Durbar (41 page)

I reluctantly abandoned my plans for a quiet evening at home and set off for Raji’s house in Golf Links. When I arrived I found that not only was there no sign of Ambassador Jaidi but no sign even of my host. The only people in Raji’s freezing drawing room was a Moroccan couple who spoke no English. They sat stiffly at one end of the room and for two hours all we did was smile politely at each other when we happened to look in each other’s direction. Raji’s staff seemed unaware that he had invited guests to dinner so there was not even food and drink on offer.

When Raji finally arrived with his important Moroccan guest it was after 9.30 p.m. and I was irritable and cold. So when Ambassador Jaidi greeted me by asking, as he shook my hennaed hand, why I was wearing henna, I said petulantly that I had been to an Indian wedding and this was an Indian tradition. ‘Ah, we have the same tradition in Morocco,’ he
said, smiling graciously. And I being deliberately provocative replied, ‘I know all about Morocco. I have friends in the Polisario.’

If the remark annoyed the ambassador he did not show it. Instead, with a very polite smile he said he would like me to visit Morocco at his invitation. When I told him that my friend Nooruddin from the Polisario Front had already invited me he said that I should not visit Morocco with the Polisario. They take people to Tindouf in Algeria and pretend that it is Morocco.

The rest of the evening was pleasant enough. I think we talked a little about the Indian government’s decision and I explained that the government could have been persuaded to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic because of pressure from Algeria and the Soviet Union and we went on to talk of other things. I forgot about meeting Ambassador Jaidi till a few weeks later, when a business-class ticket arrived in my mail from the Moroccan government. Along with it came an invitation to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations of King Hassan’s coronation. In my long years in journalism I have on principle stayed away from junkets of all kinds, but this was an offer I found hard to refuse.

So it was that in the first week of March I arrived in Marrakesh to find myself in a town that seemed to have come straight out of 1001 Arabian Nights. There were tents everywhere, Arab horsemen galloping about and lights and music in the medina. Ambassador Jaidi had arranged for me to stay at the Mamounia Hotel which was as romantic a hotel as I have ever stayed in. I entered the lobby to find myself instantly transported back to the thirties or at least to what I thought Morocco must have looked like in the thirties from what I had seen of it in Hollywood films. A black pianist played in the soft yellow light of chandeliers, there were men in dinner jackets, bejewelled ladies in long gowns and an elegant restaurant filled with laughter and the sound of clinking glasses. The next morning when I opened the windows of my room I saw an expanse of orange groves that, in the gauzy winter sunlight, seemed to stretch all the way to the Atlas Mountains in the distance.

I spent the next two days being entertained with the King’s other guests in his magnificent palaces. There were journalists from all over the world but Pranay Gupte, who worked at the time in New York, and I were the only Indians. The festivities had a fairytale quality and it was easy to forget the real purpose of my being in Morocco. There were tournaments on
horseback, feasts under tents, and evenings filled with music and magic. Pranay and I, and a gentleman from the Moroccan embassy in Delhi called Abdou, dined in charming little restaurants in the medina and had the sort of political discussions that can only happen over many glasses of wine and are afterwards forgotten. Abdou introduced me to Morocco’s minister for culture, who was an Indophile, and in my collection of Moroccan photographs there is one of me chatting to the Hollywood star Michael York outside an Arab tent. He was among the celebrities who came to King Hassan’s party.

When the festivities were over Abdou took me to some kind of military establishment where I was asked to point out on a map of the Sahara where exactly the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was. When I named the towns that Nooruddin had told me about, I was flown to each one of them in an army helicopter with Abdou for company. The ‘capital’ of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic consisted of no more than a tin shed in the desert and the other towns Nooruddin had told me about quite simply did not exist. As a result of this expedition, I flew all over the Moroccon Sahara for a day and saw the heavily guarded wall that the King had built to keep out the Polisario guerrillas, who operated from bases that were on the Algerian side of the desert. The day ended with a visit to Dakhla and Laayoune. These towns on the Atlantic were still very much part of Morocco.

When I came back to Delhi I wrote a story for
India Today
called ‘A Sahara Mirage’. In it I described what I had seen of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and pointed out that it seemed more than slightly bizarre for Rajiv’s government to have recognized a country that did not exist. I think I even asked in the article where the Indian ambassador would be presenting his credentials and where the embassy would be in a capital city that consisted of a tin shed in the desert. I came under immediate attack from colleagues of leftist disposition. They said that I had discredited myself by accepting hospitality from the Moroccan government. When I replied that this really was rich coming from people who had accepted Algerian hospitality on more than one occasion to cover the other side of the story, they said that Algeria was a socialist country and not a kingdom. My fiercest critics were revealed, decades later, to be in the pay of the Soviet Union when the KGB spymaster, Vasili Mitrokhin, published his memoirs
after defecting to the West. They were highly respected journalists in an India that was then virtually a Soviet satellite.

The Soviet Union appeared to have a special allure for Rajiv just as it had for his mother but in the cloistered world that was political Delhi in the eighties nobody seemed to notice that a war being fought just beyond India’s northern borders was slowly bringing the Cold War to an end and hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rajiv did nothing to change his policy towards the Soviet Union. It remained the same as it had been during Mrs Gandhi’s time, when she had supported the invasion of Afghanistan. The world was a very faraway place because private television channels did not exist in India and the three or four foreign magazines that came to Delhi were censored before being allowed into the country. It was also a time when foreign travel was beyond the reach of most Indians. India was so isolated from what was going on in the rest of the world that the immense changes taking place inside the Soviet Union in those last years of its existence were neither discussed in political circles nor written about in the newspapers.

When I returned to India from Morocco almost the first thing I did was call Farooq Abdullah to find out why he had agreed to an electoral alliance with the Congress Party. He happened to be in Delhi and invited me for a chat over coffee in his house on Safdarjang Lane. It was the house Naveen Patnaik had been living in when Mrs Gandhi was killed. When I arrived I found Farooq in his sparsely furnished drawing room chatting to M.J. Akbar. Akbar was about to make his first foray into television journalism and was there to interview Farooq. His crew was setting up chairs and cameras in the garden but he made no move to leave the drawing room. I asked Farooq if he was happy to talk in front of Akbar and he said he had no problem except that he was speaking to both of us ‘off the record’.

As soon as we started talking I discovered that Farooq was dispirited and angry. When I asked him why he had agreed to such an obviously insane pre-poll alliance he said, ‘Because I had no choice. They said that if I didn’t agree there would be no elections in Kashmir for the next five years. By then I won’t be able to control the situation.’ He explained that the Jamaat-e-Islami, the most fundamentalist of Kashmir’s Islamic parties, was building madrassas at an alarming rate across the Valley and that what
was being taught in them was not just secessionist but poisonous. If I was not convinced of this, he added, I should go and see for myself.

When I did go, some weeks later, I was astounded to see how much the atmosphere in Kashmir had changed under Gul Shah’s very unpopular rule. In the narrow bylanes of the old part of Srinagar, which they call ‘downtown’ and which I have always thought of as the political barometer of the Valley, I discovered that a carefully planned campaign was in progress to persuade Kashmiris that they could not live as part of India because they were Muslims. This message was taught to small children in the madrassas and to the general public through pamphlets that glorified the virtues of Islam and derided everything to do with India.

Nobody in Delhi appeared to have noticed what was happening. I may have been a novice when it came to political analysis but I could read the writing on the wall and see that there was big trouble ahead. It did not surprise me that when elections were held in Kashmir a few months later, a coalition of Muslim fundamentalist parties called the Muslim United Front emerged to pose a formidable challenge to the alliance into which Rajiv had forced Farooq. The Muslim United Front campaigned openly for Kashmir to secede from India and spread rumours that if they won enough seats in the legislature they would vote for secession.

It may have been this possibility that frightened Farooq or it could be that he panicked, but he appears to have done a few things that created a general impression that the election was rigged. Farooq has always denied that he rigged the 1987 election but in a state in which elections had been traditionally rigged for decades he was not believed. It did not help his credibility when the national press reported that there had been irregularities. In any case there were things that happened during the election campaign that toppled Farooq from the shining pedestal on which he had been placed after his dismissal three years earlier. He managed to form the government but could do nothing to stop the insurgency that began in the immediate aftermath of the election. Young secessionist politicians, who thought they had been cheated of victory, started slipping illegally across the border to Pakistan to learn about armed struggle from a military dictator who had already developed expertise in this area by training young Sikhs to spread subversion and terror in Punjab.

By Rajiv’s second year as prime minister political commentators began to refer to Rajiv and his ministers as the ‘
baba log
government’. The term
was coined by Indira Gandhi’s former friend Ramesh Thapar and quickly became popular with journalists.
Baba log
is an expression that traces its roots to the British Raj when Indian ayahs used it for their English charges. It is a term of endearment except when used in the political context in which it was used for Rajiv and his government. It was cruelly apt when used to describe the manner in which Rajiv and his coterie of mostly Doon School-educated aides were running the country.

The kindest thing that can be said of Rajiv’s other big political mistake in 1986 is that it was made out of naivety. In an attempt to become popular with Muslims he legislated to deny divorced Muslim women the right to alimony. He did this through a remarkably retrograde law called the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. In doing this he succumbed to pressure from a fundamentalist Muslim pressure group that had been demanding a separate personal law for Muslims for more than ten years. It was led by a retired foreign service officer called Syed Shahabuddin. Rajiv’s decision would lead to an upsurge of Hindu rage and a movement that would eventually end with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya the year after Rajiv was assassinated.

Why Rajiv decided to use his huge majority in Parliament to override a Supreme Court judgement remains as much of a bewildering mystery as his decision to first resist pressure to intervene in the Shah Bano case and then to change sides without explanation. He began by asking Arif Mohammad Khan, a Congress MP at the time and a personal friend of mine, to argue in Parliament against the demand that divorced Muslim women be denied their rights under Indian law. Arif, a former student leader and a man who believes that Islam and modernity can coexist, did this passionately. Then Rajiv changed his mind and Arif was so disillusioned by this that he resigned from the Congress Party.

But the Shah Bano story needs to be told from the beginning. A case came to the Supreme Court in 1985 in which a Muslim lawyer from Indore argued that he had the right to be exempted from paying maintenance to his divorced wife, Shah Bano, on the grounds that as a Muslim he came under the shariat and not Indian law. A Hindu judge ruled that this was nonsense and every Indian citizen came under Indian law. This caused conservative sections of the Muslim community to protest
noisily, as they do so well every time they think Islam is in danger, and the Shah Bano case became the subject of a debate in Parliament. Rajiv ended up taking the wrong side after his initial vacillation and thereby sowed the seeds of a problem that nearly divided India once more in the name of Islam.

While the Shah Bano case was being debated in Parliament and creating tensions across the country nobody seemed to think it was worth interviewing the lady herself. These were times, please remember, when private television channels did not exist and when most editors thought reporters wanting to travel out of Delhi to do a story had a holiday on their mind. That is the only explanation I can find for why I happened to become the first person to get a photograph of Shah Bano. I was in Indore on some other assignment and decided to look her up. It did not take me long to discover the bazaar in the old part of the city, where she lived in a narrow alley lined with open drains. A tiny door led to a box-sized courtyard at the centre of a house made up of small rooms built one on top of the other.