasty-looking and had a feminine quality about his features, but there was a peculiar magnetism about him. It may have been just because he was the prime minister’s son but where women were concerned he seemed to possess a special allure.

Sanjay was more sociable than Rajiv, and could be seen often at parties and in restaurants. In the late sixties, Delhi’s first discotheque, The Cellar, opened in a basement in Regal Building and instantly became the city’s most fashionable rendezvous. Most of the other restaurants in Connaught Place had fallen into a state of decay when prohibition laws took away their licences and The Cellar became a beacon for Delhi’s small circle of rich and idle youth. It did not have a liquor licence but the food was good and it enhanced its appeal by organizing poetry readings and plays. It was at one such event that I once saw Sanjay Gandhi standing near the entrance, in a white kurta–pyjama, looking sulky and bored. I cannot remember who he was with but the girls who were with me were mesmerized and kept trying to sidle up to him to somehow attract his attention.

When he chose Maneka as his wife, the salons of Delhi were littered with broken hearts and bile. Disappointed aspirants said cruel things about Maneka’s claim to fame being limited to having modelled in a towel. When I asked my mother about her supposedly ‘low background’ she was outraged and told me that Maneka came from a perfectly respectable Punjabi family. It was the aura of aristocracy that enveloped the Nehru–Gandhi family that made people believe that Sanjay should have married someone higher born. When Rajiv had married a few years earlier nobody noticed that Sonia Maino came from a very ordinary Italian family because she was a foreigner.

On the afternoon of 12 June 1975 what took me to Mrs Gandhi’s house at 1 Safdarjang Road was a rally that was being organized by her to protest against the judgement of the Allahabad High Court. People had gathered at a roundabout at the end of Safdarjang Road, which was lined with neem and gulmohar trees. The orange of the gulmohar flowers took on a blinding lustre in the white, white heat. On the roundabout was a thin covering of scorched, yellow grass outlined by beds of dying flowers. I stood with my face covered with a wet dupatta and even then it was so hot that I eventually took shelter under the neem trees outside the Gymkhana Club.

From there I watched the rally that was being organized. Buses were parked, discreetly and out of sight, in another street. Out of them poured sweating, barefoot men and women who looked exhausted. When they
got to the roundabout, they were made to sit in rows on the brown grass. They sheltered their faces from the burning sunlight with frayed saris and turbans, and waited patiently.

Every few minutes someone would emerge from Mrs Gandhi’s house and tell them that she would be coming out any time now. I waited, feeling increasingly sorry for the people on the roundabout (and myself) as the day got hotter and hotter. I thought a few times of going back to the office and returning later but nobody knew exactly when Mrs Gandhi would emerge and as I had been a reporter with the
Statesman
for less than five weeks I was eager to prove my worth. By late afternoon more busloads of people arrived.

It was early evening, and I was nearly at the end of my tether, when men in khaki uniforms emerged from the prime minister’s house, carrying white plastic chairs that they placed in front of the people who had by then waited all day. Behind them came a short, balding young man with very white skin and very pink lips. Big, horn-rimmed glasses covered half his face and his kurta–pyjama was so white and starched the people on the roundabout gaped in wonder. I almost did not recognize him as the man I had last seen in The Cellar.

I rushed up eagerly, notebook at the ready, and introduced myself to Sanjay Gandhi. I asked if he would give me an interview, and to my surprise he agreed. I wanted him to comment on the Allahabad High Court judgement and he said he thought it was a ‘stupid’ judgement. I asked him what the prime minister planned to do next, to which he responded with some comment like ‘we shall see’, and then he was gone. It was not much of an interview but I thought it was important. He seemed so obviously to be playing a political role. Everyone was taking orders from him, including Mrs Gandhi’s secretary, R.K. Dhawan, at the time one of the most powerful men in India.

At around 6 p.m. Mrs Gandhi emerged in a cotton sari, a worried frown on her face. Her skin, normally shiny and glowing, looked sallow and grey and the lines on the sides of her mouth looked deeper. But as she approached the people on the roundabout, a smile spread across her face and instead of going to the podium she went to the people and greeted them. Old ladies jumped up and embraced her with their dark, wrinkled arms. They smiled toothlessly when she apologized for keeping them waiting. Old men in grimy turbans fell at her feet. She looked like a higher being compared to ‘the people’ with their withered skin, their bare feet and their
dirty clothes. After greeting them and graciously accepting their adulation she went up to the rickety wooden podium. Shading her eyes with one perfectly manicured white hand she made a short, uninspiring speech but seemed to understand that it made little difference what she said. Her listeners were bewitched by her because of who she was and not because of anything she had to say. It was the first time I had seen her at a public rally and the effect she had on these people fascinated me. They were nearly all illiterate and had probably been paid a small sum to attend the rally but their reverence for the tiny woman in her plain cotton sari was real. Dark, sweaty faces, mouths hanging open to reveal paan-stained, blackened teeth, they stared up in wonder as if in the presence of a goddess.

As I was the only reporter present, I should have had the only account of the speech she made that afternoon. But I was new to the job and the notebook in which I recorded what she said is long lost. I remember she said she came from a family of freedom fighters and could never betray the interests of the people. She spoke of the attacks on her by the opposition parties and accused them of attacking her because they knew she would fight to the end for the poor. As far as I remember she did not mention the judgement of the Allahabad High Court, except obliquely. When I got back to the office I told the chief reporter, Mr Raju, that I had an exclusive interview with Sanjay Gandhi and that he had criticized the judgement. He was unimpressed and continued typing with two fingers on his battered typewriter.

‘Write it up and send it to the news editor,’ he said, without looking up. ‘They’ll decide what to do with it.’ It appeared as a few paragraphs on page three the next day.

Two weeks later, on the morning of 26 June 1975, my mother came into my bedroom early in the morning with a transistor in her hand. I heard Mrs Gandhi’s thin, quivery voice saying, ‘The actions of a few are endangering the rights of the vast majority… The forces of disintegration are in full play and communal passions are being aroused, threatening our unity.’

‘She has declared a state of internal Emergency,’ my mother said, looking shocked and puzzled. ‘Fundamental rights have been suspended and the press has been censored.’

I
t was a hot evening in June, a few days after the Emergency was declared, when I first met Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi at a dinner party given by my friend Mapu, or Martand Singh to give him his full name. He used this name so rarely that I knew nobody who called him anything but Mapu. I had known Mapu since I was sixteen and studying journalism at the New Delhi Polytechnic. We met through a friend called Bapa whose father, the Maharaja of Dhrangadhra, was at the time a member of Parliament and lived in a house on Thyagaraja Marg. HHD, as we referred to Bapa’s father, was away a lot either in his constituency in Gujarat or attending a Parliament session, so his house became a place where we congregated often. It was a large bungalow with verandas on all sides that led to a garden full of leafy trees. Mapu, a prince from the state of Kapurthala, was a friend of Bapa’s brother, Jai, from the Doon School and seemed to be a permanent fixture in Thyagaraja Marg. I knew he had an older brother called Arun Singh who was married to someone called Nina from a prominent Delhi family, but I had never met them.

That evening, I went to Mapu’s with Naveen Patnaik, a glamorous socialite who went on to become the chief minister of Orissa. Naveen and I had met recently through Mapu in Thyagaraja Marg and had taken to going out together in the evenings after we discovered that we were neighbours. Naveen lived on Prithviraj Road at the end of the vast garden of his father’s house on Aurangzeb Road, which stretched between these two arteries of Lutyens’s Delhi. Biju Patnaik, his father, bought the house from the Maharaja of Jubbal many years before I knew Naveen. It was one of a handful of private houses left in this area. By the seventies almost all the colonial bungalows in the tree-lined avenues of this most exclusive
part of Delhi were occupied by senior government officials, ministers and political leaders. The most ‘socialist’ of our political leaders had acquired a taste for living like the white sahibs of yore and once they got a ‘government bungalow’ were loath to leave it even after they lost elections. Naveen’s house was set in its own small garden whose most beautiful feature was an old Mughal pavilion. Later, when a rich businessman bought the house from Naveen’s father, who sold it to finance an election, he tore the pavilion down. Even today when I drive past Naveen’s former house in Prithviraj Road, I silently curse the vandal.

My parents lived in what used to be called Southend Lane, a narrow lane between Aurangzeb Road and Prithviraj Road, in a house my mother inherited from her father. The Indian contractors who worked with Edwin Lutyens to build New Delhi were given different sections of the new city to develop and my grandfather ended up owning several houses on Aurangzeb Road, including number 10, which he sold to Mohammed Ali Jinnah when my grandmother threatened to move into it after he secretly married again. My grandmother had been unable to give him a son and heir.

Delhi’s social life in the seventies revolved around its drawing rooms. There were very few restaurants and these were expensive. The only affordable entertainment was to watch the latest English film playing in the Odeon or Plaza Cinema in Connaught Place, but once the Emergency was declared there were so many policemen on the streets of the city that we hesitated to go to public places after dark. Instead, we met regularly in someone or the other’s house to drink Indian whisky and rum, and gossip into the early hours of the morning. We did not fully understand why Mrs Gandhi had needed to declare an Emergency but secretly found it interesting how Delhi had suddenly changed to become a city of policemen and fear. In the drawing rooms of Delhi there began to appear with alarming frequency a new breed of self-effacing but surprisingly inquisitive officials, who we concluded were Mrs Gandhi’s spies.