Durbar (9 page)

On the need for ‘slum clearance’ Sanjay was correct in observing that cities that had once been charming and well-planned now looked like slums, but he never stopped to examine why this had happened. Had he done so he would have noticed that the blame for it lay in his grandfather’s belief that central planning was the only way to urbanize India. Sanjay’s solutions to the problem of slums may have worked better had he tried to understand what caused them.

It was not poverty that made migrants from rural India choose to live in flimsy dwellings in the midst of filthy, festering shanties it was the unavailability of affordable housing. The problem has reached crisis proportions today in cities like Mumbai and at its root is the Nehruvian idea of centrally controlling economic activity. Indian metropolises continue to be controlled by state governments instead of elected city governments and this is hard to change because of the mindset that Nehruvian socialism created. A mindset based on the fundamental belief that officials are benign, competent and beyond reproach.

Jawaharlal Nehru was a passionate democrat in political matters. Thanks to him, India’s political institutions grew strong when dictatorships bloomed in every one of India’s neighbouring countries. But when it came to the economy and building economic assets, he was a benevolent dictator. He believed that it was necessary for the state to control economic activity to prevent private entrepreneurs from profiteering, so one of the actions he took in the early sixties was to ban private real-estate developers in Indian cities. He set up the DDA to build affordable housing for the poor but since this was an impossible task for a single organization to undertake, slums developed when the number of migrants exceeded the supply of adequate housing. The DDA idea was copied in other Indian cities so that across the country slums came up in cities and towns. Then, when politicians realized that it was easy to find voters in the slums, they did nothing to stop them from growing. None of these things concerned Sanjay Gandhi. He wanted slums to be cleared and that was that.

Sanjay began his slum clearance exercises in Delhi because it was the capital and then made similar efforts in Agra. India had very few foreign visitors in the seventies but those who did come almost always went to
see the Taj Mahal and while the Taj remained indescribably beautiful the bazaars around it had become indescribably squalid. In Delhi, why did he begin the demolitions in the old Mughal quarter between the Jama Masjid and Turkman Gate? I have asked myself this question many times and not found an answer. And I have no idea why it was in this part of the city that he sent his family planning envoy, Rukhsana Sultana. What is a matter of historical record is that his mother’s health minister, the former maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Dr Karan Singh, had evolved a population policy, just before the Emergency, that was based on the premise that development was the best contraceptive. But development takes time and Sanjay Gandhi wanted instant results. The prime minister must have shared his impatience because she did nothing to prevent him from making a radical change in her health minister’s family planning policy. Sanjay altered it to base it on targets that officials were ordered to meet. Everyone from teachers in villages to clerks in the government were enlisted and given sterilization targets. When the targets were found to be unrealistic, officials used the Emergency’s suspension of fundamental rights, and the blanket of silence imposed by a censored press, to institute an undeclared programme of compulsory sterilization. This started to happen not just in Delhi but in villages across northern India. The peons in the
Statesman
office, our most reliable source of information from the rural areas, brought back to the reporters’ room stories of relatives in villages in Uttar Pradesh who had been forcibly sterilized.

Newspaper editors in those times did not allow reporters to travel out of Delhi except in rare instances, so it was hard to know whether the stories the peons brought from their villages were true. What I did know was what was happening in old Delhi. Derelicts, rickshaw-wallas and others who slept on pavements at night were being picked up by mysterious officials who appeared in vans. They were taken to clinics where they were sterilized against their will. The very poor were easy ‘targets’, but despite their destitution they had tongues and they talked freely about being picked up in white vans with tinted glass windows and then waking up in hospital beds. It was only a matter of time before this ‘point’ in Sanjay Gandhi’s 5-Point Programme became as notorious as slum clearance.

Sanjay Gandhi was so obviously the most important person in Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency government that we in the media, who sat idling the hours away in reporters’ rooms in Delhi, became obsessed
with finding out what we could about him. We heard from ‘reliable sources’ that he had no time to read books but liked comics and technical magazines. We heard that he had a bad temper and got very angry if his orders were disobeyed. The sacking of his mother’s information minister, Inder Gujral, was an example often mentioned. We heard that Sanjay was completely in charge of running the government and that the prime minister listened only to him. We had no way of verifying any of this information because he gave no interviews and our only contact with him was at public events like rallies where he said very little. He spoke in uncertain Hindi and in staccato sentences in a thin voice that was not made for public speaking.

Mrs Gandhi was not a popular prime minister by the summer of 1975. The high moment of her career had been the Bangladesh war in the winter of 1971 that ended with the division of Pakistan. India had not won a war in more than a thousand years, Mrs Gandhi’s admirers like to say, and so if she achieved nothing else in her life she had done more than enough by winning the Bangladesh war. More than two decades after that war ended, I interviewed one of Mrs Gandhi’s most ardent supporters, the industrialist Rama Prasad Goenka, for a television programme. When I asked him why he admired Mrs Gandhi so much he said without a moment’s hesitation that it was because she had won India her first war in more than a millennium. In the immediate aftermath of the war even her opponents, like Atal Behari Vajpayee, exalted her publicly as Durga, the goddess of war. India’s most famous artist, M.F. Hussain, painted her riding on the back of a tiger as the goddess Durga. But by 1975 Mrs Gandhi’s lack of administrative skills and her misguided economic policies led to general unrest. The slogan of ‘
Garibi hatao’
(Remove poverty) that won her a spectacular victory in the 1971 general election had begun to ring hollow because her economic policies had failed to make the smallest dent in India’s poverty.

By the summer of 1975 the mood in India was defeated, bleak and desperate. Every economic indicator told a bad story. Literacy was less than 50 per cent, infant mortality higher than in almost any other country, GDP growth so slow that it was mocked as the Hindu rate of growth. The richest Indians did without clean water and regular electricity. In Mrs Gandhi’s own neighbourhood, long power cuts became the bane of burning hot summer nights. The water that came out of taps was undrinkable unless
boiled. India seemed incapable of dealing with the most fundamental human needs like clean water to drink and enough food to eat.

Meanwhile, in the drawing rooms of Delhi, life went on as it had always done.

Without exchanging more than a few words with Sonia during the Emergency I noticed that none of the Indian women in what was considered her inner circle of friends were ever informal with her, except Nina, Arun Singh’s wife, and she was not in Delhi much. The other ladies seemed to be in awe of Sonia and their simpering attempts to make conversation always seemed, at least to me, to be stilted and false. Sonia guarded her privacy fiercely and this gave her a reserve that was forbidding. I remember just one instance of trying to engage her in conversation at this time at one of Vicky’s dinner parties. I asked her if she had ever missed Italy after coming to live in India and her answer was, ‘No. Not at all. Sometimes maybe some food…some kinds of bread.’ She made it so clear that she was not interested in the conversation going any further that I scuttled off and found someone easier to talk to. I personally found Sonia as foreign as any foreigner I had ever met. In those days she never wore Indian clothes, and was always in skirts or frocks, which added to the impression that she was different from the rest of us.

One thing I gathered from overhearing a conversation she had with the ladies who surrounded her was that she seemed terrified of India in a deep, deep way. It was summer and there must have been a new outbreak of malaria that the ladies were talking about. I heard Sonia say that when her children were babies she was so worried about them being bitten by mosquitoes that she would put anti-mosquito coils under their cradles. She only stopped when the family doctor told her that they were more in danger from the smoke of the repellent than from mosquitoes. None of the ladies found the story funny. None of them had the courage to tell her that when you grow up in India, you learn to live with mosquitoes just as you learn to live with undrinkable water in your taps, filthy streets, flies and an unreliable supply of electricity.

Another memory I have of Rajiv and Sonia in the Emergency days was when a group of us went to Tabela after a dinner party. Romi Chopra was in the group and Sonia’s brother-in-law Waltair Vinci,
who worked for Fiat in Italy. We were too early for Tabela to be open so as we sat on loungers by the Oberoi pool and I heard Sonia’s brother-in-law chatting to her in Italian with an informality that was refreshing. I think he asked her to come and dance with him and she said, ‘
Doppo
’ which someone translated for me as ‘later’. There was no dancing, though, and neither Rajiv nor Sonia ever drank anything stronger than juice while the rest of us drank what we could get from the bootlegger.

It was from the group of friends that surrounded them that I got to know more about Rajiv and Sonia. These friends loved talking about their friendship with Rajiv and Sonia and competed with each other to show how close they were. I learned from them that Sonia hated politics and politicians and was very loyal to her friends, and that Rajiv was a ‘very good person’. When I asked for an example of his goodness I was told, more than once, that Rajiv saw a beggar in rags on a cold night and immediately stopped his car and gave him his own coat.

Delhi in the seventies was a city in which everything was changing. All kinds of social and political barriers were breaking down. In the most conservative drawing rooms young people I had grown up with were smoking hashish and talking of revolution. This was partly because the winds of change that began to blow across the West in the sixties were bringing new music, new ideas and hippies to Delhi. Suddenly, girls from ‘good families’ were running off to Kathmandu and Goa in pursuit of free love and freedom.

There were indigenous influences as well that were beginning to change the way we thought. Political influences that came from the Naxalite movement that had spread across West Bengal and Bihar had many sympathizers in Delhi University. When seen from the safety of smoke-filled student canteens, the Naxalite revolution seemed most romantic. The allure of revolution was heightened by the repression the Emergency brought to Delhi and because Mao and Marx had not been discredited yet. The brutal, mindless violence that the Naxalite movement would later spawn had not yet begun to happen.

The students I knew who joined this Maoist armed struggle were well born, well educated and full of revolutionary zeal until they actually went
to join the ‘people’s struggle’ in the jungles of eastern India and had their first brush with the law. No sooner did they get arrested for taking up arms against the Indian state than they came home chastened and shaken up by the torture and brutality they faced in police stations. I remember meeting girls who showed me scars on their bodies that they said had been made by policemen putting their cigarettes out on them during torture sessions. I was not a political reporter yet nor did I fully understand such things as revolutions, but it was hard not to notice that outside the drawing rooms in which I spent most of my evenings, India was changing and that the people I met in those drawing rooms were oblivious to these changes. As a reporter I met different kinds of people and got a sense of what was happening. Revolution was so much in the air that for a moment I was personally seduced. I remember going off to a little shop in Connaught Place that was owned by the Embassy of the Soviet Union and sold Marxist literature of all kinds. I think it may have been my failed attempts to plough through
Das Kapital
that prevented me from joining my more revolutionary friends. But I continued to meet them for long, political discussions made languid with hashish or volatile with Old Monk rum in small, one-room barsatis in Nizamuddin and Golf Links.

There were other changes happening. There was a new kind of cinema coming from Bollywood, new young artists who tried to depict changing realities in their paintings and writers who were beginning to question what was going wrong in India. Everyone loved gossiping about Sanjay Gandhi and speculating about why the prime minister was letting her son rule India in her place. So when I met the friends of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi I found it most curious that they seemed completely unaffected by India’s social and political changes.

Perhaps it was because these changes had no impact at all on their mundane lives. They had nearly all married young, nearly all produced a child or two by their early thirties and their conversations were not very different to the conversations that my parents’ generation would have had. When the occasional foreign visitors turned up in Vicky Bharat Ram’s drawing room, there would be talk of the latest fashions in Europe or a new film from Hollywood and this would hugely elevate the level of discourse. Then the foreigners would disappear and it would be back to talk of holidays and children and occasionally spicy gossip about someone’s private life and even that was not really spicy.