by Jaya Jaitly
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George Fernandes, who was by then a mere member of Parliament, sometimes dropped by at Gurjari after Party meetings at the Jantar Mantar office to inquire how I was doing. Once, while I was in Ahmedabad, he was touring Gujarat for May Day meetings with his trade union colleagues. He invited me along as it was a Sunday and our office was shut. We spent till the early hours of the morning travelling and attending meetings in villages around Baroda where I sat absorbing this new experience of listening to fiery speeches about the blood of the working class colouring the revolutionary flag red. When asked to make a short speech, I was utterly terrified and almost ran away. It took me years to develop the courage to become a confident public speaker since George Sahib was the hardest act to follow. We returned at 2 am to a small hotel where he and his old socialist colleague Somnath Dube, began to tell me of the events of the Emergency and the Baroda Dynamite Case. The room seemed bathed in moonlight as I listened to their stories till dawn broke. Nobody had slept, and no one, including me, had given a thought to the fact that I was a young woman amongst these hardened trade unionists in unusual circumstances. Sometimes, and I would realize this only later, I was the only woman on the stage listening to speeches in a hall of two thousand men. My matrilineal roots may have helped in my being completely oblivious to such exclusivity, and the consequent lack of any self-consciousness. This, of course, doesn’t go down too well in the male-oriented world of politics. Once I foolishly asked George Sahib what someone would think. He snapped back impatiently saying, ‘I do not think about what they think’. At the time, I didn’t realize that he was indoctrinating me into the world of politics and his many fearless struggles for justice and integrity. It was the only world in which he cared to belong, and those who were with him had to be part of it.
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One day, in the mid-eighties, Madhav Singh Solanki, the then chief minister of Gujarat, visited Gurjari. We showed him pictures of various other VIPs during their visits to the shop. Some photos featured me prominently. I showed him how the tie and dye bandhni fabric opened up when the threads were unravelled to reveal the beautiful design. He became poetic, describing the bandhni dots on the sari like stars coming out in the evening sky. A short while after his entourage left, the emporium manager received a call from his office saying the chief minister wished that I should go to the guest house and bring along the photographs he had seen of mine. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed. And acting on the later, didn’t go or send the pictures. This was the same gentleman who, as per the CBI, was later reported to be surreptitiously carrying a letter to certain authorities in Switzerland in an attempt to clear the Gandhis in the Bofors scandal.*
The famed dancer, Mrinalini Sarabhai, was chairperson of the Gujarat Corporation. Amma, as we called her, had a real presence and a magnetic personality. Her mother and siblings were well known to my mother and being from Kerala, there was a certain sense of affinity between us. We had once travelled to Kutch together where the locals called her ‘Saraben’ thinking the ‘bhai’ in her surname was like any other local name and was therefore detachable. For them ‘ben’, meaning sister, is added to the woman’s name and ‘bhai’, meaning brother, to the man’s name as a form of respect. Her dance troupe, with daughter Mallika and others, treated my home in Delhi informally. I stayed at their home when in Ahmedabad and Amma was sweet and hospitable in return. Once, Mallika and actor Kiran Kumar had held a chilled jug of wine to the soles of my feet to soothe my raging malaria, telling me I should be honoured that movie stars were tending to me. I had planned a tour to Kutch and decided to brave the heat for a change of scene despite my high fever. I asked Carmen Fernandes, a good friend and a designer at Gurjari, to carry lots of ice cubes and come with the matador van early next morning. We reached Bhuj by late evening where a bed was laid out in the office. Craftspersons brought moong dal khichdi with lots of pepper and cloves to cure the malaria. We worked despite the fever and vomiting, and I soon recovered as a result of their care and concern.
Much as I admired and respected Amma’s dignity, her writings and extraordinary talents, I couldn’t shed the feeling of discomfort while being around performers like her who inevitably carry the need to constantly be in the limelight. She often held back on according credit to us for our design interventions; it seemed to me as if heading an organization with several good designers was not quite enough and she had to somehow be at the forefront of its achievements. She, however, had a vulnerable side to her and shared many confidences with me about her life and family. I too was always frank with her. When the Janata government fell, and the old bosses were holding sway again, she handed me some publicity material asking me to have them delivered to the who’s who of Delhi’s power structure. One separate envelope was marked to the well-known son of a powerful political figure who had no position in government. ‘Amma, why do you have to do something like this?’ I had asked her. ‘He is not important in the legitimate hierarchy. You have stature and don’t need to be pleasing him to get some favours.’ After a moment’s pause, she agreed with me and decided not to send that envelope.
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The year 1984 was a traumatic year that detached me from everyday reality and Gurjari for more than three months. It was a nightmare and another world. But that is a story that comes for when I knew for sure I had to leave the world of comfortable office spaces, and empty, pseudo-intellectual debates, for the real politics of the street. There were, however, some occasional incidents when I participated in political activism even during my engagement with the handicrafts sector.
Since Amma’s sister Lakshmi Sahgal was a freedom fighter and firebrand activist, she did not object to my taking part in politics with the opposition Janata Party. Milk prices in Delhi had been abnormally hiked. We called a protest against V.P. Singh, finance minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government. It was an all-party show by women with seniors like Pramila Dandavate leading us. Interestingly, when I suggested the easy availability of liquor as a counterpoint to the difficulty in accessing milk for children, even some women members of the Left parties rejected the argument. Our procession led to a serious scuffle at Parliament Street. I was beaten black and blue by policewomen whose hard, expressionless eyes showed how brutal they could be. At the police station where we were herded, I noticed a board that listed heinous and non-heinous crimes. Eve-teasing, as it was called then, came much lower in the list than bicycle theft. I showed Amma the still vivid expanse of bruises on my thighs. She took it calmly. I genuinely respected and cared for her and never held against her what eventually happened to me at Gurjari on her watch.
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In 1989, Gurjari got a new Managing Director—T.S. Randhawa. He had a passion for photography. When he shared his plans to photograph the nomadic communities of J&K, I requested our old colleagues there to help him out during his stay. I thought it was friendly and courteous for me to pick him up in our car at the airport if he was coming for a visit on work. As an IAS officer’s wife, I did this as a helpful gesture to a colleague in the services. Later, he wrote a report about me saying I had boasted that my husband was the Chief Secretary of J&K and could get anything I wanted done. I couldn’t comprehend why he did so.
As a consultant, I gave advice on marketing plans and design developments to support the organization. Suddenly one day, I received a four-page letter from Randhawa rejecting all my plans and suggestions, which I defended as they were based on experience on the job and what I was paid to do. He responded saying, ‘If you are sitting on your laurels it means you are not wearing them in the right place.’
He used his talents at photography to also create an album of dusty and untidy sales areas in the Emporium to prove how poor the quality of my work was. The staff told me he had taken these pictures at closing time on a very busy day when I was not present. In any case, supervising the cleaning of the showroom was not part of my duties. The fabrics had been opened by the staff and shown to the customers like any
other day. Tidying up always happened before the shop opened to customers the next morning. The last photograph provided the perfect filmi ending. He had written ‘The End’ in the dust on top of a sales counter with his fingertips. He had been in the IAS for a total of eight years while I had worked at Gurjari for eleven years. I suppose this was the old story of the IAS being trained from inception like the British Civil Service to believe that they always know best and that anyone who may know better is a threat. Earlier, heads and colleagues welcomed and acted upon suggestions, but this showed the changing avatar of officers. Official credit cards were being used for entertaining and giving gifts from the Emporium to friends. This seemed to be the new norm to keep in step with corporate officials who were the only ones at that time to use them.
An instance of changing trends in the behaviour and attitudes of public servants was seen when S.S. Sherawat, a former captain in the army—tall, honest and decent—was the manager of Gurjari. We had a very good working relationship. At one point, the Mallika Sarabhai dance group began to expect him to facilitate their travel and shopping. This had not happened before Randhawa. Considering my old-fashioned and rigorous views on such matters, I advised the manager not to lower himself into having to shop with an old pair of Mallika’s shoes as a sample just because she was the chairperson’s daughter. He too felt uncomfortable.
A few days later, in April 1989, as I was sitting in Sherawat’s room helping him open the day’s mail, I came across a letter addressed to him from the Head Office saying ‘This is to inform you that Mrs Jaya Jaitly is no longer working for us’. I thought it was terribly funny and began laughing, but the staff thought it was an earth-shattering event. They feared if this could happen to me, any one of them could be next. I tried to meet Amma in Ahmedabad to ask why the office couldn’t have discussed any problems with me amicably and even tell me they preferred to have a change after a decade of my work. No luck. I met senior officials who sheepishly said they respected us both so much that they didn’t want to take sides. They suggested I go to court! I did so, but only to show the staff that one had to always fight injustice.
A petition was filed before the Gujarat High Court. A few moments into the hearing, the judge harshly pulled up the corporation and quashed my dismissal, scathingly commenting that it was ‘a shame this was happening in the land of Mahatma Gandhi’. Within two hours, the government went to court and obtained a stay. Typical of the Indian justice system, as I would come to experience many times over, the case dangled for twelve years because of the heavy load of pending cases.
In the meanwhile, my lawyer Girish Patel lost interest and became a prominent activist in the Narmada Bachao Andolan.* Kalpesh Jhaveri, a fine person with strong socialist leanings became my counsel. He is now a judge in the Gujarat High Court and is facing a piquant problem with fellow judges who complain that he disposes off his cases too quickly. I finally won my case twelve years later but the high court order said I should be reinstated at the same salary with no compensatory pay.
Socialism and ‘pro-labour’ judgements were obviously fading away. My victory was merely pyrrhic. If my honorarium was to be the same after twelve years, it was a status quo. It would have been silly of me to even think of going back. The ‘state’ eventually won, and misuse and corruption entered Gurjari as was the norm in most government establishments. It became a typical, rigid, state body no longer promoting quality or innovation, and its fame departed. I felt it had its time, served its purpose, and private establishments were opening everywhere. All the government emporia today need to be shut down or radically revamped as most have rented valuable space to the ever-present Kashmiri traders and have no motivation to promote the interests of craftspersons of their own state.
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I had learned that many government establishments could not give all craftspersons a fair deal. Some needed a space like our traditional haats or shanty markets to engage with customers directly without officials keeping them waiting, or finding fault with quality, price and delayed payments. As my work as a consultant in crafts allowed me time to follow other interests, in the early eighties, I decided to pursue a project to study the possibility of setting up a haat in Delhi, and was advised by Shiromani Sharma, Development Commissioner Handicrafts then, to give it a practical ending. We wanted to hold a weekly bazaar in the premises of Hanuman Mandir, across the road from Gurjari in the NDMC locality. This involved locking horns with the NDMC for a year and a half for permission to use the tehbazari space there that lay vacant except on Tuesdays. Nobody listened. In desperation, in 1985, I finally went to meet Jag Pravesh Chandra, an elderly gentleman who was then Chief Executive Counsellor of Delhi.
Chandra had a habit of giving appointments to visitors at 8 am while he was in bed in his pyjamas, still sipping his morning tea. I was the only woman there in a room full of Congress activists. Half-way through my impassioned appeal to him, he raised a finger to stop me. The tea was doing its job. He got out of bed, went to the toilet behind the curtain and, in everyone’s hearing, loudly proceeded to unburden his bowels. His audience pretended not to hear anything. When he returned, I hastily concluded my final sentences and dashed out of his house almost in tears with embarrassment. This was a first in my hitherto pretty elitist life. Despite this eccentricity, Chandra was helpful and we were officially permitted to use the space. I invited him to celebrate the first year of our little haat at Hanuman Mandir, which he very graciously did.
My ‘Dastkari Haat Samiti’, a national association of craftspersons, was formed and registered in March 1986. Hanuman Mandir saw us through interesting times on the pavement every Saturday. There were bomb blasts and bus strikes, and our secretary, a tailor, had a stroke while sitting at the haat and died soon after. The NDMC confiscated the tea seller’s cart because it wasn’t something for which permission had been given. The penalty to have it returned was two thousand rupees. They also refused to beautify the place, not allowing a tea stall, or even a small stage where street theatre could be performed. They argued that if the place improved, rich commercial bodies would want it. In effect, we had better wallow in a mess amidst drug addicts, laddoos surrounded by flies, and no tea stall if we wanted to remain there paying five rupees per stall as rent. However, our organization grew, with monthly meetings held on the pavement, democratic decision-making processes formulated and a membership of ninety craftspersons from Delhi. Those who earned four rupees supplying dolls to a retailer, now earned twenty-five rupees selling them directly at the Dastkari Haat. That was the basic idea behind the market. We eventually learned that we needed storage space, a longer occupancy and definitely food stalls to attract customers. The concept of Dilli Haat was slowly evolving.
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Since Gurjari’s time for serving craftspersons faithfully seemed to be over, the concept of a marketplace exclusively for them became the obvious answer to the need for sustaining their livelihoods. I took the idea to officials in the Delhi government for a couple of years but it proved to be too difficult for them to understand. The explosion of militancy in Kashmir in early 1990 triggered its initiation. I sought an appointment with the then Prime Minister V.P. Singh and provided the concept on paper to set up a permanent marketplace for craftspersons. ‘Good idea. Do immediately’, he wrote on file and passed it on to his Principal Secretary who called a meeting inviting various officials to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). S. Regunathan, Chairman, Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTTDC), took up the project with funds from the Ministry of Textiles with the late Ajai Shankar. It also had dogged support from one Mr Hakim, Joint Secretary in the PMO, who pushed it whenever it stalled, which is what happened when the project was to come up behind the Purana Qila opposite the Crafts Museum in a small triangular park adjoining Bhairon Mandir. These officials were from that remarkable breed who were positive, altruistic and cooperated with great willingness considering I had no political standing. In the midst of the planning, however, V.P. Si
ngh’s government fell and Chandra Shekhar became the prime minister.
Behind the scenes, some people felt threatened and used their supposed proximity to Maneka Gandhi to cancel the allotment of this location, claiming it would disturb the animals in the zoo. As we went back to the drawing board, another civil servant, Ramesh Chandra, the officially designated Administrator of the NDMC, telephoned me with a unique solution. He had discovered a law common to Chandigarh and Delhi that allowed municipalities the ownership of the space over sewers. Sarojini Nagar had a wide storm water drain running through it. He proposed to cover it with a thick slab of cement and soil and offer it for my project. I had never met him but he claimed he had seen my efforts from a distance. Nothing went too smoothly but that will be part of an exclusive book on Dilli Haat which I am waiting for someone to write for me. I had to call an urgent meeting of our organization to propose the simple name ‘Dilli Haat’ to avert the danger of Delhi Tourism christening it as ‘Shilp-Ahar’ as an incorrect translation of Food and Crafts Bazaar.