Durbar (46 page)

The more I thought about this the more aware I became of the kind of people Rajiv had chosen to surround himself with. Sycophants, servile officials and only those friends who were prepared to defer to him. He had chosen his team as an unwise maharaja may have done in another time. Anyone who could have advised him truthfully about what he should be doing, anyone who could have told him frankly that he was becoming unpopular because the changes that ordinary people hoped he would bring had not come about, was no longer in his court. There was nobody in his inner circle who could have told him that Bofors may not have caused so much damage to him personally if he had brought about even a measure of the changes that ordinary Indians so badly needed.

Changes in the corruption that they faced every time they dealt with a government official. Changes that would have reduced the discretionary powers that allowed officials to institutionalize corruption. Changes in the standard of living that would have brought better schools and health care. Changes in economic policy that would have brought higher growth rates and created better job opportunies. Nothing at all had changed and by 1988 it started to become clear that nothing was likely to change. Would he have done better if the shadow of Bofors had not fallen? Who knows.

The Bofors scandal cast a long shadow. The average Indian villager did not understand the full implications of what was involved nor was he certain that Rajiv had personally taken the bribes but what most people seemed to believe, with certainty, was that Indian money had been stolen and hidden away in foreign banks. They linked this with rural logic to their prime minister being married to a foreigner. On my travels I found myself running into more and more people who brought up the ‘foreign woman’ factor. It became the stuff of poems and jokes. I remember a catchy line from a song by a village poet: ‘Italy
ke damad, tere bas ka Hindustan nahin
.’ Italy’s son-in-law, how will you ever understand India?

Did this mean it was Rajiv’s wife’s foreignness that alienated him from ordinary Indians? In view of Sonia Gandhi’s spectacular success as a politician after Rajiv was killed it might sound absurd to suggest this, but I think it did. It certainly alienated him from Congress Party workers in more rural parts of the country. They said that because ‘Memsahib’ was always with the prime minister on his tours he never spent enough time in the villages. When Indira Gandhi was prime minister she would come to rural areas and spend the night there, they said, but Rajiv always had to fly off to the nearest town so that ‘Memsahib’ could sleep in a proper bed. Whether this was true or not it was perceived to be true.

As Rajiv’s unpopularity grew so did jokes about his token tours in the ‘real India’. A well-known Hindi satirist called Sharad Joshi wrote a hilarious skit called
Pani ki Samasya
(The Water Problem). In the satire he had Rajiv arriving in a village and asking where the villagers got their water from. They explain that it comes from the river and he asks if they walk to the river or take public transport, unaware that in the eighties there were no taxis in rural India. When they tell him that they have to walk to the river he points out that the water they bring back must be
quite hot then. When they admit it is he orders an official to check if the World Bank can be persuaded to build a shed over the river.

An audio rendering of the skit was available on cassettes in shops across north India. An apolitical friend gave it to me in Delhi and when I listened to it I could not help thinking that had Rajiv listened to my advice and seen to it that Doordarshan’s production standards were made more professional this skit may never have been possible. Doordarshan’s cameras captured every word he said on his rural tours and not everything he said was clever so he would sometimes be shown asking silly questions like whether some villager’s house was rented or owned by the man who lived in it.

Rajiv was mocked for not understanding Indian realities in jokes, satirical skits and conversations. What he most certainly appears not to have understood were the changes that were taking place in India’s villages. They happened mostly because of the increasing popularity of television. India’s villages in the eighties were so steeped in superstition and backwardness that celluloid images were seen by illiterate people as manifestations of the divine. A film called
Jai Santoshi Ma
about a goddess nobody had heard of till the film came out created a new cult. The film told the story of an unhappy woman who was tortured and starved by her husband’s family while he was away working in some distant city. What keeps her alive in the film is her enduring faith in the goddess Santoshi, for whom she fasts every Friday and practises other austerities. The film became a runaway hit but nobody noticed that this was a new goddess invented in Bollywood. Not even my well-educated, Westernized friends who started to keep the Santoshi Mata fast after seeing the film. When the film was shown in rural cinema halls people placed offerings of incense, flowers and money in front of the screen as if they were participating in a religious ritual.

But with television the most illiterate viewers seem to have worked out that what they were seeing was real. Television made it possible for them to see, often for the first time, cities like Delhi and Mumbai and observe that these were places in which other Indians lived in nice houses with plump, glowing children. It made them aspire to the same things in their own lives possibly for the first time. For this to happen the economy needed to grow faster than the annual average of 3 per cent that it had grown at since 1947 under the socialist policies of Rajiv’s mother and grandfather. Policies that Rajiv made not the smallest move to change.

It was not that Rajiv did not know that delivering economic change would win him the next election but he seemed unable to understand how to bring these changes about. When he failed politically to counter the damage done by the Bofors scandal the bureaucracy, ever-resistant to change, became stronger and imposed once more the centralized governance that their colonial administrative training had bred them to believe was the only way to govern India. Even when, under the influence of Mani Shankar Aiyar, who remained a close aide, Rajiv decided that the solution to problems in the country’s governance lay in strengthening village councils or panchayats he created a system in which money would flow directly from the central government to the villages bypassing state governments. Powerful opposition chief ministers like R.K. Hegde in Karnataka immediately objected.

By 1988 I was writing a weekly political column for the
Indian Express
and I notice when I now read the pieces I wrote that year that nearly all of them make fun of what Rajiv and his government had become. There are references to the prime minister holidaying in the Andamans with Italian family and friends just months after the famine in Orissa, and to his attempts at reviving the spirit of the freedom movement by re-enacting events like the Dandi March as if they were meaningless exercises. His advisors convinced him that the best way to increase his popularity was to celebrate India’s fortieth birthday as a nation and link it to Jawaharlal Nehru’s centenary. So a committee was set up called the 40/100 Committee to devise events that sought to evoke nationalism and reverence for the dynasty that had given India three prime ministers. This committee persuaded Rajiv to lead a new Dandi March along the route the Mahatma had taken, without considering that Gandhiji had been protesting against an unjust salt tax and not just taking a long walk to the coast. The 40/100 Committee appeared not to have noticed either that the British Raj had ended long ago and that it was slightly bizarre for the prime minister to be re-enacting a famous protest march without having anything specific to protest against.

Then there was the Great Freedom Run in Delhi for which the prime minister and his ministers jogged from Vijay Chowk to India Gate to the soundtrack of
Chariots of Fire
, a film popular in India that year. I described the confusion in this attempt to improve the prime minister’s image in these words in a column that appeared on 13 March 1988 in the
Indian Express
.

In the same piece I quoted Romi Chopra as saying proudly that, ‘Like khadi, tracksuits are a great leveller.’ He planned the Great Freedom Run along with Suresh Kalmadi who, decades later, when Sonia Gandhi became India’s de facto prime minister, ended up in jail on charges of stealing money from the organizing committee of the 2011 Commonwealth Games.

When all attempts to revive the spirit of the freedom movement failed and when there were no signs of Rajiv becoming popular once again in India the bureaucrats in his inner circle succeeded in persuading him to concentrate on foreign affairs. They encouraged him to interfere in the internal affairs of India’s neighbours like Sri Lanka and the Maldives and sent him off to travel to the capitals of powerful Western countries where local journalists still saw him and Sonia as a glamorous couple. Rajiv’s foreign travels became so frequent that Delhi’s
Sunday Mail
gave him a booby prize for being globetrotter of the year. It calculated that he made thirty-one visits to twenty-nine countries in eighty-seven days.

In private the officials who sent him globetrotting joked about the absurdity of some of his foreign policy decisions. When India blockaded tiny, landlocked Nepal for several weeks, causing terrible shortages of essential supplies, senior officials in the Foreign Ministry admitted, in off-the-record conversations with me, that this had been done for no real reason. The consequences of the blockade were hardly reported in the Indian press and I found out about the severe shortages of food and fuel Nepal was facing only because I happened to take Aatish on a holiday to Kathmandu. When I got back to Delhi I went to see a senior bureaucrat to find out why India was behaving like such a bully. He responded at first with the publicly stated reason, which was that Nepal was getting too cosy with China and had to be punished. Then with a short derisive laugh he said, ‘That’s the official reason. But the real reason is that Rajiv got upset because the King of Nepal refused to have breakfast with him in
New York on the grounds that he couldn’t do a breakfast meeting because he was never up that early.’

With Pakistan relations were even more fraught because of a military exercise called Operation Brass Tacks that took place in 1987 and nearly caused a real war. The Indian Army described the exercise as routine but when whole divisions of the army were moved up to the front General Zia-ul-Haq became extremely nervous and responded by moving his own troops up to the border. It was a cricket tour of India by Pakistan’s cricket team that brought hostilities to an end and Zia, ever smiling his horrible fake smile, came to India to try and improve his own image by taking advantage of cricket diplomacy.

Then suddenly Zia-ul-Haq was gone, killed in a mysterious plane crash on 17 August 1988. For me personally, it was an event I celebrated, as the vast majority of Pakistanis did, because of an aversion to military dictators that runs deep. Military dictators make democracy, even the dynastic kind, look good. With Zia’s death everything in Pakistan changed. Benazir Bhutto came to power as the first democratically elected Pakistani leader in ten years opening up the possibility of an exciting new relationship with India, but again Rajiv was played by the bureaucrats as if he were a half-literate child. They allowed him to pose for pretty pictures with Benazir by his side, they put all sorts of nice-sounding statements in his mouth, but behind all this they remained as obdurately against peace with Pakistan as they had always been. It was the same old men in charge playing the same old games under the oblivious gaze of a prime minister who seemed happy with just the photo opportunities.

Zia’s death gave me a chance to go back to Pakistan to do a story for NDTV and in doing so to become a bystander in a wonderful moment in history. NDTV came into being at about the time of the 1988 election in Pakistan and I was asked by Radhika Roy, who started NDTV with her husband Prannoy, if I would go to Pakistan to cover the election for the very first episode of a programme called
The World This Week
to be anchored by Prannoy. So I was in Karachi on the night Benazir won her slender victory and to this day I think of this election as the most poignant I have ever covered. After a decade of military rule so brutal that an elected prime minister could be executed, there was a tentative quality about the celebrations that night mixed with a joyous madness. I had dinner with my friend Imran Aslam, who went on to become one of Pakistan’s most
respected editors and head of Geo, one of Pakistan’s first private television channels. At the time he worked for a newspaper in Karachi and played a vital role in explaining to me the nuances of the alliance that brought Benazir to power. We watched the victory processions from his balcony.

I stayed up almost all night unable to sleep because of the excitement. It was as if a lid had been taken off the country and unleashed political forces that nobody knew existed. The crowds who thronged the streets all night shouted slogans that mourned Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s absence and celebrated the victory of his daughter. The two that remain etched in my memory are, ‘Bhutto
hum sharminda hain, tere qatil zinda hain
.’ Bhutto we are ashamed that your killers are still alive. And, ‘
Jiye
Bhutto’. Bhutto lives. Two simple words but shouted with so much passion that they resounded in the air like background music. The revellers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party were matched by those who had voted for the MQM (Mohajir Qaumi Movement), which was part of the victorious alliance. Imran explained that the MQM was a new political party that was created to represent refugees who came to Pakistan in 1947. The word
mohajir
means refugee in Urdu. Trucks filled with women wearing bangles in MQM colours drove around the city till dawn broke. And in a country in which singing and dancing in public were banned under the military dictator’s Islamic laws there was dancing and singing in the streets.