Durbar (15 page)

‘All the way from Bhopal?’ the prime minister said, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘Why have you come all the way from Bhopal? Why didn’t you go to your chief minister for help?’

‘I did,
pradhan mantriji
, but they told me there was no chief minister’s relief fund and that I should come here because there is a prime minister’s relief fund.’

‘Yes, there is. And it is not meant for charity but to be used when there is a natural disaster like a drought or a flood. I cannot help you.’

The old woman was next. ‘
Pradhan mantriji
, my husband died in the 1965 war and they’ve stopped the pension I was getting since last year. Please, sir, it’s the only money I have to live on, please help me.’

‘How can I help you? I am the prime minister not god. How can I possibly help you?’

‘The pension, sir, if you could just instruct them to restore the pension I was getting. It is only Rs 100 a month.’

‘It’s not my business. Go to the defence minister.’

He did not notice me lurking in the background taking notes. One of the sentences I wrote about my experience was, ‘exercise in reaching out to the people not working’. The impression he left on me was a bad one. In my notes I described him as a nasty old man who reeked of expensive cologne. Later, my colleagues in the reporters’ room told me that the cologne was necessary to disguise the smell that he had acquired from all the urine drinking. This may only have been journalistic speculation but it did in a way explain why someone as punishingly austere as Desai would allow himself this peculiar indulgence.

On another elegant tree-lined avenue in that part of Delhi which since Independence has been reserved almost exclusively for our socialist rulers was the house of the deputy prime minister. This was my next stop. Chaudhury Charan Singh wore his peasant origins like a badge of honour and made it a point to be as rustic as possible. That morning he seemed to have made a special effort to look like an ordinary farmer by wearing a rough dhoti–kurta and sitting on a charpai. The gates were open to allow a steady stream of peasants to enter. At first they seemed perturbed by the manicured lawns and elegant pergola that the last occupant had left behind in this once-beautiful house. But when they saw their leader sitting on his charpai under the shade of a tree they relaxed and joined the group of men seated on their haunches at his feet. Charan Singh had slanted eyes and a receding chin. He sat cross-legged on the charpai and greeted new arrivals with his hands joined together and a loud ‘Ram, Ram’.

The audience began with the villagers praising ‘Chaudhury Sahib’ to the skies. They told him how wonderful he had been as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and how they remembered his rule as a time when electricity had been available twenty-four hours a day and how they never had any problems getting water for their fields. Once they felt the deputy prime minister had been sufficiently softened by their flattery they presented him with a list of the things that they were unhappy about. They told him how in their villages the electricity always went off just when they were preparing to irrigate their fields so their tubewells became useless. They told him of failed crops and desperate shortages of water, and they told him how shocked they had been to see that power and water meant for farmers was being used in the cities.

The deputy prime minister was sympathetic and ordered his assistants, who stood around with notebooks in their hands, to take down the names of the villages that had power and water problems. Then a new group of peasants arrived and the gathering of men squatting on their haunches got bigger and the litany of complaints louder. The deputy prime minister listened to everyone. Those who had come to Delhi for the first time told him they had been stunned by the wide roads and the sight of decorative fountains everywhere while their fields were starved of water.

It surprised me that they did not mention problems such as how bad the schools were in their villages, how abysmal the standards of primary health care, basic hygiene and sanitation. But I was new to journalism
and did not understand that farmers concern themselves primarily with what goes into making their crops grow well. And this was before the time of cell phones and colour television when the average Indian peasant knew very little about how people lived in the cities and had almost no aspirations to a higher standard of living.

At some point during the deputy prime minister’s peasant durbar I needed to go to the bathroom and was directed into the house. The vast drawing room had been stripped of all furniture except for a few shabby cane sofas that had ‘P.W.D.’ (Public Works Department) written on their sides in black paint. There were no curtains and the long French windows that led on to an elegant garden in the back looked as if they had not been cleaned in weeks. The door to Chaudhury Sahib’s bedroom was open and I noticed that it had been stripped of furniture as well. A mattress on the floor, covered in a white sheet, was presumably his bed and in a bay window, on another mattress covered in white, stood a low wooden desk of the kind Indian accountants used in older times. It was here that he sat every morning to write his books on agriculture and the peasantry. His books were translated into English around this time and later when he fulfilled his dream of becoming India’s prime minister, albeit for a fleeting moment, I think he managed a certain celebrity as an author.

By the time I got to Mrs Gandhi’s durbar the blind man and his daughter and the lame old lady were already there, seated on plastic chairs with glasses of steaming tea in their hands. Mrs Gandhi, sprightly and glowing in a white sari, flitted briskly about the garden stopping to talk to every visitor individually and making them feel for that moment that her thoughts were only of them. The visitors were mostly from southern India and they told her how sad they were that she had been defeated and how certain that she would be back. ‘You are India, madam, and India is you,’ said a fat, white-haired man. With him was a large group of party workers from Tamil Nadu in shiny white kurtas and dhotis. In the election she lost to the Janata Party most of the seats she won had been from the four southern states so Mrs Gandhi had reason to be especially nice to her supporters from that part of India. She smiled her warmest smile, allowed the leader of the group to hold her hand, blessed some of the younger members of the group by placing her hand on their heads as they plunged for her feet, and then moved on to the next group, who were people from her own constituency.

As she approached them they began to wail as if at a funeral before telling her they were certain that the polls had been rigged. ‘Look, Indiraji, these are ballot papers,’ a young man said angrily, waving some papers before her face, ‘we found them in a polling booth. We know there was a plot by the collector.’

‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ she said with a sweet smile, ‘you mustn’t talk of cheating. We lost the election but this doesn’t mean that I am not here for you any time you want.’

‘Oh, madam, already our party workers are being harassed. The Janata Party workers come late at night to our houses and threaten us for continuing to support you. Your leader is never coming back, they say, so you better learn to behave yourself or we will fix you.’

‘Who are these people who come to your houses?’

‘Ruling party workers, or that’s who they say they are. They are strangers.’

‘Well, you must find out who they are and I can take the matter up with the prime minister.’

At this the group chanted in unison, ‘
Desh ka neta kaisa ho
, Indira Gandhi
jaisa ho
…’ (What should the country’s leader be like? He should be like Indira Gandhi.) It sounds funny in English but rhymes so well in Hindi that it remains among the most popular political slogans in India with only the name of the leader changed.

Mrs Gandhi noticed me and another reporter from some Hindi newspaper following in her wake and stopped and smiled at us. Since she had never in my limited experience of journalism done such a thing before it rendered me momentarily speechless but my more experienced colleague was quick to seize the moment.

‘Would you like to tell us what, if anything, you regret about the Emergency?’ he asked.

‘Censorship,’ she said with a sweet smile, ‘if there had not been press censorship, I would have known from you people what my officials were doing.’

‘Would you have held elections if you had known that you might lose?’ my colleague persisted.

‘Yes. I would have. I believe in democracy and never intended to suspend it forever. It was a temporary measure because there were internal and external threats to the country.’

‘Have they now abated?’ I asked, finally finding my voice.

‘Well, I leave that for you to judge,’ she said with another sweet smile. ‘After all, you can see what this government is doing and what it is not doing. India cannot survive if we allow fissiparous tendencies to grow. The new government has within it representatives of these tendencies.’ I was as stupefied by the word ‘fissiparous’ (which she pronounced as ‘fissiparious’) as I was by the way she spoke English. It was the first time I had a personal conversation with her. She had the sort of accent Indian girls get when they are what we call ‘convent-educated’. She rounded her vowels and modulated her thin voice and one of her eyes twitched as she gave us one last sweet smile and skittered off to the next group of visitors.

She was quickly surrounded by yet another ardent group of supporters and I found myself once more beside the blind man and the old lady.

Why were they still here I asked the blind man’s daughter. Had madam promised them help?

Oh yes she had, the girl said, she had promised to speak to the prime minister and had asked them to wait while she did so. There was more than enough money in the prime minister’s relief fund she had told them so there was no reason why needy people like them should not benefit from it.

After an hour at Mrs Gandhi’s durbar I knew with a terrible certainty that it would not be long before she became prime minister again. When I returned to the office and wrote my story comparing the three durbars I did not say this in so many words. I wrote that Mrs Gandhi had lost none of her charisma or charm and there was a dearth of these qualities in the new leaders.

My story on the three durbars had unexpected consequences. The day after it appeared, on page three of the
Statesman
, a high official arrived in the reporters’ room and asked for me. ‘I am from the prime minister’s office,’ he said politely, ‘and I am here to ask you to come and meet the prime minister tomorrow at 5 p.m.’

‘The prime minister? For an interview?’

‘Well, let’s put it this way…he would like to see you.’

Taken aback, I asked him why.

‘He read your article and thinks that you misunderstood him so he would like to explain some things to you.’

‘I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been summoned by a prime minister before.’

He smiled cryptically, told me he would pick me up from the
Statesman
office at 4.45 p.m. the following day, and left.

It was my first visit ever to the prime minister’s office and I was both excited and awestruck to be entering one of the most magnificent buildings in Delhi. The prime minister’s office was originally built as the Viceroy’s office. It is of the same pale red sandstone that was used to build the Viceroy’s Palace, now Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of India. It sits at the top of Raisina Hill, and has an imperial air and an architectural beauty that government buildings built in more socialist times hopelessly lack. From the outside it continues to retain its aura of colonial grandeur so it came as a shock to see how decrepit it had become on the inside. We entered a dank hall that smelt of damp carpets, mildew and hair oil. A shabby reception area had been created beneath the magnificent stone staircase that led up to the prime minister’s office. Two officials sat there at desks with grimy ledgers open before them. They had oily hair, towels on the backs of their chairs, with which they wiped their faces from time to time, and the haughty expressions of clerks who have more power than they deserve.

We waited in this disappointingly bleak reception area while one of the clerks dialled a three-digit number on an ancient black telephone on his table. It was so old and dirty that it creaked with every digit that was dialled. The clerk seemed aware of how filthy the receiver was because he held it with his towel. He also held a bit of the towel over the mouthpiece whose holes were thick with greasy dirt. After several attempts when he finally managed to get through and discovered that we were expected he looked resentful.

We walked up the grand sandstone staircase that looked as if it should lead to some particularly splendid ballroom but led instead to a veranda on which pigeon droppings had made indelible patterns and monkeys played. A wire mesh covered the courtyard that the veranda overlooked, with the ostensible purpose of keeping monkeys and pigeons out, but there was a monkey-sized hole in one corner that nobody had bothered to fix. The monkeys sat on the sandstone ledge of the veranda and made threatening faces at the prime minister’s visitors. My escort told me they amused themselves by stealing papers from people’s offices if they did not manage to steal food. ‘It is a big menace,’ he said as a monkey made a face at him, ‘but nobody can do anything about it.’

Leading off from the veranda were cubbyholes crowded with officials seated at desks covered in dusty files. We walked to the end of the veranda where in big brass letters on the sandstone wall was written ‘PRIME MINISTER’. When my escort pushed open the door I expected to find myself in a splendid high-ceilinged room with the prime minister seated at an imposing desk. Instead we entered a small ante-room in which more officials sat at small desks stacked with files. One of them stood up when he saw us and said, ‘The prime minister is expecting you, but I’ll just go in and check if he has got busy with something else.’ He disappeared through a door and returned a minute later. ‘Yes, yes. You can go in,’ he whispered.