Durbar (44 page)

I remember a dinner party in the house of an American diplomat at which an uncle of mine, who lived in the United States, took me aside and asked me if I knew someone called Ottavio Quattrocchi. When I asked why, he said, ‘He just came up to me and said he was so close to the Gandhi family that he could arrange for me to get government contracts.’ My uncle was with a big American construction company. Was I surprised by what he told me? Not at all, because I had heard such stories many times before. Was I surprised that the Quattrocchis were using their proximity to the Gandhis to peddle influence? Not at all. What did surprise me was the manner in which Rajiv handled the Bofors scandal. Since there was no evidence then, or even at the end of endless inquiry commissions, that linked the bribes to him or his family why did he behave like a thief caught in the act?

When Rajiv refused to allow Bofors to reveal the names of the bribe-takers in his government rumours inevitably began to spread far and wide. Anonymous officials leaked stories about Sonia’s two brothers-inlaw having been present when Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme and Rajiv signed the deal in Stockholm. These stories remained unconfirmed despite meticulous investigative journalism by the
Indian Express
and
The Hindu
, but what did get confirmed was that people close to Rajiv and Sonia had been recipients of the Bofors kickbacks.
The Hindu
got hold of a diary that allegedly belonged to the chief executive officer of Bofors AB, Martin Ardbo, in which ‘R’ for Rajiv and ‘Q’ for Quattrocchi featured in entries that said special attention needed to be paid to them. The story was reprinted in newspapers across the country.

Rajiv and his media managers did their best to erase the Bofors stain but it refused to go away. High-level corruption was fairly rare in India in the eighties. Kickbacks in government deals were not routine, as they have now become, so for the biggest scandal to break with Mr Clean Prime Minister at its centre made the Bofors story very compelling and something everyone started to talk about when Rajiv’s name was mentioned, anywhere. I remember hearing about Bofors in remote villages where access to newspapers was limited to the mofussil kind. In village teashops people joked about the biggest thief in India sitting in the prime minister’s house and mocked Rajiv for being ‘Italy’s son-in-law’.

Rajiv reacted to his sudden unpopularity with a mixture of disdain and defiance that did not help at all. In a column I wrote in the
Indian Express
in December 1987 I described his reaction to a no-confidence motion in Parliament in these words:

By the end of 1987 everything that could go wrong had started to go wrong.

On the domestic front Rajiv confirmed that he deserved the ‘
baba log
’ label when he sacked the foreign secretary at a press conference. He did not meet the press often so this press conference was attended by every journalist I knew in Delhi and many more. There was so much interest in the press conference that it was held in the largest hall in Vigyan Bhawan, where international conferences were usually held. The prime minister addressed us from the stage and the foreign secretary, A.P. Venkateswaran, was sitting in the front row along with other officials, when in answer to a question Rajiv announced that we would soon be getting a new foreign secretary. Venkat, as he was popularly known, had no choice but to leave the hall in embarrasment.

I was not yet writing a regular column for the
Indian Express
when Venkat was sacked but it was such an extraordinary event that I brought it up in a column I wrote in December and the tone of what I wrote reflects how Rajiv was beginning to be increasingly seen as a joke. Here is what I wrote in a column dated 13 December 1987:

This crumbling of Rajiv’s shining image was happening at a time when the country’s political problems seemed to get more difficult by the day. In Kashmir the election that brought Farooq Abdullah back as chief minister resulted in disharmony and not peace. The Islamist secessionists who had contested under the banner of the Muslim United Front were beginning to return to the Kashmir Valley as armed insurgents. In Punjab, Khalistani terrorist groups had not only regrouped but had gone back to using the Golden Temple as their shelter and political headquarters. Rajiv’s peace initiatives in the north-eastern states floundered and he made a disastrous intervention in Sri Lanka that would one day become the reason for his assassination.

For many years the leaders of Tamil secessionist groups had been such honoured guests of the Government of India that when they came to Delhi they lived in luxurious suites in the Ashoka Hotel. It was in one of these suites, in either 1986 or early 1987, that I first met Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) would one day be responsible for assassinating Rajiv. What struck me most at that first meeting with Prabhakaran was that he had the eyes of a dead man. Or, perhaps, the eyes of a cold-blooded killer. When I met him in his suite in the Ashoka Hotel he was being fawned over by south Indian politicians.

In July 1987, as a result of an accord with the Sri Lankan government, Rajiv sent an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka to disarm the LTTE, virtually the only Tamil militant group left after Prabhakaran had finished killing off the others. I was among a group of Indian and foreign journalists taken to Jaffna to witness the ‘LTTE surrender’. We travelled in an unnervingly narrow army transport plane and were then transferred to helicopters that flew extra high to avoid potshots from the LTTE. The army officers travelling with us tried to reassure us by saying they were
just communication flares, but their worried expressions indicated that they were not completely sure that the Tamil militants were not trying to shoot us down.

After we landed safely we were bundled into army trucks and driven to a military airport where the surrender was to take place. On the way we stopped because the photographers with us wanted to take pictures. When a couple of them stepped off the road and started wandering about, as photographers are wont to, the officers with us became hysterical with panic and ordered them to come back on to the road immediately. Afterwards they explained that they had cleared only the road itself of mines laid by the LTTE, not the surrounding area.

The so-called surrender was a farce. One LTTE man, a close lieutenant of Prabhakaran, handed over a pistol to the Indian General in charge of peace-keeping. That was it. When we asked why this was the only weapon being surrendered, the General explained that it was only a symbolic surrender but he looked unconvinced. Having driven through the empty streets and bazaars of Jaffna we understood why. It was as if the town had been evacuated of its residents and all normal activity suspended by a curfew to fool us who came from Delhi into believing that peace had been won. Nobody was fooled and foreign correspondents in the party insisted that we see more than empty streets. They pointed out that they had not come all this way to be denied the right to meet ordinary people and so we were driven to Jaffna’s main hospital where we talked to Tamil civilians with severe injuries. When we asked if they were victims of LTTE attacks they looked shocked and said that their injuries were the result of bombing by the Indian Army. It was a disastrous visit as an exercise in public relations for the Indian Army, but it revealed that Rajiv’s Sri Lanka policy was dangerously confused.

Indian troops in Sri Lanka went up to more than 80,000 at the height of their operations to defeat the LTTE but the army officers I spoke to, at various times during the two years that the IPKF was in northern Sri Lanka, told me that they were ordered to fight with ‘one hand tied behind our backs’. Since the LTTE had at one point been trained by India and the headquarters of the Tamil secessionist groups had been in Tamil Nadu it was almost a phony war that the Indian Army was ordered to fight. But there was nothing phony about the LTTE’s war against India. Prabhakaran
was not a man with a great political vision for his people but he was an excellent leader of his guerrilla army and nearly 1500 Indian soldiers lost their lives trying to keep the peace in Sri Lanka.

For this I blame Rajiv less than the bureaucrats, mostly Tamil, who advised him on his doomed policy in Sri Lanka. They must have realized that they were dealing with a prime minister who was a novice when it came to matters of foreign policy and through a mixture of flattery and chicanery they persuaded him to go down a road at the end of which there could never have been victory. Every time I travelled to Sri Lanka I came away a little ashamed of being Indian because of the arrogance with which our diplomats treated both the Sri Lankan government and the leaders of the Tamil insurgency. A wiser prime minister, someone more acquainted with the manner in which a big country like India should behave with its small neighbours, may have controlled his officials better. But Rajiv was not that prime minister and for this he would one day pay with his life.

The summer of 1988 was hot, relentless and long. So when someone invited me to a conference on the ‘Kashmir problem’ in Srinagar I seized the chance to spend a few days in a cooler city than Delhi. The conference was boring and pointless. Pompous people talked pompously and at excruciating length about ‘solving’ the Kashmir problem but offered no solutions.

It did not bother me much because Srinagar was at its most beautiful. One tourist season had ended and a new one had not yet begun, and the city was nearly empty. I stayed in a houseboat on the Dal Lake and spent long evenings watching the sunset from the carved veranda of my house boat. I have memories of the setting sun gilding the mountains and bathing the lake in magical hues. From hidden mosques would come the call to prayer and, as if to remind solvers of the Kashmir problem that Hindus lived here as well, temple bells would start up. When the evening chill set in I would eat a meal of spicy kebabs and haaq (a special spinach that grows only on the edges of the Dal Lake) with fat Kashmiri rice. Then I would curl up on the drawing room’s big sofa and read to the sounds of shikaras in the water, children laughing and women singing Kashmiri songs.

My little holiday did not last. On the third day of the conference I got a call from my foreign editor in London, and he was cross. He wanted to know what I was doing in Srinagar when I should be in Amritsar. A police officer, someone I knew quite well, had been shot outside the Golden Temple and I needed to file a story by Friday. This was Wednesday. I got to Amritsar as fast as I could and found the city under curfew. A small army of journalists was ensconced at the Mohan International Hotel where I was staying. They sat in the lobby drinking coffee, pacing up and down, and looked busy doing nothing. There appeared to be nothing to do other than wait for the police commissioner to hold a press conference later that day. There was no point in trying to go into the temple, they said, because nobody was being allowed in.

I decided to take a chance. Armed with curfew passes for myself and my taxi driver I drove through silent streets ominously reminiscent of the aftermath of Operation Blue Star. The temple had police barricades outside every entrance but there seemed to be a ceasefire of sorts and I was curious to know if this would give me a chance to go into the temple.

‘What has happened?’ I asked the young policeman who stood at a barricade close to the temple. ‘Why is everything so quiet?’

‘They could be trying to remove the bodies before they start to rot,’ he said unconvincingly.