India
Page 7
At first Rajiv rode a wave of national enthusiasm not seen since the heady days of his mother’s triumph in 1971. Then the rot set in; what was good for the nation was not necessarily good for the Congress Party, and Rajiv — a latecomer to politics, without the sureness of touch that comes from having climbed the ropes rather than having merely pulled them — soon decided politics was more important than statesmanship. Compromise followed sellout as New Delhi returned to business as usual. Charges of corruption in a major howitzer contract with the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors tarnished the mystique of the dynasty: little children sang, Galli-galli mein shor hai / Rajiv Gandhi chor hai: “Hear it said in every nook / Rajiv Gandhi is a crook.” The Rajiv regime’s distance from the masses, both figurative (he remains to this day the only Indian prime minister ever to have been photographed in jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt) and literal (thanks to the overzealous security measures imposed upon him after his mother’s assassination) exacted a further political price. The 1989 elections brought yet another anti-Congress coalition to power. And yet again it fell apart, seemingly paving the way for a resurrection of the dynasty.
But this time it was not to be.
* * *
Every assassination comes as a shock, but the bomb blast that murdered Rajiv Gandhi took more than his life and those of others around him. The elections in which he was running were briefly postponed, then rescheduled and held; Parliament sat, a new prime minister was sworn in, the business of governance went on; but in a real sense the killing disenfranchised Indians.
The India that killed Rajiv was not the India I grew up in. In April 1975, as a college student and freelance journalist of nineteen, I went to Parliament House in New Delhi to interview Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for a youth magazine. A friend from my college hostel asked whether he could accompany me; as his excuse, he carried a tape recorder in a shoulder bag. We strolled unchallenged past the guards and into the prime minister’s outer office, where a cheerful shambles reigned.
Supplicants, officials, and hangers-on sat around, walked in and out, and brought tea and conversation to the private secretary, who told an irreverent anecdote about the uncannily plausible portrayal of an Indira Gandhi-like figure in a current Hindi film.
After a while, the press secretary, the reflective and erudite H. Y. Sharada Prasad, emerged from Mrs. Gandhi’s inner sanctum to call me in. I asked if my friend could join me. “Why not?” he said, and we both walked into the prime ministerial presence. The shoulder bag might have contained a bomb, but no one bothered to check. The thought wouldn’t even have occurred to them. Despite the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi twenty-seven years before, Indians didn’t order their affairs that way.
Within a decade of this encounter, religious and sectarian violence had inflamed India. When Rajiv ascended to power following his mother’s assassination, he carried out his public duties clad noticeably in a bulletproof vest. He addressed crowds from behind a Perspex screen, a security cordon of Black Cat commandos around him
In a country where any individual could join the breakfast throng at the prime minister’s residence to seek a favor or benediction, even members of Parliament had to pass through intensive security checks. Some complained about how demeaning it was to be frisked before meeting their prime minister, but the complaints were muted. After what had happened to Indira Gandhi, security precautions became unavoidable.
And yet old habits die hard, and democracies, especially one as freewheeling as India’s, are not instinctively good at protecting their leaders. Security became an issue in itself; the distance that safety considerations obliged Rajiv Gandhi to keep from the people cost him votes. The prime minister came to be seen as an aloof and remote figure. The trappings of security created, in many voters, eyes, an imperial prime ministry, occupied by an imperious prime minister. It was this, as much as anything, that cost him the 1989 election.
So it was hardly surprising that the next time around, in 1991, Rajiv Gandhi threw safety to the winds in his campaign. He reveled in casting his bodyguards aside and plunging into the throng; he asked the crowds to flock into the empty spaces in front of the podium that were sectioned off for security purposes. His every gesture reaffirmed the vital premise, so necessary to all democrats, that they are safest among their own people; that to be touched by the Indian masses was, for an Indian leader, to be in touch with the sources of his own power.
In India, as in all true democracies, elections legitimize the system not merely through the casting of votes, but through the process itself, the self-renewing exchange of hopes and promises, demands and compromises, that make up the flawed miracle of democracy.
India’s voters had repeatedly proved -- and were in the process of demonstrating again -- that a democracy offers other ways of manifesting disagreements with one’s leaders. Despite the spiraling violence, the growing criminalization of politics, the increasing num ber of fringe groups who found bombs more effective than debate, Indians had never ceased to believe in themselves. The bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi shook that self-belief by attacking its very basis: that Indians could choose their rulers, and preserve a way of doing things that offers meaning and value to that choice.
Soon after the killing, the platitudes flowed like blood: the end of a dynasty, a life cut short in its prime, the bullets triumph over the ballot. I mourned, too, for the India I grew up in. I had no doubt that India would survive, that Indians would find the resilience to transcend one more national calamity. But it will never again be an India where freedom is untrammeled by fear, an India where a student can walk in uninvited upon his prime minister.
* * *
I could not have voted for Rajiv Gandhi’s party in the elections that took his life. But I grieved his loss. I grieved, of course, for his family, for a nation plunged again into mourning. I grieved for the hopes he had once raised in me, for the frustration and disappointment he had later evoked, for the potential he still represented till the moment of his passing. And I grieved because his death, and the manner of it, again shook, in a very different way from the Emergency, my sense of what, as an Indian, I could always take for granted.
Rajiv Gandhi had had no obvious qualifications for office, but in the frenzy and chaos that followed India’s first major political assassination since that of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the Congress Party clamored for the stability and reassurance of a familiar vote-catching name at the helm. Its leaders chose Rajiv Gandhi not for himself, but for his lineage. His genes justified their ends.
So I was dismayed. But within weeks my dismay dissolved into hope. For the unexpected ascent of Rajiv Gandhi had brought to power the kind of Indian almost completely unrepresented in Indian politics. My kind of Indian.
There are many of us, but, among India’s multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national identity rather than a local one, which we express in English better than in any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part; we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. We see the poverty, suffering, and conflict in which a majority of our fellow citizens are mired, and we clamor for new solutions to these old problems, solutions we believe can come from the skills and efficiency of the modern world. We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but in that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.
And, in Indian politics, we are pretty much irrelevant.
We don’t get a look in. We don’t enter the fray because we can’t win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don’t have the votes: there are too few of us, and we don’t speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learned to talk about political issues without the expectation that we will be able to do anything about them.
Until Rajiv Gandhi, the accidental prime minister, came to power.
Rajiv Gandhi was unlike any Indian political figure I had ever met. He had nothing in common with the professional politicians we had taught ourselves to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing private wealth through the manipulation of political favors. Instead of the visionless expediency that had been his mother’s only credo, Rajiv offered transparent sincerity and conviction. Instead of the grasping opportunism of careerists who saw politics as an end in itself, he was a reluctant politician thrust unwillingly into public office but determined to make something of it — the very antithesis of his brother Sanjay.
For one exhilarating year, those of us who had thought ourselves alienated from the Indian political process were swept up in the unfamiliar excitement of having one of our own as prime minister. In every step Rajiv Gandhi seemed determined to stem the drift, to find urgent solutions to the perennial problems of India. He pledged to shed the shopworn socialist dogmas that had consigned the economy to stagnation and left workers and consumers alike to the mercy of the permit/license/quota-granting bureaucracy. In place of the tired reiteration of sterile slogans, he spoke of liberalization, of technology, of modernity, of moving India into the twenty-first century. He even chose the self-congratulatory occasion of the Congress Party’s centenary celebrations in 1985 to assail the corruption and complacency that had made the party atrophy into an unresponsive behemoth.
Nor did the politicians themselves escape his cleansing fervor. He shunted aside the old-timers and the time-servers, brought in fresh professional faces from the private sector (including energetic entrepreneurs who had made their fortunes in the United States, but wished to serve their homeland), and outlawed the unprincipled “defections” that had made party labels a matter of convenience. Best of all, he made peace with rebellious Sikhs in Punjab, agitating students in Assam, and unreconciled guerrillas in Mizoram, bringing them back into an electoral process they had preferred to subvert. To Indians like me, this was heady stuff.
It was also too good to last. Rajiv Gandhi became the victim of his own success. His actions strengthened the country, but undermined his party. His peace accords, by bringing disaffected minorities into the mainstream, gave them power at the expense of the Congress. The veteran politicians rumbled in complaint: Rajiv Gandhi, they said, was indulging his personal predilections at the party’s expense. And because he had not worked his way up the political ladder, Rajiv Gandhi was uniquely vulnerable to the charge, leveled by those who had, that his instincts were the wrong ones. He gave in.
Within two years of his coming to power, it was back to business as usual. Politics was elevated above performance, the national interest subordinated to the party interest. When a seventy-five-year-old divorced Muslim woman, Shah Banu, won a Supreme Court case obliging her husband of forty-three years to give her the equivalent of five dollars a month in alimony, Rajiv Gandhi bowed to outraged Muslim orthodoxy and sponsored a law officially named, with breathtaking cynicism, “The Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights Upon Divorce) Act,” placing Muslim widows outside the purview of the country’s civil codes. He had initially taken the opposite view, but was persuaded by the opportunists in his party that that would cost him “the Muslim vote.” As compromise followed compromise, promises to Punjab were broken to appease neighboring Haryana; economic liberalization was stifled to preserve political control; resources that could have gone to providing clean drinking water and electricity to the villages of India flowed into arms purchases; the investigators of governmental corruption were fired rather than the corrupt. The fresh faces quickly faded away, the party hacks returned. Rajiv Gandhi was no longer one of us.
He was, instead, trying hard to be what he was not — a traditional Indian politician. In having to operate the levers of Indian democracy, he had lost sight of where he had intended the engine to go.
Is a democracy best served by leaders whose pulse throbs with the passions and prejudices of their people, or by those who transcend the limitations of their followers? Sitting on the sidelines, I had no doubt about the answer; caught in the vortex, Rajiv Gandhi couldn’t even ask the question.
I learned the humbling lesson that the give and take of democracy does not always produce the results sought by its impatient observers. Rajiv Gandhi’s charisma was no substitute for experience: where a veteran politician might have been able to trust his instincts and lead with vision, the tyro was pressured into retreat. And despite all his compromises, Rajiv Gandhi — isolated from his natural constituency, counseled into political opportunism, and protected from the public by a security phalanx — still lost the next election.
So I couldn’t have supported him the next time; my disappointment still stuck too raw in my throat. But I was glad to have him in the fray, because I hoped that someday he might more effectively give voice to the convictions of his own upbringing. And at a time when casteists and religious fanatics were attempting to redefine India and Indianness on their own terms, I was proud to have an Indian leader who belonged to no single region, caste, or community, but to the all-embracing India I called my own. By simply being Rajiv Gandhi, he represented a choice it was vital for India to have.
An assassin’s bomb deprived India of the right to exercise that choice. With Rajiv Gandhi’s passing, there was no longer any Indian political leader of whom it could be said that his appeal was truly national, and in the spectrum of alternatives available to Indians, that loss was disenfranchisement indeed.
It was not true, of course, despite the fatuous pronouncements of some TV commentators in the sound-bite-ridden West, that the assassination demonstrated India’s unfitness for democracy, any more than the shootings of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. made the United States an unsuitable place for freedom. Indian democracy survived, as it has survived other calamities. But though violence cannot destroy democracy, it can weaken its most vital premise: that democrats do not need to be shielded from their own people.
Rajiv Gandhi tried to overcome his literal and figurative distance from the people by mingling with the crowds in his campaign. His successors would now hesitate to do that; the bulletproof vest, the protective screen, the commando escort, the roads cleared before every VIP convoy, would become an ineluctable part of the Indian political scenery. And so barriers have come to be erected between India’s leaders and her people — if not in the hustings, then intangibly, in every Indian mind. That, too, has disenfranchised India.
Perhaps the ultimate reflection of both the extent and the limitations of Rajiv Gandhi’s appeal lay in the decision of his Congress Party to offer his place to his widow, Sonia. Behind the extraordinary selection of an Italian-born nonpolitician — and though she turned it down — lay the implicit judgment that Rajiv Gandhi’s value as a leader lay not in his qualities but in his name. From the party he led to his death, this was an unworthy epitaph.
The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi took from Indians, of whatever political coloration, part of the glory of their Indianness. The knowledge of our freedom of opinion and choice was something that we lit inside ourselves like a flame. Now its glow was forever dimmed by the knowledge that, in the election of 1991, the most important verdict was delivered not in a ballot box, but in a coffin.
* * *
When Rajiv fell at the hands of Sri Lankan Tamil assassins, his party looked likely to emerge as the largest single political force in the new Parliament, but well short of a viable majority. Ironically, it was the outpouring of support after his assassination — Rajiv’s dea
th, psephologists estimate, swung some forty seats to his party — that enabled Congress even to form a minority government. Had he lived, as one aspiring prime minister among many, Rajiv might well have presided over the terminal decline of the dynasty. But in death he focused the minds of the nation again on the sacrifices made by his family, and so revived its mystique.
What, then, is this mystique made of, that it can make an Indian ruler out of an Italian whose only patrimony is matrimony?
Mystiques are, almost by definition, difficult to analyze, since they are suffused with a magic that is greater than the sum of their ingredients. Salman Rushdie saw the Nehru-Gandhi mystique as the stuff of myth: “We have poured ourselves into this story, inventing its characters, then ripping them up and reinventing them. In our inexhaustible speculations lies one source of their power over us.” Perhaps Rushdie’s is the best way to see the dynasty, as a sort of collective dream of all Indians, a dream from which the nation periodically seems about to wake, before fitfully relapsing into oneirodynia.
But there is more to the dynasty’s appeal — more meat to the myth — than that. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Nehrus and the Gandhis is that, though their parliamentary seats may lie in the populous northern heartland around Allahabad, they are truly national figures. The New York Times’s Abe Rosenthal reported about Jawaharlal’s visits around the country that “it was always as if Nehru was looking into the eyes of India and India was just one soul.” When Ved Mehta first met Nehru, he wrote, “I feel I am confronting Sanskrit, Mughal, and English India at the same time . . . . I feel the real secret of free India lies in the prime minister. His character reconciles the various Indias.” Displaced Kashmiris to begin with, the Nehrus’ family tree sports Parsi, Sikh, and now Italian branches, and its roots are universally seen as uncontaminated by the communal and sectarian prejudices of the Hindi-speaking “cow belt.” Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, and religion, something impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician.