What Am I Doing Here? (40 page)

‘No control . . . strife . . . no law and order . . . atrocities are commonplace . . . no homes for the homeless . . . Harijans (Untouchables) burned alive . . . lathi charges . . . Instead of strengthening the voice of the voiceless they are more interested in haranguing me . . . But we have something more important, the love of the people. We can feel the pulse of the masses . . . '

 

She had not felt the pulse of this mass. Thousands and thousands turned their backs, and, in the arc lights, we watched the upper tiers draining, and snaking for the exits.

 

At the breakfast press-conference Mrs G., dressed in a crisp flower-printed sari, demonstrated her flawless technique for dealing with a roomful of men. She poured from the teapot in her best memsahib manner. If anyone presumed to ask an awkward question, she said, ‘
Do
have another cup of tea!'

One journalist, bolder than the rest, was not to be put off.

‘Why,' he asked, ‘when you were in power, did you throw out the foreign press? Why are you now courting the foreign press?'

She looked hard in my direction: ‘I don't see the foreign press.'

 

At eight sharp the motorcade set off north for Calicut. Mrs G. sat on the back seat of the drink concessionaire's Mercedes. We followed in far greater comfort and style, in the doctor's car: an immaculate white Humber Super Snipe with the Red Cross flag fluttering from the bonnet.

‘What could go wrong with Mrs Gandhi?' I asked the doctor.

‘She might get stoned,' he said wearily. ‘But the worst we expect is an allergy to flowers.'

 

The doctor had already surprised us with the bust of Stalin in his living room. This was his story:

Sometime in the Fifties, he was a house-man at the General Hospital in Newcastle-on-Tyne. Among his patients was a Conservative MP who was expected to die of a bloodclot approaching his heart. The MP wanted to die, but wanted to live until Saturday when his racehorse was running at Longchamps. On Friday evening came news that the horse had been kicked and couldn't run.

‘Damn it,' said the MP. ‘I'd have known what to do. Feed him a couple of pounds of onions.'

The doctor, remembering an ayurvedic cure, asked, ‘Do you ever eat onions?'

‘Hate onions,' said the MP. ‘Always have.'

‘Well, I'm going to feed you two pounds of onions.'

They forced the onions down the MP's throat. The clot dissolved - and the man lived.

The doctor took out his album of press-cuttings. Time showed a smiling young man in horn-rimmed glasses: the discoverer of carraganen, a chemical contained in onions that was a powerful anti-coagulant and might conceivably transform heart-surgery.

But you couldn't patent an onion: the rest was a sad tale. He came back to India. No one took any notice. He now worked for a private clinic in Cochin owned by a man I felt was completely deranged.

 

On the way we passed pink-eared elephants, brick-kilns and churches that looked like Chinese pagodas. Most of the slogans were welcoming. But from time to time a string of old shoes was suspended across the road: the worst of all Hindu insults.

One graffito read, ‘Indira Gandhi is a notorious fascist witch'.

 

At every village Mrs G. got out of the car, mounted a platform decked with Congress-I flags, and thanked the crowds for their ‘warm and dutiful welcome'. As the morning wore on, more and more garlands of jasmine and marigolds were festooned around her neck: each one had a banknote pinned to it. The heat had the effect of moving her to shriller and shriller rhetoric: ‘The full force of the Government is on one small woman.'

 

 

Eve Arnold and I go through alternative phases of ‘Love Indira' or ‘Loathe Indira'. Today was ‘Love Indira' day.

At the approach to Calicut, the Black Flag boys were out in force. Mrs G., slumped under her mound of flowers, got through unscathed, but the Humber Super Snipe, like some stately relic of the Raj, was obviously mistaken for her car. A small rock smashed the driver's window and hit him on the head. Another rock smashed my window and landed in my lap. The flying glass lightly grazed my scalp and the side of my neck.

Suitably patched up, I went to the afternoon press-conference where Mrs G. was again handing round cups of tea.

‘Good Heavens, Mr Chatwin,' she said, ‘whatever happened to you?'

‘I was stoned, Mrs Gandhi.'

‘That's what comes of following me around.'

But when the conference broke up, she rushed towards me: ‘Are you sure you're all right? Have they really got all the glass out? Well, thank Heaven for that! Do you want to lie down?'

No. I did not want to lie down. But Eve did. She was wilting in the heat.

Mrs G. sized up the situation and led Eve into her own bedroom where her briefcase was open and papers were strewn about. She laid her down on the bed and let her sleep for two hours. She then returned with the eternal cup of tea, and said she needed the room to change.

It was, of course, excellent public relations. It was also very pleasant behaviour.

 

I talked to Mrs G.'s secretary, Nirmala Deshpande, a small, determined spinster who is very vociferous on the subject of her employer. Miss Deshpande was sitting on the floor unthreading the banknotes from the garlands.

‘Look what we got on the way,' she said, stuffing them into a bag. ‘The people give her what they have.'

One of Mrs G.'s secrets, she said, was her stamina. Physically, she could outpace every other Indian politician. In the elections of Andhra and Karnataka she went to bed once in sixteen days.

 

For dinner at the Circuit House we had real mulligatawny soup made of fresh pepper and asafoetida. Then we went to another evening rally. The Black Flag boys had rioted in the afternoon and the Security Guards were taking no chances. Rifles and sub-machine-guns glinted in the moonlight. Mrs G., as usual, was completely fearless: but I did wish she'd make a better speech and not rant on about ‘witch-hunts against me and my family'.

After all, it was
she
who locked up the Opposition.

 

Mrs G. left Calicut at 3.30 am on her way to Manipur, a tribal area on the Burmese border which was out of bounds for foreigners.

Eve and I went to Madras and to the temples at Mahabalipuram, and then returned to Delhi. The mood had changed, drastically. When we first arrived, most people thought Mrs G. was finished. Now, they were tempering their words.

A by-election had been called in the constituency of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress-I candidate, a Mrs Kidwai, stood a good chance of winning. If she did win, it would mean the Hindu heartland had forgiven Mrs G. for the Emergency - and that nothing would stop her coming back.

One Delhi journalist had it all worked out: Janata was Weimar: 12 Willingdon Crescent was Hitler's cell in Landsberg Castle.

Delhi talk:

‘All this nonsense about the 700 million. As far as we're concerned, there are 700 Indians and we know them all.'

‘Moraji's quite right. There should be an auto-urine therapy clinic in every Indian village.'

‘We've got to stop behaving like Hamlets.'

‘She can't come back with all those flunkeys and sycophants. She's got nobody to come back with.'

‘Hindus have always worshipped power for power's sake. In the Hindu pantheon, the male god is passive, whereas the mother-goddess, his
Shakti
, is the active partner.'

‘The atmosphere around Mrs Gandhi has always reminded me of
Arsenic and Old Lace
' (Piloo Mody, one of her ex-cabinet ministers).

 

No aspect of the Emergency was more surreal or more damaging to Mrs G. than Sanjay's programme for sterilising the Muslim men and bulldozing the slums of Old Delhi. The two went hand in hand. If you refused sterilisation, you were bulldozed and packed off to a shanty-town.

Rukhsana Sultana – a gorgeous girl and friend of Sanjay - had been, semi-officially, in charge of the programme.

When I called on her, she was wearing a mass of flowered grey chiffon, and sunglasses in a darkened room. Before she took up ‘social work', she had run a jewellery boutique. Her servant brought in some red plush boxes, from which she pulled strings of emeralds, alexandrines, rubies and pearls.

‘All our vasectomies', she said, ‘were done in a lovely air-conditioned cellar. I and my workers had to sweat it out on the street.

‘At my first vasectomy,' she went on, ‘I simply passed out . . . The blood and all. But after a while I got used to it. Three minutes on the table . . . snip . . . snip . . . and they were away . . .

‘In India one's got to have family planning. We were brilliant. We were idealistic. But we were young and inexperienced and we were victims of vicious propaganda. I must tell you, none of us was working for money. We all came from prosperous families. Our idealism was selfless.'

The programme ended in the famous riot at the Turkman Gate in which at least fifty people were killed.

‘But I'm sure she's coming back,' said Rukhsana. ‘The people of India have to have one leader. They worship Mrs G. like a god. Indians are only capable of worshipping one God.'

‘I thought they worshipped a lot of gods.'

‘Hundreds of gods! Thousands of gods! But all manifestations of the same OM. You know what is OM? Well, for them Mrs G. is a manifestation of the OM.'

 

 

Azamgarh
,
Uttar Pradesh

 

We got here by taxi from Benares in the sweltering May heat. The fields were grey: the cultivators had nothing much to do but wait for the monsoon. Azamgarh itself was a dusty, almost shadeless town on the banks of a sluggish river. There was one hotel. It was full.

In the restaurant - if it could actually be called a restaurant – we overheard three Congress-I workers weighing the pros and cons of getting a Muslim stooge to burn a copy of the Ramayana – and so cause an incident. A very young Delhi journalist was eating his dahl and chapatis. He raised an eyebrow as we came in, as if to say, ‘The Brits!'

After a meagre lunch Eve and I set off in search of a bed and, after threading through a mass of rickshaws, were shown a squalid communal doss-house.

‘There's nothing for it,' she said. ‘We'll have to go back to Benares.'

‘We mustn't give up.' I said. ‘I think if we're very nice to that young journalist, he'll give up his room for you.'

He was still in the restaurant.

‘Can I introduce you to Mrs Arnold?' I said.

‘Not Eve Arnold!' He jumped up. ‘Your pictures of Joan Crawford are absolutely fabulous!'

Eve almost fainted with pleasure – and it all worked out as I hoped. She got the room and Rajiv (as I shall call him) and I joined a long line of sleepers on the roof.

 

Rajiv was an exhilarating companion. He had been everywhere in India roughing it. He could take in Hindi and spit it out in English from the sides of his mouth. The Janata candidate was not much in evidence, but we called on Mrs Kidwai: a nice, stout, motherly woman who had set up her headquarters in a ruined rajah's palace on the riverbank. She had carefully modelled her style on Mrs G.

A man asked me, ‘Excuse me, Sir. Is she Indiraji's niece?'

 

Mrs G. was expected to arrive at the border of the constituency around three. While Eve took a nap, Rajiv and I followed Mrs Kidwai's car. But as we passed a clump of ancient mangoes, we saw the green-and-orange flags of the Janata. Rajiv shouted, ‘Vajpayee!' — and we tumbled out of the car.

Atal Behri Vajpayee, the Foreign Minister — perhaps the best Foreign Minister India has had — was addressing a crowd assembled in the shade. He had silver hair, a square intelligent face, a dramatic use of gesture, and mastery of metaphor. His audience clung to every word. The level of discourse made Western electioneering seem like some barbaric rout. This was true democracy.

‘The squabbles of the Janata', he said, ‘are not so unhealthy. All Indians like to squabble.

‘Take a bowl of milk,' he continued. ‘It hangs over the fire on a rope of five strings. Think of those strings as the Janata. The cats playing round the fire think they are going to snap. But they don't snap. The cats get tired of waiting and fight among themselves . . .

‘But this is no ordinary election, my friends. Had it been so, why would Indira Gandhi have bothered to visit you for the last five days?'

 

Mrs G. and her bandwagon turned up on time. She wore the look of victory. On the window of her used Ford Falcon was an advertisement: ‘Go naked in the SUN. Action-packed weekly.' A Jeep-load of Sikh bodyguards followed. One was a vast and sinister man with ice-blue eyes and a turban to match. Proudly, he showed me the revolvers nestling in his rolls of fat.

‘She's coming back,' he said, ‘like de Gaulle.'

At dusk, they propped her above the roof of the Jeep and, with the torch shining upwards, she really did look like an image on a juggernaut.

 

 

Mrs Kidwai began the speeches while Mrs G., in vengeful vermilion, glared at the crowd. She then rose to speak and told such outrageous lies that Rajiv and I, crouching under the platform, made a commotion of protest.

‘There are no compulsory sterilisations in this part of the country,' she continued blandly.

‘Liar!' shrieked a voice from the crowd. ‘I have been sterilised!'