The Great Indian Novel (56 page)

Priya Duryodhani had her back to the wall, and that was the position from which she always fought the hardest. Especially when the wall itself appeared on the verge of crashing down behind her.

Yes, Ganapathi. For right in the midst of this political crisis, an upright if excessively legalistic provincial court found the Prime Minister guilty of a ‘corrupt electoral practice’ for making a campaign speech for her parliamentary seat during the last elections from a platform shared with President Ekalavya. The President being a non-political national figure, Priya Duryodhani should not have ‘exploited his presence for partisan ends’. I don’t know what was more laughable, the suggestion that the Prime Minister stood to gain in the slightest from the President’s political lustre (all of which was reflected from her in the first place) or her conviction for an offence whose triviality was underscored by the far greater crimes perpetrated and perpetuated all around her and her government.

The conviction - which deprived her of her parliamentary privileges pending appeal - gave the Popular Uprising just the spark it needed. They turned their movement into a massive orchestrated cry for her resignation, threatening to court arrest outside her home every day until she quit. More ominously for her, Drona began to talk to a faction within her own party, led conspicuously by his son Ashwathaman, which was calling for her to step down ‘temporarily’ in order to quieten the Opposition demands and give the judicial process time to work.

But if there was one thing Priya Duryodhani had learned from her mother’s wasted sacrifices, it was never to put anything, anything at all, ahead of self- interest. She would not allow anyone to place a blindfold on
her
blazing eyes. And her instincts were confirmed by her closest advisor, the hand-picked President of the Kaurava (R) Party and the man known as ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’, the Bengali lawyer Shakuni Shankar Dey.

Shakuni was an immense mountain of a man, oily and slick, with a gleaming bald pate, gleaming gold buttons on his immaculate silk
kurta,
and gleaming white enamel in place of the teeth he had lost at the hands of a grieving mob (which had expressed its grief with its fists after he had got a murderer off on a technicality). ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’ flicked a stray speck of lint off his spotless sleeve and turned to the Prime Minister.

‘Don’t resign, even for appearances’ sake,’ he said firmly. ‘Why gratify the howling jackals outside and give time for the opportunists within the party to wrest control from you?’

‘But do I have a choice?’

Shakuni frowned his disapproval of the question. ‘The Prime Minister always has a choice,’ he growled. ‘You don’t have to do anything merely because it’s expected of you. But there is something else you can do,’ he added meaningfully.

‘What?’

Shakuni rested manicured fingers on the prime-ministerial table in front of him. ‘Hit back.’

The Prime Minister looked at him like a schoolmistress whose favourite pupil has given too pat an answer. ‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘But how? I can’t just lock up all those I’d love to put behind bars.’

‘You can.’

‘Oh, of course I
can,’
Duryodhani said in exasperation. ‘But I wouldn’t last a day afterwards if I did that.’

‘You might not, if things were allowed to continue as at present,’ Shakuni said carefully. ‘But you could change the rules of the game. You could declare a Siege.’

‘But we already have.’ This was true: the state of Siege declared in the country at the time of the Gelabi Desh war had never actually been lifted.

‘Yes, but
that
Siege was declared to cope with an external threat which everyone knows has long since passed,’ replied the lawyer. ‘What you could do now is to declare an
internal
Siege. A grave threat to the stability and security of the nation from internal disruption.’

‘Which is true enough,’ Priya Duryodhani nodded reflectively.

‘No one has ever defined the permissible procedures under an internal Siege, which leaves it more or less up to us to define them,’ Shakuni added. ‘I think they could very safely include the preventive detention of some of our more obstreperous politicians . . .’

‘All of them,’ the Prime Minister said firmly.

‘Or, indeed, of all of them,’ Shakuni affirmed. ‘Not to mention censorship of the press, which is nowhere explicitly ruled out in the Constitution, suspension of certain fundamental rights - free speech, assembly, that sort of thing - and measures to put the judiciary in their place.’

‘Go on,’ Duryodhani said, her anxious pinched face brightening. ‘I like the sound of this.’

‘Of course, this plan will need the cooperation, or at least the signature, of the President.’

The Prime Minister’s face took on its famous determined look. ‘It is time,’ she said pointedly, ‘that Ekalavya earned his keep.’

While this conversation - or something very like it, Ganapathi, for my sources were no longer as good as in the old days - was taking place, Yudhishtir, flanked by Drona and the assembled luminaries of the Opposition, was addressing a mammoth mass rally at the Boat Club lawns convened by the People’s Uprising movement to call for the exit of Priya Duryodhani.

‘As I get up and stand at this microphone,’ he declaimed, ‘as I stand here and look upon the hundreds and thousands of you gathered here before me, the lakhs of men and women who have come to
see
us all on the same platform, who have come to
sense
and
feel
our unity, our confidence, the strength of our commitment to freedom and justice and change, who have come to
hear
us because for once we represent your hopes instead of merely your dissatisfactions, as I see all this, I feel a
surge
in my heart.’ The crowd roared its approval at each pause, its excitement rising as Yudhishtir added clause to heady clause to bring his audience to a crescendo of vocal adulation. ‘I know,’ Yudhishtir declared, ‘I
know,
standing here, that change is at hand. I
know
that India can no longer be the same. I offer my respectful salutations in your name to our guru Drona.’ Enthusiastic applause. ‘I look from you to my colleagues on this platform’ - a broad sweep of his hand encompassed his former rivals and critics in other opposition parties and he named some of them, receiving a lusty cheer from each politician’s supporters in the crowd - ‘and I know that from now on there is
no
looking back’ - roars from the crowd - ‘that our differences are over’ - another roar - ‘that together we are going to seek and attain our
supreme
goal, the bringing down of this corrupt and iniquitous government.’ Another roar, this time louder than all the rest; the crowd on its feet; slogans raised by Kaurava (O) workers judiciously scattered amongst the throng - ‘Down with Priya Duryodhani! Yudhishtir,
Zindabad
! Long Live Opposition Unity! People’s Uprising,
Zindabad
!’

And so it went on, with even stiff-necked Yudhishtir provoking the exhilaration of the rallied mass, but there was still something staged, unreal, about this piece of political theatre. The court verdict had, inevitably, stirred the Opposition movement to greater boldness, just as the Hastinapur elections had prompted them towards greater unity. (There the disparate followers of Drona’s Uprising had banded themselves together in a Janata Morcha or People’s Front, which with the linguistic eclecticism of Indian politics had quickly become known as the Janata Front.) The Prime Minister’s court- directed loss of her parliamentary privileges now gave them the one thing they needed: a clear-cut issue on which they could unite.

But their unity seemed purely expedient, their programme severely limited and their theatre all the more unreal. For several days now they had been calling on the Prime Minister to resign without the slightest thought of who or what might take her place. Demonstrations took place in every significant stretch of ground in the country to condemn the government and demand that the Prime Minister step down. To counter them, Shakuni had had busloads of rural peasants wheeled into Delhi from neighbouring farmlands on diverted public transport to express their support for the government in raucous rallies outside the Prime Minister’s residence. Sometimes the two groups had clashed; sometimes the innocent farmers had lent their vocal chords to the wrong cause. But they were not the only ones who had no idea of the rest of the script.

It was, I suppose, heady stuff, grist for the foreign news-magazines which reported on wars and political conflict in the same tone that they reported the goings-on in Hollywood bedrooms, but my own view of it was entirely ambivalent. I knew that in India there were really no blacks and no whites; nor was there a uniformly dingy grey. Instead, political morality and public values were a mystical, blurred, swirling optical illusion of alternating blacks and whites in different shades of depth and brightness. The Prime Minister ruled like a goddess: black to liberal democrats, black to her political opponents (who were not all liberal democrats), white to adoring impoverished
sansculottes
at rural public meetings, white also to contented corpulent capitalists who shrugged off her strident socialist rhetoric and fuelled her party’s electoral machine with the profits they made through her less-than-socialist policies. An honest judge had disqualified her from office by an impartial (if unimaginative) reading of the statutes: white to those who believed in the rule of law, white to her critics and enemies (who did not all believe in the rule of law), black to those who believed her hand at the helm was essential to steady India’s ship of state, black also to those sycophants and hangers-on who stood to lose personally from her downfall. It was a complex spectrum of blacks, whites and fluid greys; Brahminical ambivalence was therefore nothing to be ashamed of.

My ambivalence, Ganapathi, was to become less and less tenable with time.

Yudhishtir’s grand show at the Boat Club received a rousing curtain-call, but there were to be no repeat performances. Later the same night Shakuni’s plans were put smoothly into motion, and teams of red-eyed policemen knocked before dawn at the doors of the Uprising’s leaders to take them away to the prisons and the ‘rest houses’ that would be their home for months to come.

I do not know what saddened me more, the fact of the Prime Minister of free India arresting her political opponents, or the fact of their surprise at their own arrest. Drona’s astonishment at being taken away confirmed the extent to which he was living in the past. All he could bring himself to say was a Sanskrit phrase that had been coined two thousand years earlier, the same phrase that had sprung to Gangaji’s lips at the Bibigarh Gardens all those years ago:
‘Vinasha
kale,
viparita
buddhi.’
You may remember from that occasion, Ganapathi, that the Greeks had an equivalent: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’ Questioning the sanity of the victor is the only course open to any civilization defeated by forces it cannot understand.

I was not honoured with a pre-dawn knock on my door. Priya Duryodhani evidently considered me too old to be worth locking up. But that was not why I failed to join the chorus of condemnation that was raised in the Western press and in Indian drawing-rooms about what had happened. You see, Ganapathi, I was sensitive to the excessive formalism of some of the attacks on the Siege: the critics seemed to think that democracy had been overthrown, without paying much heed to the content of that democracy or the results of its abrogation. I could not, at that stage, think of the issue simply as one of freedom versus tyranny. Yes, Duryodhani’s motives in proclaiming a state of Siege, arresting a number of opponents and imposing censorship on the press were primarily cynical and self-serving: without these steps she would not have been able to contain the mounting pressures on her to resign. But I still believed that the political chaos in the country, fuelled by Drona’s idealistic but confused Uprising which a variety of political opportunists had joined and exploited, could have led the country nowhere but to anarchy.