Durbar (42 page)

I found Shah Bano seated on a string bed in the courtyard. She was a bird-like woman with a heavily lined face and beautiful green eyes. She seemed confused by the fuss her story had created. She told me that all she had asked for was an increase of Rs 100 in the Rs 180 monthly maintenance her husband paid her, and could not understand why this was too much to ask for. She said her husband made thousands a month as a lawyer and could well afford to give her more money. While she talked I took as many pictures as I could. I am widely regarded in my family as one of the world’s worst photographers but discovered, to my delight, when I got back to the
India Today
office, that it was the first picture taken of her. Raghu Rai, who was picture editor of the magazine, sold it to a photo agency abroad and gave me $100. It was my finest moment as a photojournalist. There had been no other.

But apart from this small personal triumph there is little about Shah Bano’s sad story that is worth celebrating. She accidentally became a pawn in an ugly game of religious politics that ended in a wave of hatred spreading across the country and violence that caused not just the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya but the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

The cause of these terrible events was Rajiv Gandhi. When he realized that his decision to allow Muslims their own personal law had seriously
antagonized Hindus his moronic advisors told him that the best way to make the Hindus happy was to open for Hindu worship a disused, disputed mosque in Ayodhya that Hindus claimed was built at the exact spot where the mythical god Ram was born. It did not win Rajiv much Hindu support because this was a game that the Hindu nationalist parties knew how to play better. But it did make him seem increasingly like a prime minister who did not know what he was doing.

W
hile it is possible to forgive Rajiv Gandhi the big political mistakes he made from inexperience and from not being a politician in the real sense it is harder to understand why he never made even those uncontroversial changes that needed to be made. Changes that should have come naturally to a man who professed to believe in taking India towards modernity and computerization. By the time he became prime minister Doordarshan was reviled even by semi-literate Indians as nothing more than a mouthpiece of the government and not a very effective one at that. Its news bulletins were so filled with items that were not real news that newspaper offices were awash with jokes about how they were only worth watching if you wanted to learn what should not be in the news. All India Radio, during the Emergency, was mocked as All Indira Radio and almost every journalist I knew relied on foreign radio stations to get the real story. Those of us who could afford to, bought expensive German shortwave transistor radios that we carried with us wherever we travelled. And the BBC’s world service was possibly more listened to in India than any other country.

One of the things Rajiv could have done was give Doordarshan more autonomy and allow private television channels to compete with it even if only in the area of entertainment. Doordarshan’s attempts at producing entertainment programmes were as amateur and ineffectual as its attempts to produce news bulletins, and on my travels in Punjab, where they caught the signal, I remember constantly running into people who said they preferred watching Pakistani television channels because of the high quality of their serials and plays. Rajiv could have changed
things had he wanted to and I tried, one evening, to persuade him to see the wisdom of this change.

I think I may have rung Sonia to ask if I could talk to Rajiv and she suggested that I come over on an evening when he was home early from work. It was the first time I saw the house after she had redecorated it and it was full of light and pictures and beautiful things. She had completely and correctly abandoned the pseudo-socialist style of interior decoration that Mrs Gandhi preferred and created a home worthy of a prime minister and not some lowly socialist apparatchik.

It was one of those gentle Delhi evenings when you can sit in the garden without feeling too hot or too cold so we sat drinking iced drinks under a gazebo that was a new addition to the garden. Rajiv looked cheerful and happy and we talked of this and that and whether he was enjoying being prime minister, to which he said something like he was only doing his duty. I no longer remember how the subject of Doordarshan came up, but I asked why he did not relinquish state control over it. I said that it could never improve as long as it remained a tool of government propaganda and he sort of agreed with me. But he said that it would improve soon because he had found ‘an intelligent, young bureaucrat’ to take charge. The intelligent, young bureaucrat he referred to was Bhaskar Ghosh.

That was as far as he was prepared to go. I pointed out that as long as Doordarshan was controlled by officials sitting in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting it was unlikely to improve because officials rarely came equipped with the creativity and imagination needed to transform a shoddy propaganda machine into a real television channel but my arguments fell on deaf ears. I think I even mentioned that when Doordarshan covered his own tours they did it badly but he said he was sure that Mr Ghosh would be able to make dramatic changes. The sort of changes that Doordarshan needed have not happened to this day and despite governments from other parties having come and gone no prime minister has seen the need to abolish the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for being the anachronism it has been for decades. Television is today the most powerful tool of mass communication in India and an engine of change even in remote communities where literacy levels remain poor. There are more than 300 news channels in Indian languages that have become the main source of news for most of India and Doordarshan
remains as dreary as it always was and as incapable of providing real news or entertainment programmes but it no longer matters because it has become irrelevant except in really isolated parts of the country where satellite dishes and private cable televisions have not yet reached.

It was, ironically, the year after Rajiv was killed that Rupert Murdoch’s Star channels beamed their way into India via satellite. Suddenly, private channels in all of India’s languages grew at such speed that keeping count became impossible and rural communities who had often not seen what the nearest town looked like were able to see big Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai from the remoteness of their village huts. It changed the way they looked at the world and it has changed rural India in a way that ambitious government welfare programmes have failed to.

When Rajiv was prime minister we began to see the first hint of how powerful an engine of change television could become. It happened accidentally. Doordarshan allowed one of Bollywood’s most famous directors to produce a television version of the Ramayana. This most popular of Indian epics is well loved and well known across most of the country because the story of Ram’s extraordinary life is told every year in the weeks just before Diwali. But it is told by amateur actors who keep forgetting their lines as they stumble about on makeshift stages so the most serious moments of the epic are often reduced to farce. On celluloid with special effects and professional actors it became larger than life. And, so popular that in villages without electricity they used tractor batteries to run communal television sets around which the whole village gathered. What changed their lives were the commercial breaks advertising Sunsilk shampoo, Colgate toothpaste and Hamam soap. Most people in rural India were too poor in the eighties to spend Rs 20 on a bottle of shampoo but they could afford the Rs 2 sachets of Sunsilk shampoo that soon appeared in village shops. It was the beginning of a revolution in personal hygiene and lifestyle.

Had Rajiv allowed private channels to enter the television business change would have come to the villages of India much sooner than it did. Why did he, a young man who travelled every summer to Western countries and who in his years as a student in Cambridge University would have enjoyed watching British television channels, not see the need to allow private television channels in India? I do not know. My only explanation is that it could have been because, like his mother, he
believed it was important for India to continue to follow the example set by the Soviet Union. It was already beginning to fall in the eighties but news from other countries travelled slowly to India and very little was known about Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to start telling the truth about his country’s brutal past.

I am ashamed to admit that I only learned about the immense changes taking place in the Soviet Union nearly a year after the Berlin Wall came down, when I travelled to Moscow in 1990 with the prime minister who took over from Rajiv. In my years as a political journalist I have been invited to be part of an Indian prime minister’s delegation to a foreign country only twice and this was one of them. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the man who became Rajiv’s nemesis, was upholding the tradition of going to Moscow on his first trip as prime minister and I was invited to be part of the press delegation that went with him. We travelled on a special Air India flight and the crew who looked after us urged us to take along the free bottles of Scotch whisky, duty free cigarettes and packets of cheese and chocolates they gave us. ‘They will come in very handy in Moscow,’ they said, ‘because there is a kind of barter system there.’

Little did we know how right they were till we ended up confined in the gulag-like Hotel Rossiya and discovered that a packet of cheese handed discreetly to the lady who guarded our floor could be exchanged for morning tea. She was a large woman with a grim expression and shabby, shapeless clothes and was meant to be a guest relations officer but looked like a warden. She helped us only if we bribed her with the foreign goods we had come armed with. The Rossiya was more penitentiary than hotel, but it had about it a hint of the atmosphere that existed in our own government hotels. Just as in our ITDC (India Tourism Development Corporation) hotels there was a peculiarly unpleasant smell in the rooms and in the bathrooms a small, hard cake of cheap Indian soap.

When we wandered about Moscow I remember being struck by other similarities with India. There were government-controlled shops filled with tawdry indigenous goods and the same black market for foreign goods. Male colleagues swore that they could hire prostitutes in Red Square for a packet of cigarettes. When I tried to file my copy from the hotels in Moscow and Tashkent I discovered the same ancient telex machines that were the bane of journalists in India and the same indifference among the officials to their work. But, I also discovered
glasnost
and
perestroika
and
Gorbachev’s valiant attempts to reform the system. It saddened me that he seemed to be doing more to bring about change than Rajiv had done despite having history, democracy and a massive mandate on his side.

So trapped was Rajiv in the bad old ways of the past that when there was a drought in 1987 he reacted with the same disdain for the people that had defined Indian political leadership. The worst effects of the drought that year were in Orissa and the response of the state’s Congress chief minister, J.B. Patnaik, was, as usual, to deny all reports of starvation deaths and famine. When newspapers reported that people in remote districts were eating red ants to survive the chief minister smiled and said that they were a ‘delicacy’ in Orissa. Reports of children dying of starvation, which he dismissed as propaganda by his political enemies, were followed by stories in the national press about women selling their babies for as little as Rs 40.

When the first stories reached Delhi in August, I suggested to the
Sunday Times
that I go to Koraput and Kalahandi to see what was really happening. The story interested my foreign editor in London because until then all the stories about Rajiv Gandhi in the Western press had raved about India’s ‘Camelot’ and he was intrigued that the gloss was beginning to peel off. The Bofors scandal had broken by this time but it was not as big a story then as it was to become later in India. In the Western media it never did become a big story.

It was not till I got to Bhubaneshwar that I discovered that the villages from where the starvation deaths were being reported were more than 12 hours away by road. In Bhubaneshwar there was no sign of famine or drought and I quickly realized that the only way to find out what was really going on was to drive to the villages from which the reports of starving children were coming, no matter how long this took. I set off almost immediately and we drove till night fell. We were on a dark road at the edge of a forest, so the only choice I had was to spend the night in my hired car outside a teashop in what my driver told me was the district of Phulbani. It was as desolate a place as I have spent the night in but my driver, who seemed accustomed to this kind of night halt, told me cheerfully that I would discover the next day that it was one of the most beautiful parts of Orissa.

In northern India I could not have dreamt of spending the night alone in a car at the edge of a forest but my driver was so relaxed about it that
I sensed I had no reason to worry about unwanted nocturnal visitors. He seemed to know the owner of the teashop well and they sat drinking tea and listening to Hindi songs on the radio late into the night, which, in this unfamiliar jungle, had a most comforting effect on me.

The next morning I set off early for Kalahandi. I remember a long drive through beautiful countryside before I came to a town that was more an overgrown village than a town. In the dilapidated row of shacks that was the main bazaar I discovered the government of Orissa’s token effort at famine relief. A free kitchen had been set up to serve a meal of lentils and rice to children under the age of five, but children older than five were prohibited from being fed. With a ruthlessness that I have never forgotten, the officials running this outrageous token kitchen turned away children they thought were over the age of five. All the children had pot bellies, discoloured hair and teeth, and a vacant look in their eyes. Classic signs of malnutrition. They stared in wonder at the huge cauldrons filled with rice and dal but when they were denied food they seemed too feeble to protest. They walked away quietly and waited for their younger siblings to bring their meagre meal to share with them. It was a horrible, sickening sight and so many years later I still find it hard to forget. Another memory from that morning is of a small baby, no more than a few weeks old, whose only living relatives were a six-year-old brother and an uncle. The brother and the uncle looked as if they had not eaten a proper meal in a while and the uncle, who lay listlessly on a string bed, told me that the children’s parents had died a week earlier of hunger-related diseases. There had been no food in the house for weeks. I tried to summon up the courage to ask the uncle if I could buy the baby, who looked as if he would not survive another day if he was not hospitalized, but my courage failed me. It is something I am ashamed of to this day.