Durbar (6 page)

It is an indication of how deracinated our little set was, how removed from even popular Indian culture, that we did not notice that a few weeks after the Emergency was declared, a film called
Sholay
was released and made history as the biggest hit ever from the Bombay film industry. Rajiv’s childhood friend Amitabh Bachchan was one of the stars of the film and would go on to play a political role when Rajiv became prime minister.

While people in Delhi’s drawing rooms, including Rajiv and Sonia and their friends, lived through the Emergency years blissfully oblivious to the new political realities that the suspension of democracy created,
most Indians were learning in different ways to understand the meaning of repression.

On the morning my mother woke me up to tell me that a state of Emergency had been declared in the country all I could think about was getting to the office as soon as possible to see if the consequences of censorship meant that I would no longer have a job. Press censorship brought with it the possibility of retrenchment in newspapers and the thought of becoming unemployed again and so soon terrified me.

When I got to the reporters’ room I found it packed with senior journalists who had descended from their fine offices at the other end of the corridor to explain the meaning of the Emergency to us humble reporters. A Bengali editor, who shall remain nameless, was in full dissertation mode and in lengthy sentences filled with big words was explaining why Mrs Gandhi had to do what she did. He supported the Emergency, he said, because no country could tolerate opposition leaders who openly incited the police and military to disobey the prime minister. His reference was to a rally in Delhi’s Ram Lila Maidan that the opposition leaders had held a few days earlier, at which Jayaprakash Narayan urged soldiers and policemen to disobey government orders. I had not been at the rally but heard from colleagues who had that it was the biggest political rally ever held in Delhi. This rally alone would have frightened Mrs Gandhi enough to declare an Emergency, nervous as she already was about the political movements against her government that seemed to be spreading across the country.

The Emergency came into effect at midnight on 25 June 1975 when the President was ‘persuaded’ to sign the declaration without asking questions. Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet ministers were forced to go along with her plan. That night every major opposition leader in Delhi was arrested. This did not seem to bother the Bengali editor.

When someone asked about press censorship, he said it was a temporary measure and then, with a wave of his hand, vanished back up the corridor where senior journalists had offices much grander than our crowded, hot and stuffy reporters’ room. It had a glass wall through which we could see the grubby balcony on which the peons sat all day, breathing fumes from the relentless traffic in the outer circle of Connaught Place. The reporters’ room seemed to have been designed with the specific purpose
of making reporters feel the worst of the heat during summer and the iciest cold in winter. Our desks were crammed together, making life even more uncomfortable, and the room always smelled of newsprint and south Indian spices.

That hot June morning there was too much excitement in the air even for someone as finicky as me to notice the smells and the heat. Journalists, especially junior reporters, love big political stories, and this was as huge a story as anyone had ever covered. What made the day even more exciting was the news that our paper had decided to defy censorship. Surinder Nihal Singh was the editor-in-chief of the paper at the time and made it clear to the senior staff at that morning’s news conference that we would carry on the front page details of the arrest of opposition leaders. When this was conveyed to us, I have to say that I was thrilled. I saw our battle against press censorship as a small but vital part of the struggle for democracy that the Emergency had provoked.

That morning most of the city’s newspapers had failed to come out because Mrs Gandhi ordered the power supply to be cut in Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg where they had their offices. But, with typical Indian ineptitude, the officials had forgotten that the
Statesman
and the
Hindustan Times
had their offices in Connaught Place, so we began our defiance of censorship by bravely bringing out a special edition that had blank spaces on its front page where the story about the opposition leaders being arrested would have been. This got us into trouble with the censors but we continued bringing out the paper with blank spaces until the censors, sitting in the Press Information Bureau, ordered the newspaper to be submitted to them every night for what they called ‘pre-censorship’. On some days it would be returned so late at night that it could not be sold the next day until after 8 a.m.

It did not take long for the
Times of India
and the
Hindustan Times
to start obeying government orders. But, the
Statesman
and the
Indian Express
fought valiantly on until the minister of information and broadcasting was changed at Sanjay Gandhi’s behest. Sweet, mild Inder Gujral was replaced by Vidya Charan Shukla. The story of the minister’s sacking that drifted around newspaper offices was that Mr Gujral, an old friend of Mrs Gandhi, had objected to Sanjay ordering him around and Sanjay had responded by ordering his immediate dismissal. The unsmiling, brutish Shukla warned us at the first press conference he held that any
defiance of press censorship would be dealt with harshly. He was soon dictating which stories we should give ‘prominence’ to and these were usually related to an event attended by Sanjay Gandhi or an idea that had come from him.

Every day in that first month of the Emergency political rallies were organized in Delhi in support of Mrs Gandhi. At these rallies, her close aides made long, sneering speeches about the opposition leaders. They were reviled as the villains of the Emergency for supposedly inciting anarchy and violence while Mrs Gandhi was praised as India’s only hope, the saviour of India. I remember one of these rallies in particular because the star speaker was Mrs Gandhi’s former stenographer, Yashpal Kapoor, the man chiefly responsible for the Allahabad High Court’s judgement against Mrs Gandhi as the official indicted for managing her election campaign without resigning from his government job. His presence at a political rally so soon after the Emergency was a sign that Mrs Gandhi had decided to be brazen. My most vivid memory of this rally is of Yashpal Kapoor’s wife, who was also present on the stage, and the large, dangling diamond earrings that she was wearing. This was unusual in those socialist times when the richest of our political leaders pretended to be poor, but as we were soon to discover the Emergency was a most unusual time.

Another rally I remember from those first days of the Emergency was one that was meant to be addressed by the Rajmata of Gwalior, Vijaya Raje Scindia, an opposition leader who had managed to give Mrs Gandhi’s policemen the slip. One day the reporters’ room buzzed with the rumour that the Rajmata was going to emerge in old Delhi that afternoon and after making a speech would allow herself to be arrested. I spent a burning hot day waiting in Chandni Chowk for her to arrive. Mark Tully, already the most famous foreign correspondent in India and the voice of the BBC in South Asia, was there along with reporters from Delhi’s newspapers.

We waited in an old Mughal square at the end of a cluttered, ugly street in front of an old mosque. Political workers from the Jana Sangh, the party the Rajmata represented, tried to rally people by shouting slogans and ‘courting arrest’. After waiting all day we were told that the Rajmata would not be coming after all and that she had probably been arrested. I remember going home and telling my mother that I had spent a whole day waiting for the Rajmata of Gwalior and she had not shown up. My mother listened politely but seemed less interested in what I was saying
than in the trays of food that were being carried to a guest room by maids I had never seen before.

‘We have guests?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘You don’t know them.’

‘Oh.’ The house was often filled with relations from Punjab whom I spent a lot of my time trying to avoid so I asked no more questions.

It was only when the Rajmata of Gwalior was arrested some weeks later that my mother told me that on the day I had waited for her in old Delhi, she had been the mystery guest in our home. In the days that she remained ‘underground’ the Rajmata was on the move constantly and stayed a few days with my parents because of their friendship with Jaswant Singh who was then one of her political aides. He was in the same regiment as my father but left the army to enter politics and went on to become India’s foreign minister when Atal Behari Vajpayee became prime minister in 1998.

Mrs Gandhi used the Emergency to teach the nation, in instalments, the lesson that not even the smallest act of defiance would be tolerated. First it was politicians and journalists who were taught what the Emergency meant. Then came the turn of judges to be taught that they would owe allegiance to the government or find themselves in trouble. So when the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether the suspension of fundamental rights was valid, they quietly submitted that it was. Only one judge dissented and paid for his defiance by remaining out of favour as long as Mrs Gandhi ruled. India’s political culture changed forever during the Emergency. It was on account of the absolute power that the prime minister was seen to wield that an atmosphere of servility and sycophancy came to surround her and her family. Dissenting voices were no longer heard in government, in Parliament or in the judiciary.

After this came the turn of rich Indians to learn what the Indian government could do to them. Their ranks had already been decimated by high taxes and a virtual economic dictatorship but now they were forced to realize how dangerous it could be for them to oppose the government in any way. In Delhi it was the sudden intrusion of unknown but important officials into people’s homes that first made people wonder what was happening. The officials were polite but asked a lot of questions and had
no hesitation in admitting that they represented various branches of the Indian government’s intelligence agencies. Then came the tax raids.

Mrs Gandhi had long used the income tax raid as a weapon against her political opponents but now raids were carried out randomly against almost anyone. Tax inspectors appeared one morning in Mapu’s house in Sundar Nagar and started questioning him about the silver chairs in his drawing room that belonged to a Gujarati prince. He tried to explain that the chairs did not belong to him and had been brought to Delhi for repairs but Mrs Gandhi’s tax inspectors had little time for explanations. After this they wandered down the road to the house of a rich businessman and questioned him about how he could afford to own and run seven air-conditioners. Stories of these raids were deliberately leaked by officials to the offices of censored newspapers and Mapu’s silver chairs got bigger headlines than the businessman’s seven air-conditioners. Journalists covering the story were somehow bedazzled by the idea of silver furniture.

The most famous of these tax raids took place in the palaces of the Maharaja of Jaipur. The Nehru–Gandhi family, who had pretensions to aristocracy, were famous for their antipathy to the Indian princes. In Mrs Gandhi’s case this antipathy was believed to be intense on account of her personal dislike of the Rajmata of Jaipur, Maharani Gayatri Devi. Those of us who knew the Rajmata also knew that though she had contested a Lok Sabha election in the early sixties and won with such an astonishing margin that she found herself in the
Guinness Book of Records
, her political aspirations were less than serious. We often wondered why Mrs Gandhi disliked someone who was no political threat to her and concluded that it could be because she was the only Indian woman, other than Mrs Gandhi herself, who was well known outside India in the seventies.

The reasons for the raid on the Jaipur royal family were not obviously political unless Mrs Gandhi was playing a card she had played with great success before. Three years before she declared the Emergency, she abolished the titles, privileges and privy purses of the Indian princes. The Government of India had signed a treaty with the princes guaranteeing them their personal privileges and a privy purse when they merged their kingdoms with the Union of India in 1947. The size of the privy purses varied according to the size of the state and diminished with every generation but Mrs Gandhi decided to put an end to the princes’ privileges
altogether. This was the first instance of the Government of India breaking a sovereign treaty.

Once India’s fabled maharajas were no longer ruling princes they lost touch with the people and when Mrs Gandhi abolished them, they went mostly unmourned. The urban middle classes saw them as feudal anachronisms and their poorer subjects no longer respected them as givers of jobs and deliverers of justice. By the seventies, the princes hardly mattered to anyone and Mrs Gandhi was seen as the great socialist heroine by the people who lived in desperate rural poverty. The princes ruled 40 per cent of India in the days of the British Raj and it was in this 40 per cent that Indian culture was kept alive. The maharajas created schools of music and painting, built museums and kept Indian languages alive through their promotion of Indian literature and poetry. But there were also stories of debauchery, decadence and indolence, of toadying to the British and betrayals of India that they became more known for.

Mrs Gandhi liked to depict herself as a person of simple living and socialist beliefs. State-controlled television channels, the only kind that existed until the nineties, portrayed her as a sort of people’s maharani whose family had donated their ‘palatial’ family home in Allahabad, Anand Bhawan, to the nation. When I finally saw Anand Bhawan during an election in Allahabad, it surprised me to find it was not a magnificent palace but an ordinary house of little charm. It was a museum by then and to perpetrate the myth of Nehruvian aristocracy, Pandit Nehru’s laundry bills from some European laundry were on display in glass cases along with other artefacts from the days when Anand Bhawan was one of the centres of the freedom movement.