May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (43 page)

Kiran was born in June 1949, in the heady days after Indian independence. The participation of women in the freedom struggle had committed its leaders to an India where men and women would have equal constitutional and political rights; in 1950, when Kiran was a year old, the new Indian Constitution put it in writing. Several acts passed in the mid-1950s liberalized marriage and divorce laws and provided for near-equal inheritance rights among the sons and daughters of Hindu families. For educated women, the world had opened. Kiran had not only the advantages of class but also a father like no one else’s.

The Peshawaria girls were taught to read and write at home, before entering a convent school. Once they enrolled, they realized, according to their father, “that the other girls were not preparing for life. They were preparing for marriage.” Instead Prakash Peshawaria taught his daughters tennis, spending three to four hours with them on the court each day. “Then immediately after tennis, they would go home, do their homework, take dinner and go to sleep early,” her father said. “Then they would get up at five and study for two hours before leaving for school. They would study and play tennis and do nothing else. They never had time for movies.”

His hard work paid off. One daughter became a clinical psychologist, another a lawyer, and another a painter. Kiran, who had been on the courts since the age of nine, had enough talent and drive to distinguish herself at first as a national tennis star. In February 1972, she won the International Lawn Tennis Championship of Asia, and a month later married a fellow tennis player, for love. She was twenty-two,
the age when most Indian women settle down and start a family, but that was not the kind of life her father had planned for her. Instead, she was the first woman to enter the upper levels of the Indian Police Service, the elite national force that is one of the most competitive branches of the Indian Civil Service. Its discipline and organization greatly appealed to her father, and as for the widespread corruption of the rank and file, well, Kiran would set an example. “As an honest officer she would be valued more,” her father said. But police officials, stunned by Kiran’s application, were at first unsure whether to take it seriously. After passing her exam, she was summoned to the Home Ministry, where a panel of judges explained to her the problems a woman would encounter in the job. Some years earlier, another woman who had passed the police exam had been persuaded by these arguments to withdraw her application. But Kiran told the judges it was her “constitutional right” to join the Indian Police Service and refused to back down.

From the very beginning she attracted attention. Kiran, after all, had not been raised to remain in the background. Her first assignment was as an officer in charge of three police stations in the diplomatic enclave of Delhi, a highly conspicuous posting among embassies and official residences that was a security nightmare. She herself went out every night to check up on the patrolling of her men and make sure that suspicious people were rounded up. But it was not until she charged the group of Sikh demonstrators that she became a national celebrity and earned herself a gallantry award from the president. In 1980, when she was chief of a gang-infested West Delhi police district, Kiran was able to reform a number of bootleggers by arranging for bank loans and shop space so they could start new lives. Later, as deputy commissioner of traffic in Delhi, the zeal with which she ordered the police to tow away illegally parked cars with cranes earned her the nickname Crane Bedi. And yet her take-charge, self-righteous style, which critics always complained was the result of a reckless need to promote herself as an officer as tough as the men, inevitably irritated the people around her. In 1982, after her department denied a roadside franchise during the Asian Games to a businessman who was a close associate of Indira Gandhi, she was transferred to the state of Goa, a tropical backwater on India’s western coast, where her fame was such that the local newspaper announced her arrival by warning motorists to be careful.

But by mid-1984 she was back in Delhi, and by the time I got to know her, Kiran was in line for another promotion, to additional
commissioner, which would have made her one of the top dozen police officials in the capital. She seemed unstoppable. I watched her operate one morning in her office at Tis Hazari, the central court complex in Delhi, where as deputy commissioner she had taken it upon herself to lecture criminals about the futility of their ways. Her theory, perhaps naïve but typical of her thinking, was that a good scolding and sound advice were more effective in preventing a repeat offense than the trial, which in any case would take years to be heard. So all those from the North District who had been arrested and jailed the day before were brought from their cells, dirty, unshaven, in torn clothes and frightened, and lined up in a semicircle in front of Kiran’s desk. An underling announced their cases while Kiran flipped through the files. In fast, forceful Hindi she told two men charged with brawling over a political argument to stay away from political parties, pointing out that while the men were getting arrested the party leaders were not. Another case was announced: “A suitcase lifter, under the influence of liquor.” This defendant had his lawyer with him, but when the lawyer began pleading for his client, Kiran abruptly cut him off in English.

“The man doesn’t have that clean a record,” she snapped. “He has been arrested in the past.”

The lawyer tried to object.

“The man has a damn bad record,” Kiran shot back, then abruptly switched her attention to another case. The lawyer had no recourse but to scuttle out of the room, humiliated.

It was like that the entire day. Moving in Kiran’s orbit, I felt as if I had passed through a looking glass into a topsy-turvy land where women had complete control over the lives of men. Male officers leapt to attention and saluted as Kiran sped through corridors. Supplicants waited outside her office with invitations for her to speak at meetings or attend festivals. A reformed criminal wanted her to recommend him for a loan to set up a vegetable stand. In a meeting at a police station, she asked the officers, as if they were students in an elementary school class, to stand and relate a news story from the paper that morning. At one of the six drug treatment centers she had begun in her district, she lectured the former addicts, in her best positive-thinking style, to begin improving themselves by reading the magazine
India Today
. I was standing around watching, and Kiran, seeing a body unengaged in productive activity, briskly ordered me to hand out a bag of apples to the men. I followed her instructions as obediently as everyone else. “When I started, I didn’t wait to see if the men would accept my
order,” she said later. “I just gave it.” At home, she almost never slept through the night. The phone would routinely ring at three or four in the morning; usually the call was an official one, but sometimes it was simply a private citizen—her phone was listed—calling to report a burglary at home, thinking, usually correctly, that reporting it directly to Kiran Bedi would get faster results.

It was not a life conducive to domestic tranquillity. Kiran’s husband, who had become a textile engineer, lived in Amritsar, near the Pakistan border, 250 miles away, where he looked after his mother, his business and his farms. That had been the arrangement for all but the first four months of their marriage. Kiran said simply that it was impossible for her husband to leave everything behind and live with her in Delhi. They saw each other only about twice a year. When I asked her more about it after her lectures to criminals were over, Kiran started out cheerfully enough. “It’s working all right, at least as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “It was a choice we made. We knew what was coming. My husband knew he was marrying a very ambitious career-oriented woman. And it’s been kept up. We didn’t let it break, we didn’t let it crack. And we didn’t let a sulk come up. Both of us are in love with our jobs.”

In Delhi, Kiran’s parents had moved in with her to help take care of her teenage daughter and run the house. “I don’t manage my home, I have it managed,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty because my parents are there. This is something special that I deserve—not only me, but my parents. We all worked for it, and we deserve it. And my parents continue to be my best friends. They’re much more friends with me than my husband is. Because by the time I see him, so much has passed. Even if there was something that was important, by that time it’s not important.”

But as she continued to talk she began to sound bitter, and her thoughts fell into a jumble of justifications and regrets. “He’s not willing to sacrifice his career for me, and I’m not willing to sacrifice mine for him,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. Just because I’m a woman—am I supposed to sacrifice? I said to him, ‘I’ll have a second child only on the condition that you be here and you participate.’ But he said he couldn’t move. So we have one child. My parents are not baby-sitters. They can do it for one, but I don’t expect them to do it again and again. Having not moved, he’s a big loser. He’s missed out on seeing his daughter grow. But he doesn’t understand the loss. So, he can be happy with his nonappreciation. And he could have moved,
had he been slightly more enterprising. He could have bought some farmland here, or opened a textile mill. But I can’t blame him. He’s not enterprising. He’s content. So what I’ve really lost out on is a mental companion back in the house. There are my parents, but I really don’t have a mental companion of my own, someone who I could sit down with and share some of my problems.”

And then, putting a positive thinker’s spin on a sad situation, she brought the subject to an end. “But I’ve not let that loss be heavy on me because I’ve gotten used to a lot of self-analysis and self-help. It would be nice if I could have that person, but fine, I can’t have everything. But what I’ve got in return—is it more? Is it to my heart’s content? Yes. So I’m a happy person.”

Three days after that conversation, an event occurred that would stall Kiran, at least temporarily, in her professional pursuits. Her critics said it was another example of her arrogance getting her in serious trouble; her supporters, including the feminist groups who demonstrated in her behalf, said the system was sexist and that the men at the courthouse could not tolerate taking orders from a woman.

It all started simply enough. A lawyer was arrested for stealing money from a woman’s purse at Delhi University and then was brought on a bus to Tis Hazari by a police subinspector who thought it wise to handcuff the man while using public transportation. The president of the Delhi Bar Association, angered that a member of his profession had been handcuffed, asked Kiran Bedi to suspend the subinspector. She refused, saying the suspect had never informed the subinspector that he was a lawyer. “If he had declared he was a lawyer, we wouldn’t have handcuffed him,” she told me a few months later. “But after that it got blown up—every newspaper wrote about it in its own language.” The Bar Association was in the middle of its elections, and Kiran became a political issue. The lawyers, many of whom were never fond of Kiran on a good day, went on strike to protest the police action. They had struck before over working conditions at the courthouse, but the walkouts had lasted only one or two days. This time the strike was to last three months.

In the first episode, a group of fifteen lawyers forcefully broke down the door of Kiran’s office and ran toward her, only to be repelled by the police. Kiran later said that the lawyers had been shouting obscenities and threatening to rip off her clothes, and that her men may have reacted emotionally. “Had I not been a woman, things would have been different,” she said. “An attack on a man would not have been
viewed so seriously as an attack on a woman.” But the next day, the lawyers charged that the police had used excessive force, and they demanded Kiran’s suspension. The strike gained momentum. A few weeks later, hundreds of other demonstrators, this time in support of Kiran, had a rock-throwing fight with a group of lawyers outside the court complex. Two dozen people were injured before the police broke it up, and the lawyers charged that Kiran was slow to respond to protect them. They issued a call for a nationwide strike, which was effective, at least for a short time.

Delhi’s commissioner of police cleared Kiran of any wrongdoing, but in April a two-judge panel appointed to investigate both incidents concluded in an interim report that there was some evidence of police lapses. It said, however, that it needed more evidence before it could hold Kiran personally responsible. The panel suggested that Kiran be transferred, and she was, to the Narcotics Control Bureau as a deputy director. It was a lateral move to a desk job designed to keep her off the streets and out of the press. The panel’s investigation continued, and when the judges called Kiran to testify, she refused, taking an aggressive stance recommended by her lawyers that as the accused she had the right to hear the entire case against her first. The judges summoned the prosecution to make its case, but her lawyers balked, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The last time I saw Kiran, in early August 1988, she was waiting for the Supreme Court judgment, which she felt would be in her favor. After that, the panel’s investigation would continue.

I asked her if this was the worst thing she had ever been through. “It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever been through,” she said. She did not seem to me especially troubled; at most, she seemed subdued. “I’m feeling quite normal,” she said, “but waiting for the day when I have something better to look forward to.” She had just come home, at the unusually early hour of seven
P.M
., from the job at the narcotics bureau, which bored her. Although she was in charge of all investigations of illegal drug trafficking in India and coordinated her work with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Scotland Yard, the reality behind this dazzling job description was that she remained at headquarters analyzing field reports and passing them on. “It’s all paperwork,” she said. “I’m a total misfit.” She planned to stay with it for another few months and then, if things did not improve, to take a leave to finish her doctoral work in drugs and crime at the Indian Institute of Technology. (Kiran had a master’s degree in political science from Punjab
University and a law degree from Delhi University.) She also wanted to write a book about her work in drug rehabilitation. “I don’t like marking time,” she said. On the other hand she was pleased to have more hours for her family and friends, although Kiran herself admitted, “I don’t have many friends. The ones I do have are from school, and they’re not friends because of my status. They were good friends before I got into the police.”