What Am I Doing Here? (39 page)

 

My friend of the afternoon was Sanjay's wife, Menaka – a pretty, freckle-faced girl dressed in scarlet kurta-pyjamas. She had not had an easy time. Her father, Lt Col Anand, was thought to have siphoned funds away from Sanjay's Maruti car factory and diverted them to Congress-I. Last June he was found shot dead in a field, lying on newspapers full of the scandal. A note at his side read ‘Sanjay worry unbearable'. Neither dogs nor vultures had touched the corpse for two days. The gun was missing. The arms were rigid. It was an odd kind of suicide.

 

‘Come on, Brucie.' Menaka took my hand. ‘Come and watch me do my fishwife act!'

She led me to the Children's Park where the PACs had pitched camp.

‘Show me your rifles,' she screeched at a kind-faced sergeant.

‘I can't, Menakaji.'

‘You showed them when you murdered people. Why can't you show them to me?'

She raised her camera.

‘Please, Menakaji, don't photograph me. I have a wife and a mother. We had nothing to do with the killing. It was the 10th Battalion from Meerut.

The 10th Battalion had been transferred.

The speeches ended and Mrs Gandhi went to inspect the scene of the crime: at a crossroads between the student hostel and some staff bungalows.

The trouble began when some non-Jats among the students and staff encouraged the Purbias to strike for higher pay. A local Congress-I politician got in on the act. The Vice-Chancellor panicked and asked for a detachment of police. About a thousand Purbias first prayed in their temple and then set off in a protest march towards the administrative building. The PACs blocked their path – and they sat down.

The students, confined to their hostel, had a grandstand view from the roof. They saw the police officer fire a single shot into the air, and saw his men fire straight into the crowd. Some of the strikers ran for an open drain where we saw their sandals still floating on the surface. Others rushed for the bungalows but were dragged out and bayoneted. There was a list of 81 dead: 160 were missing.

Yet the cheerful crowds milling around Mrs G. gave the event the air of a race-meeting. A senior student boasted it was he who had persuaded her to come. He knew all along that the Jats had planned the massacre for that morning.

‘In which case,' I said, ‘why didn't you stop the Purbias from marching to their deaths?'

He shrugged and walked away.

A Janata supporter said the whole thing had been set up by agents-provocateurs.

 

‘And now let me show you something absolutely gruesome,' said a bright-eyed boy from Kerala. He pointed to a bed of zinnias and petunias, in which there was a reddish smear, buzzing with flies.

‘The brains of a murdered man,' he added, melodramatically. ‘Pantnagar produces the best seeds in India. Now human seeds have been sown in the canefields.'

The police, he said, loaded the bodies onto a truck, burned them with gasoline in the canefield, and ploughed in the remains.

‘And even now, Sir, in that place you will smell putrefaction and burnt flesh!'

 

The students dug up the bones and took them to the laboratory, but the verdict passed on to Charan Singh pronounced them the bones of jackals.

‘This is a question mark,' Mrs G. said to me in Delhi two days later. ‘Whether the bones were jackals or whether people were burned in the fields, that has not been proved. What the students say is: “Why did they set fire to the fields? They must be hiding
something
.” But when we talked to Dr Pant he wasn't sure whether the bones were human or not.'

‘So you think the shooting was planned in advance?'

‘It's very difficult to say,' she said. ‘I mean, it seems so senseless. I always find it very difficult to believe in anything for which you can't find a cause. It all seems so cruel . . . '

 

 

Mrs G. lives in a low white bungalow, No. 12 Willingdon Crescent, a few doors away from her father's house, Teen Murti. It is an excellent spot for staging a political comeback, because Teen Murti is a museum and place of pilgrimage. She shares these cramped quarters with her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, their wives, and Rajiv's two children. The cook has to prepare meals at the oddest hours, for the family and a couple of exhausted Irish wolfhounds. From time to time Mrs G. goes on fast – and will then order quantities of deep-frozen trout.

Access to Mrs G. is controlled by the Assistant Private Secretary, R.K. Dharan: people say she is a puppet in his hands. He was once a tourist guide at the Red Fort. It was he who persuaded Sanjay there was a loophole in the constitution which would enable them to call a State of Emergency – although it is doubtful, in retrospect, if either was sufficiently literate to interpret a document of this kind. But Sanjay persuaded his mother. R.K. took their orders to the President, and most of the Opposition went to jail.

 

R.K.'s office was in a garden shed. His hair was heavily pomaded, and he wore a white bush jacket. He seemed very anxious to make a good impression, and said we could call him ‘R.K.'. There was a stack of books and magazines on his desk.

We talked for a while until the phone rang.

‘Excuse me, Sir,' he said, ‘Madame is calling.'

He waddled off towards the bungalow, but hastened back and, removing the top-most book, inserted it into the middle of the pile.

‘Psst!' I called to my photographer friend Eve Arnold. ‘Watch the door. I'm damned if I'm not going to see what that book is.'

The author was Chatpathi Rao, and the title
Mimicry and Mono-acting
. It was a handbook for ventriloquists.

 

In another shed visitors had congregated for the
darshan
, or morning audience. At 9.15 Mrs G. emerged from behind the bamboo blind of the verandah. Someone handed her a black umbrella. She swept past a bed of red roses, and swept on to greet the crowd.

There was a minor hullaballoo when Sanjay and Menaka came out with armfuls of papers and drove off to Tis Hazari Court, where he was in the dock.

 

Sanjay makes a very odd impression: plump, balding, with thick, bright, downcurving lips. He is, of course, his mother's blind spot. As a boy, he was a near-delinquent and she had to rescue him from various scrapes. In England he worked as an apprentice in the Rolls-Royce factory. In India, his Maruti people's car was a fiasco. During the Emergency, he drew up the list of people to be locked away. Finally Mrs G. could bear the loneliness of dictatorial rule no longer. She overrode him – and called the election she lost.

 

The Janata has a variety of criminal charges against him: the murder of a dacoit, the illegal bulldozing of slums in the Muslim quarter, frauds at Maruti factory. But the charge they are pressing is that he burned a satirical film called
Kissa Kursee Kaa
,
The Story of a Chair.

 

Mrs G. received us in a white room bare but for a vase of gladioli, one or two paintings, some lumps of quartz crystal and a spiky modernistic sculpture. Her chair was stationed beneath a photo of Pandit Nehru in profile. She presented herself as a modern, practical housewife: indeed the only one capable of ordering the affairs of India. She kept turning her hands over as if rinsing them – and knew exactly how to time the intervals between her smiles.

But the interview was a bitter disappointment. Most of it consisted of petulant and rambling attacks against unidentified enemies. She attributed her election defeat to the ‘vicious propaganda of outside forces', and when I asked her to name them, she said, ‘I couldn't do that.'

Her reasons for calling the Emergency made even less sense. She implied that Jayaprakash Narayan's non-violent resistance movement had been leading India towards a civil war, like Bangladesh:

‘My chief ministers said, “Well, if you want to be a martyr that's all right for you, but there's no reason why you should force us into the same situation.” '

I asked about her plans:

‘I have no plans.'

I asked about her political beliefs:

‘I really think I am a socialist because I believe in the basic things.'

I asked about the secret of her attraction for the Indian masses:

‘Basically, I am a sympathetic person and that's what creates a bond.'

When I slightly overstepped the mark, she countered with a crack at the English:

‘There were these refugees . . . pouring over the border from East Pakistan. So I said to my cabinet, “We'll have to send them back. We can't feed all those people.” “Well,” they said, “we can't send them back.” So I said, “Then let them go to England or some rich place.” '

The only real point of interest was her description of looking after her mother as she died of T.B. in a Swiss sanatorium. It was in Switzerland that she first read the story of Joan of Arc.

‘Rather morbid it sounds now,' she said, ‘but I didn't think of it in those terms. It was the sacrifice of Joan of Arc that attracted me, the girl who gave up her life for her country . . . '

Over the next couple of weeks she repeatedly harped on the theme of Joan of Arc. Often, when there was a lull in the conversation, she would start up the familiar refrain: ‘Joan of Arc . . . the girl who gave up her life for her country . . . '

 

Only when I switched off the tape-recorder did the conversation take an interesting turn: ‘Why did you put Rajmatas Jaipur and Gwalior into jail?'

‘
I
didn't put them in jail. It was nothing political. They were in for some kind of currency fiddle'.

 

‘You have said the Janata Government is a
kitchri
. In England we have the same word, “kedgeree”.'

‘Yes, we used to have it for breakfast at Teen Murti. Lady Mountbatten taught my father's cook how to make it: smoked haddock, rice and hard-boiled eggs. But in India
kitchri
means a “mess”. I'll say it again and again, “The Janata is a mess.” '

 

‘Do you think Mr Bhutto will hang?'

‘People who come to me from Pakistan say, “Yes, he will.” After all there's been no little movement to save him inside the country and that's what gave them the encouragement. I'm sure he did order the murder. He comes from a part of the country where life is incredibly cheap.'

Mrs G. met Bhutto in Simla after the Indian victory in East Bengal.

‘What was he like?' I asked.

‘Well, when he came to see me he was extremely frightened. We were standing together outside the Governor's House and the crowd was looking on. It wasn't a hostile crowd or anything. But he said to me, “I don't like the look of that crowd. Couldn't you wave at them or something?” So I said, “No. Wave at them yourself. After all, it's your show.” So he waved and they waved back. But even after we got Bhutto and his daughter inside, it took us quite a lot to get them calmed down.'

‘But he was rather charming, wasn't he?'

‘He was extremely nasty to me.'

 

 

After a whistle-stop round of speeches at Bombay airport, we have followed Mrs G. to Kerala where she hopes to mend a split within the Congress Party. Her faction here is quite strong: a Kerala MP, Mr C.M. Stephen, is her Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, or Lower House. But she has been a controversial – not to say hated – figure since 1960, when she persuaded her father to boot out the elected Communist State Government.

They put on a good show at the airport. Chanting crowds cheered her and Mr Stephen to a white Mercedes that belonged to a local drink concessionaire. We followed in a taxi.

On the outskirts of town, a lathi-charge was coming down the street. The anti-Indira demonstrators dropped their black flags and scampered away from the ‘hard hits'. We swerved. A man fell close to the taxi and was clubbed in the gutter. At the fourth blow blood spurted over his face. Sixty-one casualties were taken to the General Hospital. No one was killed.

 

Mrs G. installed herself in the Old Divan's residence: a wooden building wherein, in the ground-floor saloon, there were ferns in a brass jardinière, watercolours of Venice and a print of the
Madonna of the Rocks.

At sunset black clouds banked up and burst: but the downpour did not prevent about a quarter of a million drenched figures from filing past to pay their respects.

Mrs G. reviewed them from a balcony on the top storey, seated on a chair which had been placed on a table. She jammed a torch between her knees, directing the beam upwards to light her face and arms. She rotated the arms as if performing the mudras of Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth. One group of marchers carried mock corpses, wrapped in orange cloth and with names in devanagari script. They were the three old men of the Janata: Morariji Desai, Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh.

‘They'll stop at nothing,' Mrs G. laughed, ‘but I suppose it's all right.'

I was sitting on the table.

‘Do get me some more of those cashew nuts.' She turned to me. ‘You've no idea how tiring it is to be a goddess.'

The rain cleared and I went into the street to join the marchers. Their pupils dilated as they gazed in adoration at the tiny illuminated figure.

 

An hour later, I was sitting again behind Mrs G. on the podium of the Cochin Stadium: but the rally was a dismal performance. She spoke in English, in a thin, whining voice, and listed a catalogue of accusations against the Janata.