India (9 page)

Indira Gandhi began to distrust her colleagues, and lost the political intuition that had oriented her strategies in the past. She fought with her daughter-in-law, Maneka, a strange, attractive woman who was apt to make outrageous allegations, and ordered her out of the house. Maneka refused to leave—instead she summoned her sister, ordered lunch and sat down to watch an Amitabh Bachchan movie on the VCR at high volume. Mrs. Gandhi burst into tears; Rajiv and his hulking cousin, Arun Nehru, told a security officer to remove the sisters from the house; the officer refused unless he was given the order in writing. Nearing midnight, Maneka, her sister and her baby, Varun, departed in front of the watching media. Mrs. Gandhi tried and failed to keep possession of little Varun, to whom she was devoted. Maneka published a letter accusing “Dear Mummy” of “literally torturing” her “in every conceivable way.”
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Mrs. Gandhi’s murder in 1984 was a kind of suicide, a fulfilment of the warnings she had hoped to keep at bay through manipulation and sorcery. The root cause was a conflict she and the late Sanjay had sparked in Punjab by attempting to influence a state election. To break a local coalition in Punjab, Sanjay had set up and sponsored an obscure Sikh preacher, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, as an alternative political force. Bhindranwale was an extremist, a man with intense eyes who railed against any Sikh men who dared to cut their beards or touch alcohol.
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In Canada, the U.S.A. and particularly in Britain, money was raised by Sikh activists for the cause of a separate homeland.

The scheming and plotting of mother and son ended with the breakdown of civil order in Punjab when the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most holy shrine of the Sikh faith, was taken over by Bhindranwale and his armed supporters. Indira Gandhi ordered Operation Blue Star, an assault which largely destroyed the Golden Temple. The director of the Intelligence Bureau had all Sikh personnel transferred out of her security detail, but she countermanded the order. In an atmosphere of doom, she visited a sadhu in Kashmir and spoke of death, and complained to friends that her personal security was organized in a haphazard way, while doing nothing to reform it. In a speech in Orissa, she said she had devoted her life to the
service of her people, and did not care whether she lived or died. Just one day later, on the last day of October 1984, she was walking through her garden trailed by a servant, a male secretary, a security man and a constable, who was holding a large black umbrella to shield her from the sun. Waiting by a wicket gate were her two Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. As she raised her joined palms to them in the namaste greeting, Beant Singh pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at the prime minister. There was silence. Birds sang in the trees. Mrs. Gandhi looked at him, and said, “What are you doing?”
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Punjab is fertile. The land has tall thin trees and hayricks shaped like turbans. Buffaloes wander along the side of the railway line. I alighted at Chandigarh station where, as usual in India, there was a remarkable mix of people: a puzzled man with a pointed hat, some sort of holy woman standing on one foot, a modern girl in a tight sweatshirt, a large Sikh family with trunks and cases, the boys in orange shirts and topknots, and a Sikh guard in a royal blue outfit, holding a long spear. I drove through the sectors of the city to the house of Sarabjeet Singh. He was five years old when his father killed the prime minister.

“My father was an in-charge, he was good at his profession. He was very close to Mrs. Gandhi and even went on foreign tours with her. He had very much respect for her, and she called him by his own name, Beant Singh. My father had a stout build. He was not a follower of the dehras [religious bodies] or of a terrorist organization, nobody paid him or motivated him—he was not interested in Bhindranwale. It was just that he could not believe what had happened at the Golden Temple.”
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After Beant Singh fired his revolver, he was taken to a guard house by the Indo-Tibetan border force and shot dead; the official story was that he was trying to escape. Sarabjeet remembers coming home from school and wondering why there were so many people at their house in Ashoka Police Lines. The security forces moved in with them for three weeks in the aftermath, before the family was transferred to Chandigarh.

The assassin’s widow, Bimal Kaur Khalsa, became a martyr by proxy. She led a procession through Amritsar, was sent to jail on a charge of attempted murder and after her release was elected as an MP from Punjab. Sarabjeet had himself contested a parliamentary seat for a Sikh party in 2004. So like other families in India, their future role in politics was determined by the actions of those who had died before them.

Sarabjeet’s sister, Amrit Kaur, took up the story: “It was a great moment for her. We were very young at that time. She sat right across from [Prime Minister] Rajiv Gandhi in Parliament and thought, this is our democracy. She raised her voice and said, ‘Rajiv Gandhi, you have killed so many Sikhs and should be hanged.’ What my father did was a great thing for the honour of Sikhs.”
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Sarabjeet said, “He sacrificed his life for Sikhism. Almost all our community were proud that he took a gun to Indira Gandhi. The common Sikh has a very high respect for us. They compare us to those who took revenge in the old times against the armies of the Mughal emperors.”

He showed me things the family had been given: a big cardboard cutout painting of their father, silver-plated cups commending his action, an equestrian statue of the Maratha warrior Shivaji, an admiring plaque from the Sikh Foundation of Virginia.

Sarabjeet stood by the door as I was leaving. What, for him, were the central tenets of Sikhism? “To be honest, to give equal rights to ladies and children, to take pride in your religion but not to oppress others. The real Sikh is not casteist.” As he said this, singing began outside the door, aggressive singing and stamping. Sarabjeet had recently got married and had a baby, and I guessed it was a choir of hijras, or eunuchs, come to celebrate the birth and demand money. Sarabjeet went out, spoke to them and came back in looking sheepish. The choir banged and rattled the door. He locked it. “They are just a backward class who come when they know a child has been born. Not hijras. This is what happens in Punjab.”
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The noise continued. He returned to the door, opened it a crack and the door was pushed open. Four women came in shouting, gesticulating and demanding money for singing the baby’s celebration song. Sarabjeet was a big man with a long black beard and an orange turban. He paid up.

Mrs. Gandhi’s daughter-in-law Sonia had just finished washing her hair when she heard what she thought were celebratory fire-crackers, but the bangs were followed by shouts and her children’s nanny ran into the house screaming. Sonia went out to find her mother-in-law bleeding on the path. The driver of the prime ministerial ambulance was off on a tea break, and no one could find the key, so Sonia got into the back seat of an Ambassador car, wearing only a dressing-gown, and cradled her mother-in-law as they drove to hospital. Her greatest fear was that a killer might try to eliminate her children and the entire family, as had happened to the Bangladeshi leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It was a three-mile journey, and
the traffic was thick. Within minutes, Indira Gandhi’s saffron-coloured sari and Sonia’s dressing-gown were drenched with blood. Mrs. Gandhi died that afternoon.

The events of the next few days showed, in microcosm, many of the things that had gone wrong with Indian politics in the twenty years since Nehru’s death. During a flight back to Delhi from West Bengal, Rajiv Gandhi was encouraged to inherit his mother’s job. A prudent suggestion by the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, that he might himself take the position on an interim basis was ignored. The Indian Constitution was consulted, and Rajiv’s inflight entourage deduced that the president—who had been picked by Indira Gandhi for his sycophantic tendencies—could nominate whomever he chose. Before they even reached the hospital, the process was in train.
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Nehru’s grandson, a socially popular Indian Airlines pilot with no ministerial experience, would take power. In an ideal world, the premiership of the largest democracy on earth should not be an entry-level appointment.

At the hospital, no emergency preparations had been made, because nobody had thought to call and say the dying prime minister was coming. The atmosphere was chaotic. A young journalist, Vichitra Sharma, managed to get inside. “The hospital was on my beat as a reporter, and a doctor I knew took me up to the eighth floor, which had a VVIP [Very Very Important Person] space, saying, ‘Blood donor, blood donor.’ Once I got there, he told me I was on my own. I sat in a cubicle outside the operating theatre, behind a dark green curtain, watching the doctors go in and out through the swing doors. The body was puffing up and they were pumping blood and waiting for someone senior to tell them what to do.” While surgeons attempted to conjure life into the corpse of Mrs. Gandhi, the ministers and courtiers of Delhi arrived in droves and milled about on the floor below. “In her years of power, she had taken away the manhood from every one of these men,” said Sharma. “I remember a minister telling everyone how close he was to Madam, then hollering at his driver—‘Go pick up my children from school!’ They were just waiting for orders. It speaks volumes about her centralized style of leadership.” Rajiv Gandhi arrived, composed but ashen-white. Sharma overheard a smartly dressed lady say, “I must go inside to show my face to Rajivji. He must know we took the trouble to come here at a time like this.” Before long everyone had gone, pursuing a new source of patronage, leaving the corpse behind. Vichitra Sharma slipped into the operating theatre and saw the late Mrs. Gandhi “cold and lifeless. And no one was there to pay her the courtesy of guarding her body.
It was pathetic.”
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Her time as prime minister had left India in a vulnerable position.

Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership began in 1984 with a founding slaughter. Within hours of his mother’s assassination, news of the killing passed through the city, and by nightfall the shutters were down and the roads were empty. It did not take long for mobs, in some cases led by Congress activists, to target Sikh districts in Delhi and other cities—the men they were looking for were easily identifiable by their beards and turbans. On the same night Indira’s old friend Pupul Jayakar received phone calls telling her Sikhs were being dragged out of their homes by their hair and thrown on bonfires. She raced to the prime minister’s house. Rajiv was sitting with the home minister, Narasimha Rao. She poured out what she had been told. “Rajiv seemed helpless, bewildered. He turned to the home minister and asked, ‘What shall we do?’ ” Narasimha Rao, famous for his silences, said nothing. Jayakar advised Rajiv, whom she had known since he was a child, to do what his mother would have done—go on television at once, “with all the prestige, power and strength of the Prime Minister of India” and say that although it was right to grieve, no one should take revenge and that butchery would not be permitted under any circumstances. Rajiv Gandhi hesitated and asked Jayakar to prepare a concept note. She did, and waited. The next morning he did not appear on television. Instead, the home minister appeared on the screen and read a statement. In her words, “The speech had neither the anguish of the son nor the massive authority of the Prime Minister.”
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For days, mobs of rioters roamed the streets looting homes and setting people alight with kerosene. Only in Calcutta did the state government, run by a communist chief minister, Jyoti Basu, make sure no pogroms took place. More than 3,000 Sikhs died, and three days passed before Rajiv Gandhi decided to call out the army to stop the slaughter. When it was all over, he made a notorious comment—that when a mighty tree falls, the earth is bound to shake. His new government made only the most perfunctory attempt to investigate what had happened and to look at to what extent the killings were organized. It was to develop into a political tradition: after a small genocide, after a disaster, after a scandal, no leader would be held accountable.

Later in the year a general election was held, and a wave of public sympathy returned Congress to power with a large majority. There was a great sense of relief that the next leader from the Gandhi family would not be the late Sanjay. Everything rested on India’s new Mr. Clean—unassuming,
diffident Rajiv Gandhi, the man from the Co-Op bakery’s bread section. His generation projected their aspirations on to him, hoping he would be the dynamic catalyst for a different India. Destiny had other plans for Rajiv: he would be remembered by history as Indira Gandhi’s son, and Sonia Gandhi’s husband.

Rajiv Gandhi had sensible, modernizing intentions, which was part of the problem. Early on, he hoped he could learn to be prime minister by reading textbooks on politics, just as he had learned to be a fine airline pilot by studying manuals. He wanted to do well, to bring India forward and make it run efficiently. As the first member of the family since Motilal Nehru to have had a regular job, he knew about schedules and workplace efficiency. All his achievements to date had been technical: he had assembled a radio, taught himself photography, flown different types of aeroplanes and experimented with recording sound. The aspiring technocrat was keen but out of his depth, impatient over the numerous obstacles he faced. Rajiv wanted to challenge the economic legacy of state socialism, but was not sure how to do it. There were some achievements: a peace deal with Assamese separatists, support for panchayats, or village democracies, some taming of the bureaucracy and a relaxation of duty on certain imported goods. Congress continued to manipulate vote banks. His government passed a law allowing discrimination against Muslim women during divorce in order to woo conservative elements, which infuriated many Hindus; this was balanced by a court decision regarding a disputed mosque—the Babri Masjid—which appeared to pander to Hindu traditionalists. After his death, this decision would have dangerous consequences. He responded to the setbacks and complications by relying on his popularity and dreaming up amorphous new initiatives, and working ever harder, eighteen or nineteen hours a day, tapping information into his treasured Toshiba T5200 laptop in the hope it might spit out some answers. Many of his initiatives were constructive, but they were never part of an overarching strategy.