Durbar (7 page)

Mrs Gandhi’s socialist officials went out of their way to humiliate the real maharajas after they were ‘derecognized’ in 1971. Senior bureaucrats and petty officials took to marching into palaces in Rajasthan on ‘inspections’ and if some objet d’art or piece of furniture caught their eye, they would order it to be sent to their own homes. With their privy purses taken away, most maharajas were unable to maintain their palaces. At the time they could not even turn the palaces into the hotels they were to eventually become since there were few foreign visitors to India in the seventies. Princely India fell into genteel decay. This did not stop Doordarshan programmes and Bollywood films from routinely depicting maharajas as venal and duplicitous and our new socialist rulers as paragons of virtue.
Doordarshan programming was entirely controlled by the government and Bollywood was controlled by writers of leftist persuasion who liked to depict princes and rich businessmen as enemies of the people.

The raid on the Jaipur royal family confirmed all the myths and created many more because of the 800 kilograms of gold found in a hidden cellar in the Moti Doongri fort. The discovery validated Mrs Gandhi’s tax raids. The funny thing is that the gold was found by accident and it seems more than possible that even the Jaipur royal family did not know of its existence. A friend who was close enough to the royal family to have been present through the raid told me afterwards that the tax raiders ‘just got lucky’.

‘They went through all the big palaces and forts with a fine-toothed comb,’ she said, ‘and they found nothing at all. I think all they found was $70 in one of Rajmata Sahib’s handbags and it was because of this that she was arrested under COFEPOSA under which they arrest smugglers and those who deal in foreign exchange. Then, on the last day they went up to Moti Doongri and again found nothing that was illegal. The man who was leading the raid was quite frustrated at finding nothing so he stamped his feet and the paving stone made a hollow sound. That’s how they found it. I tell you nobody knew it was there or when it was hidden there. If they had, do you think it would have still been there?’ What the ‘lucky’, foot-stamping tax inspector stumbled upon was a wall of gold bricks. Nothing like this hidden treasure has ever been found either before or since, and the excitement it caused during the Emergency is almost indescribable.

Delhi’s reporters finally had a really good story they could actually report on. The Jaipur gold sent such a tremor through dreary, censored newspaper offices that usually stingy editors opened their purse strings to pay for reporters to go to Jaipur and do some ‘investigative’ journalism. I was not lucky enough to be assigned this story but I happened to be in Jaipur for other reasons shortly afterwards and found the city full of new myths. In the bazaars they talked of how this was ‘Mughal gold’. The maharaja who built the fort was commander-in-chief of the armies of the Emperor Akbar, they said, and it was at that time that the gold was brought here and buried. Suddenly, everyone had an ancestor who had personally seen ‘long lines of mules laden with gold going up the hill to Moti Doongri’.

Mrs Gandhi’s tax inspectors were so encouraged by the success of the Jaipur treasure hunt that they started looking for hidden treasure in
other palaces and forts. Almost next on the list was Gwalior. Vasundhara Raje Scindia and her sister Yashodhara were the only two members of the Gwalior royal family who were around when the raid happened. Their brother, Madhav Rao Scindia, escaped to Nepal when the Emergency was declared because, as a prominent member of Parliament of the Jana Sangh at the time, he was an obvious candidate for Mrs Gandhi’s jail cells. Vasundhara Raje’s mother, Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia, was in jail by the time of the raid. Vasundhara was in the family home in Delhi when the raiders came. They threw all the furniture out of the house, she told me later, and said that she could take what she wanted from it but could no longer have the house. It was taken over by Navin Chawla, who soon became known as one of Sanjay Gandhi’s hatchet men and, much later, when a government came to power under the dispensation of Sonia Gandhi, was appointed the chief election commissioner of India. At the time of the raid on the Gwalior family he was an unknown municipal official. Vasundhara became homeless overnight and had to move into a manager’s cottage on the premises of an abandoned ceramics factory her family owned. Yashodhara told me afterwards that the taxmen seemed more interested in going into the cellars under the Gwalior palace than in anything else. It was hidden treasure they were looking for and after the Moti Doongri discovery they had good reason to hope that they would find something. They found nothing, but the raids on businessmen and opposition leaders continued.

The Emergency shattered the safe little world in which I had grown up and threw me into another world altogether. In my secure, privileged India of boarding schools, Gymkhana Clubs, summer holidays in the hills and Enid Blyton books, I had been taught to respect our political leaders and never question the authority of the government. In that first month of the Emergency I learned to understand brute political power and the terror that the Indian state could instil in those who chose to defy its will.

A
s the months went by it became clear that beneath the talk of discipline and development the main reason for the Emergency was to ensure that no questions were asked about Sanjay Gandhi’s new political role. Until that summer of 1975, Sanjay Gandhi was known only for being the prime minister’s more controversial son. He had shown little ability to succeed at anything. His academic record was unremarkable and instead of going to university, as his older brother had done, he chose to do an apprenticeship at the Rolls Royce factory in England. I knew from friends, who were with him when he was briefly at the Doon School (he left for unknown reasons), that he had a mechanical bent of mind and that his taste in reading was limited to magazines for amateur mechanics.

After he left for England not much was heard of him except for the occasional bit of gossip about reckless behaviour and a taste for fast cars. Sanjay’s activities only caught the public eye after it became known that the prime minister had granted her younger son a licence to build a ‘people’s car’ for India to be called Maruti, after the Hindu god of the wind. This was the height of the licence raj when not only were licences and quotas hard to come by but industrialists could face criminal charges for producing manufactured goods beyond their quotas. Only two or three Indian companies were licensed to make cars so for Sanjay, with no experience of automobile manufacturing, to be given a licence was so irregular that Maruti became a big issue in Parliament and in the media. What added fuel to the furore was the Congress chief minister of Haryana’s gift to Sanjay of hundreds of acres of public land on the outskirts of Delhi to set
up his car factory. Sanjay supposedly got to work but never succeeded in making a single car.

Until the Emergency Sanjay showed not the tiniest interest in politics. When the first stories about his interference in matters of government and his influence over his mother began to filter into newspaper offices many people dismissed them. If I took them more seriously it was only because of my acquaintance with Rukhsana Sultana, a celebrated socialite, whose access to the rich and powerful was legendary. Rukhsana had once been married to the brother of a school friend of mine but the marriage had not lasted. I did not see her for many years after this but heard of her often in Delhi’s social circles and always because of her connections with powerful politicians and rich businessmen. She was much older than me and we moved in different circles, so I may not have met her at all had I not gone with Naveen Patnaik to dinner at Biki and Goodie Oberoi’s farmhouse.

The Oberoi Hotel was by the mid-seventies not just the most glamorous hotel in Delhi but had enhanced its allure by giving Delhi its first nightclub. It was called Tabela and, because the word means ‘stable’ in Urdu, its interior was designed by a singularly unimaginative designer to resemble a stable. Every table had its own stall and there was real straw and paintings of horses on the walls. It was outside Tabela one evening that Naveen introduced me to Biki and Goodie Oberoi as they wafted into the nightclub in a cloud of expensive perfume and cigar smoke. They were with a baron from Germany whose private plane had been seized by Indian customs. Rich foreigners rarely came to India in the seventies and the customs officials had never seen a private plane so they confiscated it. It was as simple as that. They then spent many days examining it closely for reasons that remain unexplained. The baron was on his way to a more enticing eastern destination like Bali and was annoyed to be stuck in Delhi instead, worried that Indian customs may have plans to sell his plane in bits and pieces to smugglers. I remember him being very puzzled about why it should take so long for customs officials to release it. In a misguided attempt to defend India and blame it all on the new rules of dictatorship, I tried hopelessly to explain the Emergency to him in a few short sentences. In the course of this conversation I found myself invited to dinner at the Oberois’s farmhouse the next day, when Goodie leaned across me to order Naveen, ‘Bring her with you.’

Rural land on the edge of Delhi was cheap and Rai Bahadur Oberoi had bought more than a hundred acres of farmland in Bijwasan village near the airport to grow food and dairy products for the Oberoi Hotel. In one corner of this farm, Biki and Goodie had built themselves a modernistic glass palace and filled it with beautiful things. There were Persian carpets on floors of Italian marble, elegant European furniture, paintings by famous Indian artists and a luminous view of lit-up gardens and a swimming pool through walls of glass. Not many people lived like this in socialist Delhi and I admit to gaping like a villager as I picked up a glass of champagne from the uniformed waiter at the entrance.

No sooner did Naveen and I enter the drawing room than I noticed Rukhsana Sultana resplendent in a dark chiffon sari and very much the belle of the ball, possibly because it was by now well known that she was a close aide of Sanjay Gandhi. She wore sunglasses that were tinted blue and I remembered that my school friend had told me she wore them all the time because she was short-sighted. I had not seen her for more than ten years and was struck by how good she still looked. She was in her late thirties and had gained a few pounds so there was a soft dumpiness about her body, but her skin was as clear as that of a young girl and she had a femininity about her that was, according to men of reliable expertise, her real allure. ‘Look at the way she always smells of wonderful perfume,’ one of them said to me that evening. ‘Look at how her hands are always perfectly manicured, look at how beautifully she is dressed… You women should learn from her.’

That evening she sat surrounded by an audience of businessmen and socialites whom she was regaling with stories of the ‘social work’ she was doing ‘for Sanjay’ in the old city. He wanted her, she said with a sweet smile, to introduce Muslim women to modern ideas like family planning. The fragment of this conversation that remains etched vividly in my mind is her saying, ‘You know, these women are ready for change, darling, but they do not know how to defy their men. So when they see me, a Muslim woman, wearing chiffon saris and pearls and French perfume they like it… They see me as someone they would like to be.’ They were words I was to remember well, some weeks later, when Rukhsana’s efforts at coaxing Muslim women to plan their families caused riots in the old city and I was nearly attacked by a mob because my sunglasses caused some people to mistake me for Rukhsana.

Why Sanjay Gandhi chose an apolitical socialite to influence conservative Muslim women to stop having babies remains a mystery but what soon became evident was his personal touch when it came to running the government. In the very first weeks of the Emergency, after he appointed a tough information minister of his choice, a concerted effort began to introduce Sanjay to India as her future leader. Photographs of his thin-lipped, bespectacled face started appearing nearly every day on the front pages of newspapers. Doordarshan, state-controlled and obedient, followed him on his travels around the country with the prime minister. He suddenly seemed to be accompanying his mother everywhere she went.

He started his own political activities as well with the creation of a new youth wing of the Congress Party. It soon became hard to ignore in Delhi. Thuggish young men in white became a worrying feature of life in the city. They moved in large, noisy groups and terrorized restaurants and shops in Connaught Place and Janpath. If they chose not to pay their bills or create a disturbance nobody objected, because everyone knew that these were Sanjay Gandhi’s men. Sanjay made no effort to hide his growing political power or his influence on government policies. He announced a 5-Point Programme that was given more publicity than Mrs Gandhi’s own 20-Point Programme. The 5-Point Programme turned big policies into short sentences.

Delhi’s walls were soon covered in posters advertising the political thoughts of the new leader in snappy, one-line slogans.

The one that urged Indians to stop having more than two children. ‘
Hum do, hamare do
’, which literally translated is ‘We two, our two’, survived beyond the Emergency as a family planning message.