Durbar (49 page)

It was becoming increasingly clear that he would lose the election. Even before Rajiv made this unwise start to his election campaign, even before I went out to cover the election, I predicted that he was going to lose. I had come to this conclusion from my travels with his main antagonist, V.P. Singh. When the foreign editor of the
Sunday Times
rang to ask me what would be the big story from the general election in India, I told her it would be the possibility that Rajiv could lose the election. She was an Australian woman with little understanding of India but huge confidence in herself. She asked me with a sneer in her voice who I thought would defeat Rajiv. I told her that I thought V.P. Singh would be India’s next prime minister and she said scornfully, ‘I don’t think an unknown politician with big glasses and a funny hat can defeat a handsome and charismatic prime minister like Rajiv Gandhi.’ I replied that it was possible that looks were more important in Australia than in India and reminded her that Gandhiji was not good-looking by any standards but she was not convinced and some other, more trustworthy journalist was sent from London to cover
the election. I concentrated on covering it for my column in the
Indian Express
, which was not only more satisfying but also more interesting in terms of the places to which it took me.

When Rajat Sharma suggested that I go with him and the actor Shatrughan Sinha on a journey by road that would start in Patna and take us across Bihar into eastern Uttar Pradesh and on to Lucknow, I happily agreed. Sinha was not a politician then but was campaigning for the BJP with the intention of joining its ranks one day. As the most famous Bihari in Bollywood he was a big star in Bihar and drew huge crowds everywhere we went. I remember endless meetings on dusty playing fields and in squalid village squares, and sometimes just wherever crowds gathered because they had heard their beloved ‘Bihari Babu’ was passing through.

Sinha spoke with the studied eloquence of an actor and made the same speech everywhere, the main message contained in a single verse: ‘
Kaun kehta hai aakash mein suraakh nahin ho sakta, ek patthar to tabiyat sey ucchalo yaaron.
’ Loosely translated it means, ‘Who says it is not possible to make a hole in the sky? Just try to throw a stone upwards with all your heart.’ He would begin almost every speech with this verse so that everyone understood he was urging them to have faith in the opposition’s ability to defeat a prime minister as seemingly invincible as Rajiv. The crowds responded fervently in the decayed, disorderly towns and villages we drove through. But it was not till we got to the former princely kingdom of Dumraon, at the edge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, that we saw how effective the opposition campaign against Rajiv was proving to be.

One of Rajiv’s ministers, a famous sycophant called K.K. Tiwari was contesting from here and on our first evening as we were driving to the maharaja of Dumraon’s broken-down palace our car was stopped by a mob of Tiwari’s supporters. A man leaned in through the open front window and slapped Rajat so hard in the face that his glasses broke. We drove on without waiting to find out why but assumed that Tiwari’s supporters were so nervous that they were trying to frighten away Shatrughan Sinha. The slap was meant for him.

Sinha was staying as a guest of the maharaja in his charming, dilapidated little palace while Rajat and I were relegated to spending the night in what may once have been a fine hunting lodge. It was in ruins, with holes in the roof and its main drawing room bereft of all furniture. It was in this vast, rancid-smelling hall full of political workers sleeping on rough bedding
on the floor that we spent the night. It was an especially uncomfortable night for me. I was the only woman in the dormitory and going to the foul lavatory meant that I needed Rajat to stand guard outside because the door had no locks on it.

The next morning I discovered to my huge relief that Nandini Mehta, editor of the
Express
’s weekend edition in which my column appeared, was staying in considerably more luxury as a guest of the maharaja. I scuttled off to the palace as soon as I was up and found Nandini awake and reading the morning newspapers in a room filled with sunlight and the scent of a hot breakfast. She was more than happy to allow me the use of her clean and comfortable bathroom for my morning ablutions. Afterwards, we sat and chatted over boiled eggs, buttered toast and hot tea and she confirmed that the election did not look good for Rajiv. She said she had travelled all over Bihar and had noticed an overwhelming sense of disappointment. A majority of the people felt that their hopes had been betrayed, and on top of that there was the Bofors scandal and the very effective opposition propaganda that Rajiv was really a foreigner because of his distance from Indian realities. We exchanged notes about our travels and agreed that one of the signs that things were not going well for Rajiv was that people were making jokes about him. She said that one of the jokes that was popular and had been turned into a slogan at public meetings taunted Rajiv by saying that Jawaharlal Nehru was sending his grandson a warning from the heavens that he would face defeat. In Bhojpuri it went like this: ‘
Swarg se nana ki aayi pukaar, ab ke naati tu jaibe haar
.’

I said goodbye to Nandini after breakfast and after attending an opposition rally in Dumraon we drove across the border into Uttar Pradesh and on towards Rajiv’s constituency, Amethi. Everywhere in the filthy bazaars of small towns were posters of Rajiv smiling happily but there were no signs of improved living standards. Except in the streets in which officials lived, where there was order in the rows of neat gardens and bungalows, the towns had grown organically out of villages without any attention to urban planning. I have never understood why the Gandhi family’s pocket boroughs, constituencies that are almost their private estates, look so very uncared for. Many other political leaders have made sure that their own constituencies look so good that people vote for them in the hope that they will replicate what they have done in their constituencies on an increasingly larger scale.

What I saw in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar on this long drive reminded me of one of the saddest examples of poverty caused by political neglect that I have ever seen. It was in a village in Bihar’s Palamau district a year earlier. I had been invited by the social activist Swami Agnivesh to see the work he was doing to release workers in Bihar from bonded labour. This is a peculiarly Indian form of slavery in which a small debt enslaves generations of a family because somehow the debt continues to remain unpaid. In one village I met bonded labourers who had never left the farm they worked on to even go to the nearby town of Daltonganj less than 10 kilometres away, never seen money and never heard the name of the country in which they lived. They had heard of elections and voted regularly. When I asked them who they voted for they said simply, ‘We vote for whoever they tell us to.’

‘They’ were the landlord and his henchmen. It sickened me to see the degradation in which these people eked out an existence on the handful of grain that the landlord gave them at the end of the day. Had Rajiv’s grandiose, computerized anti-poverty schemes worked better the repugnant, shameful practice of keeping human beings in ‘bondage’ should at least have stopped. But when I came back to Delhi and discussed this with his officials, they said I could not possibly have met bonded labourers in Bihar because bonded labour had been legally abolished during the Emergency.

Somewhere along the way on my travels with Shatrughan Sinha in Uttar Pradesh we ran into V.P. Singh’s campaign convoy and attended a meeting he held on the edge of town. I remember thinking that the crowd was huge by rural standards and that people seemed to be actually listening to what he told them. Whenever he mentioned Bofors, they responded with glee and jeers. He made it the cornerstone of his campaign and came back to it over and over again in different ways so that it seemed there was nothing more important for India than to catch ‘the thieves who had stolen the people’s money’.

On 2 December 1989, V.P. Singh was sworn in as India’s seventh prime minister at the head of a government that was doomed from birth because of its fractured nature. The prime minister did not have enough seats for even a simple majority in Parliament and needed the support of several disparate parties. From the moment he was chosen to lead this rickety
coalition, he earned the enmity of the man who had thought he would be prime minister until Indira Gandhi’s assassination made it seem like a silly dream. Chandrashekhar.

Chandrashekhar, who walked from the southern tip of India to New Delhi to show that he was serious about understanding the problems of the ordinary people of India. Chandrashekhar, who went to jail during the Emergency rather than compromise with Mrs Gandhi. Chandrashekhar, who was so passionate about his socialist ideas that he did not change them even slightly in his many decades in politics. With this impressive political record behind him, Chandrashekhar showed his first signs of pettiness when he refused to accept V.P. Singh as prime minister and started to make trouble for the new government from day one by storming out of the meeting in which V.P. Singh was chosen as leader.

Even without Chandrashekhar’s sulks the new government had enough troubles. The day after V.P. Singh became prime minister, his Kashmiri home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter was kidnapped by the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and returned only after the government released a large number of important secessionist leaders. When these militants returned to Srinagar, they were publicly welcomed by armed comrades who fired automatic weapons in the air in celebration. Kashmir’s armed insurgency had begun and V.P. Singh soon showed that he had no idea what to do. His handling of India’s most serious political problem was so inept that Rajiv, whose policies had created this new phase of the Kashmir problem, started dictating what should be done as if he were still prime minister. He demanded that an all-party delegation be sent to the Valley and behaved as if there had been no Kashmir problem at all until V.P. Singh became prime minister. The wobbly, unsure new prime minister let him.

It was not just in dealing with Kashmir that V.P. Singh showed he was not a real leader, but in almost every aspect of governance. It is true that his own colleagues were plotting against him from the day he took office, but had he shown a hint of being a real leader he could have rendered futile their attempts to unseat him. Rajiv saw what was happening and quickly realized that the government was unlikely to survive a full term so he lost no opportunity to attack the government in public. It did not survive a year. But before it fell V.P. Singh, in a cynical and desperate attempt to garner popular support, announced plans to reserve thousands
of government jobs for lower-caste Hindus. The castes he included in this plan were not traditionally untouchable castes or castes that had ever been oppressed. These castes represented powerful peasant clans who needed no affirmative action on their behalf. So when Singh announced that he was implementing the suggestions for affirmative action recommended in a long-forgotten report called the Mandal Commission it was seen by upper-caste Hindus as a deliberate attempt to divide the Hindu vote. It was to prevent this that the BJP’s powerful cadre-based progenitor, the RSS, decided it was time to take action. So Lal Krishna Advani, till then a man in the shadows and not a mass leader, was pulled out of the BJP’s backroom and ordered to set off on a ‘yatra’ from the Somnath Temple in Gujarat to Ayodhya.

The route chosen for his journey was full of Hindu symbolism. The legendary wealth of the Somnath Temple had caused it to be looted and destroyed at least six times by Islamic invaders. It was in ruins in 1947 when India became independent and one of the first things done by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru was to restore its former glory by reconstructing a magnificent new temple at the ancient site. Advani’s rath yatra began in Somnath ostensibly to remind Hindus that if a new temple could be built in Somnath it could just as easily be built in Ayodhya. The real purpose of the yatra was to consolidate Hindus, always fragmented by the caste system, into an integrated vote bank.

Would there have been a yatra at all if the actions of Rajiv and V.P. Singh had not paved the way for it? Perhaps not. To give Advani’s journey a touch of Hindu mythological melodrama, a Toyota truck was embellished to look like Ram’s own chariot may have done. And, when Advani stopped to greet the crowds that lined his route, he stood under an embroidered umbrella like gods do in old Bollywood movies and more recent TV serials. It was a shameful exercise in exciting hatred against Muslims but it was horribly effective.

I followed for a while in the rath yatra’s wake and came upon town after town in which ordinary Muslims had been massacred and their homes destroyed by militant Hindu groups who seemed to never leave the killing grounds without painting Hindu religious symbols on blackened walls. These militant Hindus were always, without exception, linked in some way to the RSS and so to the BJP.

Advani did not get to Ayodhya. He was arrested in Bihar but managed to enter Delhi still riding his ‘chariot’. Overnight, he became the BJP’s new mass leader and his battle cry was ‘end pseudo-secularism’.

Urban liberals like me may have been disappointed by the new genre of politics Advani created, but to the ordinary Hindu he was a hero and it was because of his chariot ride that the BJP was able to rise spectacularly from its humiliating diminishment in 1984. Aggressive Hindu nationalism took the party from strength to strength and by 1998 it was in a position to make Atal Behari Vajpayee India’s first BJP prime minister. Advani was graceful enough to concede to Vajpayee, but perhaps he did this because he understood that to be prime minister you needed more than Hindu support. With his decision to reserve government jobs for lower-caste Hindus, V.P. Singh successfully identified the fault-lines of caste and by the time his unstable, hopeless government fell in November 1990, India was engulfed in political violence. In campuses across the country upper-caste students protested, some even setting fire to themselves, against his job reservations.