Durbar (8 page)

Along with Rukhsana’s efforts to teach Muslim women the joys of having fewer babies, another point in Sanjay Gandhi’s programme that began to manifest itself in Delhi soon was the injunction to remove slums. If Rukhsana Sultana was an odd choice as his family planning envoy, the person he picked to be his slum clearance envoy was odder still. He chose Jagmohan, a municipal official, whose family had come to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and who had a reputation for being bitter about the division of India in the name of Islam. Years later when he started writing regularly in newspapers, the thoughts he expressed had a distinct tinge of Hindu nationalism.

Jagmohan was a small, charmless man with a long nose and hair that he brushed upwards to cover his bald pate. He was head of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) when the Emergency began and vain about his administrative abilities, perhaps because he had developed some parks in Delhi and had made efforts to ‘beautify’ the city. When Sanjay announced his slum removal plans, Jagmohan took up the task with unconcealed zest. Sadly, one of the first things he demolished in the old city was a lovely little air-conditioned restaurant called Flora, which was so close to the steps of the Jama Masjid that you could see the mosque through its big glass windows as you feasted on kebabs so delicate they melted in your mouth. When I made some inquiries about the disappearance of my favourite restaurant, I learned that it had been demolished on Jagmohan’s orders because it was ‘illegally constructed’.

It was around then that rumours started to spread in the old city about Jagmohan being a man who ‘hated’ Muslims. Bazaar gossip had it that a meeting of officials had taken place in Ranjit Hotel, a new hotel nearby whose higher floors offered a clear view of the old city. According to hearsay, it was at this meeting that Jagmohan said, ‘I want everything cleared from here to the Jama Masjid because I will not allow another Pakistan to come up.’ Jagmohan has since denied that there was ever such a meeting but because newspapers were censored at the time rumours were easily believed. This was especially true of the bazaars of the old city. Karim’s restaurant put up a sign in Urdu that said: ‘Political conversations
are banned in this restaurant until further notice.’ But rumours of Jagmohan’s alleged plans to demolish huge sections of old Delhi continued to spread and somehow got mixed up with Rukhsana Sultana’s exercises in family planning.

Rukhsana may have convinced herself that she was doing social work in old Delhi, but the residents of this conservative Muslim quarter of the city saw her as someone who had been sent to corrupt God-fearing Muslim girls. I heard this not from women in the old city but from Muslim men, particularly the older, bearded ones, who saw themselves as sentinels of Islam and its traditions. It was always easy in this part of Delhi to raise the cry of Islam being in danger and between Jagmohan’s demolitions and Rukhsana’s family planning forays it became easy for Muslims to believe that the Emergency was being used to target them as a community. Days before violence broke out at Turkman Gate, I remember wandering about the streets around the Jama Masjid and being conscious of a simmering rage.

Shahjahanabad, the old Mughal city, once existed where the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort now stand. At one time its population had been mostly Muslim. After Partition this changed because thousands of Punjabi refugees were settled in the homes vacated by the Muslims who left for Pakistan. But because of old tensions and differences in dietary habits the Hindus formed their ghetto on one side of the mosque and the Muslims lived on the other side, as they do today.

These are factors that Sanjay Gandhi seems not to have considered or cared much about. If the prime minister was trying to give him wiser counsel it did not prevent him from sending his envoys to this politically sensitive place to implement the two most contentious points of his 5-Point Programme. Rukhsana Sultana and Jagmohan went about their missions with zeal and insensitivity. And what happened at Turkman Gate on 18 April 1976 was an eruption of public anger that had been building slowly for months.

Turkman Gate is an old Mughal gate that was one of the entrances to the walled city, built by Emperor Shah Jahan when he moved his capital here from Agra. It is made of stone, more arch than gate, and would have been just another one of Delhi’s forgotten monuments if it had not lent its name to the area in which it stands. Leading off from the gate is a maze of narrow lanes that twist and wind their way to the Jama Masjid. Until Jagmohan’s demolition crews arrived, these narrow lanes were lined with
old-fashioned havelis typical of this part of the city. Their architecture is distinct; they are usually tall, narrow structures built around a central courtyard. These grand, old buildings have now mostly disappeared but in the seventies there were many fine havelis hidden in old Delhi’s squalid, cluttered alleys. Their narrow doorways opened to courtyards and walled gardens and into high-ceilinged rooms beautifully furnished with antique Persian carpets and dusty chandeliers. By the seventies, municipal neglect had turned old Delhi into so unsanitary a place that those who owned the grander havelis had moved to newer and cleaner parts of the city, but this did not mean that old Delhi could be described as a slum. It was, and still is, the most picturesque and romantic part of the city despite decades of neglect and civic decay. There were slums and shanties in newer parts of the city but, for reasons that remain mysterious, it was old Delhi that was targeted for ‘slum removal’.

On 18 April 1976, it was one of those lazy afternoons in the reporters’ room when news came of riots in the old city. Whoever brought the news said people had been killed in police firing. I assumed that it was a clash between Hindus and Muslims because this, sadly, is what the old city had become notorious for after 1947. There was some debate in the reporters’ room whether it was even worth covering a riot since the story would be almost certainly censored but I decided to go anyway. After a series I had written on Delhi’s hospitals was censored, I was given the task of writing an anodyne column called ‘Passing By’. I had to find three people who were passing through Delhi every week and interview them. It was as tedious a task as I have ever had in my career. So I jumped at the idea of having a real story to cover, even if just for my own satisfaction.

The bulldozers had arrived before I got to Turkman Gate and were doing their work with remarkable speed. Clouds of dust and debris obscured the houses that were being demolished, so it took me a few moments to realize that the bulldozers were battering down old Mughal havelis, which may have looked rundown and shabby from the outside but were proper, furnished homes beyond the façade. The officials with the bulldozers did not care. They were interested only in carrying out their orders. Through the dust and debris I saw people standing amid their salvaged possessions, looking dazed and helpless. Women wailed and children wept as they stood among pots and pans tied up with string, clothes gathered in bundles made of old sheets, rolled up mattresses and
small pieces of furniture that they had managed to save. They stared mesmerized at the bulldozers as they smashed down the walls of their homes. When the walls came down, there would be glimpses of beds and cupboards and carpets before the bulldozers smashed them to dust. At one moment it looked as if some men were on the verge of stopping the demolition by lying down in front of the bulldozers, but before this could happen a convoy of trucks arrived, into which they were herded.

While the officials supervising the demolitions were busy I managed to talk to some of the people whose homes were being demolished. They said they had been given no more than an hour’s notice to move out of their homes. There had been rumours of possible demolitions for about a week but nobody had paid much attention to them because they did not think it was possible that the government would destroy their homes. It was only that morning, before the bulldozers arrived, that people realized they were about to lose their homes. They tried resisting but their protests had ended quickly when the police escorting the demolition squad fired into the crowd. Nobody knows how many people died in police firing that day. Figures range from twelve to 1200.

The people who were forced to move from Turkman Gate were taken to one of Sanjay Gandhi’s ‘resettlement colonies’ on a wasteland beyond the Yamuna river where they were given small plots on which they were ordered to build their homes. Given the space provided, they could afford to build no more than one-room tenements, and since there were no provisions for drainage, electricity or water, what emerged from Sanjay Gandhi’s ‘slum clearance drive’ were real slums that even today are places of open drains, flies, disease and degradation.

These shanties stretch from the banks of the Yamuna to the borders of Uttar Pradesh. If Jagmohan had been a real city planner he would have realized that by creating a wasteland of slums on the other side of the Yamuna he was throwing away forever the chance to use the river as part of Delhi’s urban design. It could have been what the Thames is to London, the Seine to Paris and the Hudson to New York instead of turning into the poisonous sewer it is today.

Bizarrely, the place where I was to hear about the Turkman Gate incident next was, of all places, the unlikely surroundings of another Oberoi
dinner party. Naveen called one morning to say that Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq, had returned to India after many years abroad and Goodie and Biki Oberoi were having a dinner party in his honour.

‘We should go,’ he said, ‘it could be fun.’

One achievement Indira Gandhi can be given full marks for was the ‘Indira–Sheikh accord’ that she signed with Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah in 1974. As a result of this accord he gave up the demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir and agreed to elections within the democratic framework of India.

Sheikh Abdullah was Kashmir’s most important political leader and the history of the subcontinent may have been different if the Government of India had not made its first big mistake in Kashmir by jailing him for nearly two decades. In 1953 Indians were still on an extended honeymoon with their political leaders so nobody seems to have asked too many questions about Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision to imprison Sheikh Abdullah, who was not just Nehru’s personal friend but the man directly responsible for Kashmir not opting to be in Pakistan.

Thirty years later, while I was doing research for a book on the Kashmir problem, I examined the reasons why Sheikh Abdullah had been jailed and found them hard to understand. The charges against him seemed flimsy. He had played golf with the American ambassador to India, met American officials in Saudi Arabia and visited Pakistan, and it was on the basis of these activities that he was charged with trying to bring about the secession of Kashmir from India with American help. All he appears to have wanted was Kashmir’s right to retain the special status it was given when it chose to remain in India. Under the terms of its accession it was allowed to have its own prime minister, its own constitution and greater autonomy than other Indian states. These terms could have been conceded without any damage to the fabric of India.

Farooq Abdullah, Sheikh Abdullah’s eldest son, left Kashmir after his father was jailed to go to a medical school in Jaipur. After becoming a doctor, he made a life for himself in England and returned only in 1975 after his father was released and allowed to return to Kashmir as chief minister. I remember this particular evening as being even more enjoyable than usual, possibly because Farooq was an old friend of the Oberois, returning after a long absence. It could as well have been because Sheikh Abdullah was now chief minister in Kashmir and the Oberois owned
Srinagar’s grandest hotel. Farooq Abdullah, a very tall man, was a better-looking, lighter-skinned version of Sheikh Abdullah.

After drinks in the drawing room we went downstairs to the dining room. It had glass windows that opened on to the same landscaped gardens and a swimming pool that could be seen from the floor above but more intimately. The food, as usual, was excellent, starting with European hors d’oeuvres, a European main course that I think was capons from the Oberoi farm and then, to satisfy the Indian palate, there was spicy Goan prawn curry. Farooq and I were seated at the same table that evening and the conversation turned to politics, as it frequently did during the Emergency in drawing rooms that did not have government officials or members of the Gandhi family present. Most people at my table were supporters of the Emergency and made this clear. There was a retired military man who said that he liked the Emergency because he found it easier to park his car in Connaught Place and ‘because the trains were now running on time’. This provoked me to say, with a sweet smile, that the trains had run on time in Hitler’s Germany as well. There were protests from the military man and his wife about this ‘odious’ comparison. It must have been to deflect attention that I asked Farooq if it was true that his father had recently made a speech in Delhi criticizing the Emergency.

Farooq, who had listened quietly to the military man, looked straight at him and said that his father had indeed made such a speech after visiting the area where people moved from Turkman Gate were ‘resettled’. It had made him very angry. It had shocked him, Farooq said, that they were living in the open in the rainy season. They had been dumped without shelter and without help, his father had said in his speech, adding that he could not believe that human beings could be treated this way. I cannot remember what the military man said in response but I do remember that we stopped talking about politics and went back to the sort of inanities usually discussed at dinner parties.

When I look back on Sanjay Gandhi’s early exercises in governance I realize that it was the policy that interested him and not the people it would affect. Since he was a political novice and apparently uninterested in history, he never examined the reasons why the poorest, most illiterate Indians had the most children or why slums had come up in our cities.
He was interested only in ensuring that these things were stopped. The Emergency’s suspension of fundamental rights suited his idea of governance perfectly.