by Jaya Jaitly
The CBI finally filed a charge sheet much later in April 2006. My daughter, and a friend, Sunita Sachdeva, came to court with me. Sunita posted fifty thousand rupees as bail. My son wanted to replace her bail surety deposit with his, but that too required him and her to appear in court, file affidavits giving reasons why, applying for withdrawal by one and replacement by the other. It sounded so tedious and painful that they both dropped the idea.
Hearings at Patiala House courts near India Gate in 2007 took place in two different rooms before two different judges within a short time. But then the case abruptly shifted to the district courts in Rohini in far-off north-west Delhi in the middle of a court hearing which had simply been adjourned for lunch.
Till 2010, I went to the Rohini courts by changing two metro lines and then going the last stretch by cycle rickshaw. Finally, it was so wearisome that I went by car since my children had gifted me one for my birthday that year. Three judges changed during my case at Rohini. At 8 am on the day of a hearing, my lovely golden retriever Honcho, afflicted with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, dropped dead at my feet. I could not go to cremate him as I had to reach court by 10 am. My daughter-in-law, Isabelle, came across to handle it for me while I went to court compelling myself to push down the sadness inside. I remembered an incident when the late J. Jayalalithaa, former chief minister of Tamil Nadu at that time, had abruptly discontinued a meeting with seniors of the NDA in a rare visit to Delhi because her pet dog had fallen ill in Chennai.
The ridiculous things that happen in Indian courts, by one of which I was rather affected, is reflected in a formal letter I felt compelled to write to then law minister of the UPA government, Veerappa Moily in 2010:
My reason for writing this letter is to bring to your kind attention the status of a charge sheet filed against me by the CBI in December 2006, under the Prevention of Corruption Act, almost four years ago. It is connected with a completely hyped, motivated and fraudulent set of allegations made initially by a journalist’s website called Tehelka.com. in March 2001, that is, nine years ago.
The Enquiry Commission functioned from April 2001 till October 2004 when it was aborted just before the honourable retired Supreme Court judge was to give the second and final part of his report. The enquiry could not be concluded although we co-operated with it fully for four long years.
The UPA government handed the matter over to the CBI which took two years to file a charge sheet, and that too only when it managed to twist the tail of a petty businessman and made him change his original story, given under oath in the inquiry Commission. Even today, the witness statements provided by the CBI with the charge sheet do not tally in facts. However, that is for the honourable judge to take note.
The proceedings started in the Patiala Courts in 2007 and later shifted to the Rohini Courts (for speedier processing). The appointed judges have changed four times already without any meaningful hearings beginning till date. Even persons with good memories of events that were significant would forget what happened leave alone trying to recall a meaningless event. Each new judge means starting from the beginning.
I am also happy to have been one of the victims of highly inefficient court systems since it gives me the opportunity to bring it to your notice, hopefully, for correction.
The judges on my case have now changed for the fifth time. The honourable Delhi High Court does the transfer of judges, but the judge gets his powers from the Lt. Governor of Delhi. The gap between the two processes leaves the judge ‘powerless’ for 20 days to a month, wasting his and everyone else’s time. A parallel judge can rule in his case if he is absent but not when he is present even if he cannot do anything.
A court clerk’s mistake about the next date of hearing (which all the accused, their lawyers and even the CBI’s public prosecutor noted correctly) resulted in our bail’s being cancelled and bonds forfeited by the parallel judge. We had to rush to get a stay, but the parallel judge who ordered the cancellation would not do it since the main judge was present. But, the main judge was ‘powerless’ so we had to rush to Tees Hazari courts to get the District Judge to order the parallel judge for the stay. What a perfectly ridiculous situation for all concerned. It took four trips to courts to rectify the situation. What is the point of a ‘powerless’ judge…
Sir, can you not ensure that transfer of a judge and according of powers for the judge to function happen simultaneously?
The law minister had no objections to the tone of my letter. He was kind enough to reply promptly with some kind of positive assurance that the situation would be rectified. That was more than I expected, but I have no idea whether things have improved on this front.
~
Then the case got transferred to the Dwarka district court in another far-off area of Delhi. It seemed to me as if the presiding judge had pre-determined intentions. In 2012, when he allowed me to travel to Singapore to attend a reunion of the Smith College alumnae from Asia, he arbitrarily raised my deposit fee from 25,000 rupees to 3,00,000 rupees. It was a big jump; I did not possess this amount. I told him so when he passed the order but he simply shrugged and smiled smugly with his arms crossed in triumph.
I had to appeal to the high court quickly with passbooks and demonstrations of my meagre resources. Fortunately, we got this order reversed so that I could travel to be amongst some of the highest Asian achievers among my alma mater. When I shared my political experiences, including the struggle to get to Singapore, the audience burst out into applause.
Since the same judge had convicted the unfortunate former president of the BJP, Bangaru Laxman, a heart patient in his late seventies, to four years in jail, I was apprehensive that I was next in line irrespective of our arguments. His orders to frame charges in my case were based entirely on speculative and far-fetched conjectures. In fact, he blatantly made up for the lapses in the poor CBI’s public prosecutor’s inept arguments in open court to send my case for trial. I appealed to the Delhi high court the next day but while the appeal was admitted and notices issued, it has not been heard yet. Four years have gone by.
Providence intervened and took us out of this judge’s hands. We found the case shifted to the district courts at Saket in South Delhi in the court of Special CBI Judge Manoj Jain. He seemed eager to move the case forward quickly by often mentioning the need for daily hearings which never came about due to the dilly-dallying by the CBI team. He was, however, patient with the CBI. We did manage to get through a few more witnesses.
Judge Manoj Jain completed his roster and was shifted. By then he was already irritated about the fact that Matthew Samuel of Tehelka, the final and most relevant of the CBI witnesses who kept pleading ill health and not appearing on appointed dates, was delaying matters.
Interestingly, on the last day of his hearing our case, the honourable judge called me back from the exit door when the proceedings were over. He addressed me in front of the CBI team and others who happened to be in court. ‘Madam, I want to thank you for your patient and calm demeanour and your co-operation in court. If you are innocent you have nothing to worry,’ he said. This was one of the pleasant surprises in all my experiences with courts. It reminded me of Justice Venkataswami’s kind response to my letter to him.
Judge Rakesh Kumar I (so named because there happened to be two of the same name) replaced him. He was followed a couple of years later by Judge Dr Ramesh Kumar.
During this period covering three judges so far, Mathew Samuel has avoided deposing in about twenty-one out of twenty-eight hearings. His excuses range from diabetes, constipation, piles, fistula surgeries, feeling unwell, lengthy bed rest, stuck in traffic, busy in the Kolkata High Court in the Narada Sting Operation case and going for training to the USA for eight weeks. The latest was that his mother was in hospital. Even his own opening ‘chief’ deposition is only half done.
One day in court on yet another fruitless trip, I took out my calculator and did some ‘back of the envelope’ mathematical calculations. At an average of a
ttending hearings ten times a year for ten years, I would have made approximately a hundred trips to court. Add to that, another thirty sundry trips for applications for travel and extending validation of my passport which initially got curtailed to only a year’s validity. Add the notional costs of lawyers for all accused persons at the aborted Inquiry Commission and then at various district courts. Add to that expenses on paper, photocopying, stationery, petrol and transportation for all concerned and other consultations and extraneous expenditures. It would have cost a minimum of 400,000 rupees a year for ten years.
The costs to the Government of India for this entire exercise would be many, many times that amount—forty million rupees spent over this case over the whole period, in the very least, on bringing all the accused to justice. My head whirled at trying to arrive at a grand total when a lawyer reported that a judge had revealed that while in court it cost the government 3500 rupees each time a case file had to be taken from the registry and brought to the courtroom. This did not include what was spent and aborted on the Commission of Inquiry for four years before this.
All this has been for the ‘state’ to use all the legalities and instruments at its command to find out whether I (and others) actually, knowingly, met arms dealers, asked for and took 200,000 rupees in corrupt circumstances from a man—a private poseur—on a pretend deal, and subsequently assisted them through the Minister/Ministry of Defence in advancing their interests.
My answer always remains: ‘Prove it quickly and lock me up, or finish with it and let me go.’
I am often asked, perhaps rather foolishly, whether some evil figure behind the scenes is orchestrating such a slow halal. I believe that it’s just that the pernicious Indian legal ‘system’ doesn’t care if an innocent person who is entitled to speedy justice, dies an agonizingly slow death after getting entangled in its clutches.
25
LIMBO AS A STATE OF BEING
Alzheimer’s Disease and the Under Toad*
BOOKS ARE GREAT FOR A reason. They help create a new order, a clearer design, in which to fit your own experiences and beliefs. When they are written in evocative language, words, sentences, ideas, even nuances—they stay with you forever. I came across some of my list of favourite novels while studying English, French, American and Latin Literature in the USA. Some I read later. I often refer to these special ones: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, George Orwell’s 1984, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Of the books I have read, admired, kept, remembered, revisited often, John Irving’s The World According to Garp stands out, as I write this chapter of my memoir. Published in 1978, Irving’s Garp is a powerful, humorous and tragic story of the family of T.S. Garp—about the love of writing and literature, and of radical feminism with its repercussions on society at that time. In it, I came across the use of effective symbolism for dreaded events to come. I found myself recalling this book when inner instincts compelled me to write of looking at the first imperceptible signs of Alzheimer’s Disease in the life of George Sahib. Moreover, like everyone else, I feel a certain solace in sharing emotions that are both personal and universal.
~
In Irving’s book, the Garp family recalls visits to the New Hampshire seaside every summer. Their familiar beach is known for its strong undertow. ‘Watch out for the undertow!’ and ‘The undertow is strong today’, become frequently used warning phrases if the roads are icy or some other danger anticipated. Garp’s four-year-old son Walt, however, begins to form his own ideas. One day, the family finds him with his little feet in the swirling surf, with him staring intently into the waves. When his mother and elder brother ask him what he is doing, he replies: ‘I’m trying to see the Under Toad…How big is it?’
Little Walt asks if it’s slimy or green or brown. It is only then that his family realizes that for all that time he had imagined the ‘undertow’ to be a giant, loathsome, toad-like monster waiting to leap out of the water to swallow him. It becomes an allegory for the presence of death or at least the unavoidable, in everyone’s lives. Walt is later run over and killed by his father in a freak car accident in their own driveway. The parable seeps ominously into our uneasy consciousness telling us that misfortune and death, the grim reaper, will eventually come. There is no avoiding it by fighting endless battles against it. One just has to live life to the full until that time arrives.
~
The ‘undertow’ that changed the nature of my work routine began at 9 am one morning in 2004 with the discovery that George Sahib suddenly could not remember the code to open the combination lock to his bedroom. Turn clockwise to twelve, anti-clockwise to twenty-eight, then clockwise back to ten. He had returned from somewhere at midnight and spent the night on the sofa in the adjoining study with the bedroom door still locked. He had refused to let Durga, the household help, call me earlier. I felt a slight tug at the pit of my stomach, but brushed it aside. I thought he may have been tired from hectic travel. After all, in 1978 his travel schedule had been so frantic that he, for a few moments, had forgotten his own name. Only he, Aditi and I knew the sequence of numbers to open the lock. We, because he would sometimes call from office or out of town asking urgently for papers lying locked in his room to be found and sent to him. It was the only room in the house that was locked in his absence. Papers and books always covered the entire twin bed next to where he slept. Sometimes, the dogs would occupy the empty space of his own bed. He would leave them undisturbed and sleep on the floor instead. Lord Snowden photographed him on this bed, fast asleep, amongst his books, when he came to photo-document famous political personalities of India for a coffee table book. This is available as archival material now.
As signs of forgetfulness and confusion increased in number, he was examined by his friend and neurosurgeon Dr V.S. Mehta of AIIMS. They found he had water accumulating in the brain; it was probably a long-term effect of his brain injury and surgery in 1995. Surgery was performed to permanently drain the fluid away through a tube. He also underwent tests for cognitive abilities but no note of adverse effects was put in his file.
He recovered and was active again but had recurrent headaches. He was so stubborn that he continued to bury himself in Parliament work, meeting visitors, exercising, reading and writing. He refused to dwell on any signs of discomfort. He was keen to refresh himself with a spell of treatment in Kerala, so I arranged to take him to my Kollengode family home, now formally called Kalari Kovilakom*. It was now a well-appointed Ayurvedic health establishment run by a sophisticated hotel group with a team of highly competent doctors, cooks, yoga teachers and sundry programmes to rejuvenate the body and mind. I had not seen its transformation from an empty palace to an internationally acclaimed luxury spa. We were treated as guests of the proprietors since they saw me as the granddaughter of the late Rajah of Kollengode, and therefore not allowed to pay for any of the services availed of. This was June 2006.
Politician Margaret Alva, and her husband, a poet from Australia, and two frazzled corporate ladies from the UK who wanted to detoxify their systems were also there with us for eleven days. It was almost exactly the same as in the days of my childhood except now there was electricity, modern plumbing, Internet and high-end contemporary fittings in the bathrooms. No one was allowed to leave the premises, wear leather, eat non-vegetarian food or drink anything intoxicating. There was no television either. George Sahib was delighted and missed nothing of what was disallowed since he did not care for them anyway. I was amused at the amount people paid to not have luxury but the message was that true luxury lay in a calm mind and good health. The initial medical inquiry took four hours. Special medicated oils were brewed, and a diet created for each kind of body-system was cooked and served accordingly. An eggless cake was baked for his birthday. There were newspapers and evening talks or cultural perform
ances for information and entertainment. In my honour, they staged a Kathakali performance of Kuchelavritham, the very same story I had learned and enacted with my cousin in our teens. I was also asked to give a lecture on the history of our family and take the occupants on a tour of the establishment. For once, the media left us alone.
George Sahib felt refreshed and re-energized but a couple of minor surgeries followed some months later to clean the blocked pipe that drained the fluids from his skull into his peritoneum; the series also included the removal of a gall stone, and cataract surgeries. George Sahib continued his walks in the garden, his many public engagements, and markedly blossomed when visitors from all over the country came calling. He enjoyed nothing more than company and music. He even insisted on travelling to Japan and Taiwan for political visits although I was completely against the idea. He simply avoided listening to me and got his staff to make the arrangements anyway.
The undertow in my innermost gut was getting stronger, more insistent, demanding attention and instilling dread. I silently went through the typical and well-documented symptoms (or so I discovered later on the Internet, reassuring me that my range of feelings were common) of a person finding a loved one increasingly afflicted by something unfamiliar, terrifying, unmentionable and incurable.
It isn’t easy looking back into the past, but while it was happening it was like being at the darkest edge of a constant nightmare. Denial, rejection, isolation, helplessness, anger, despair, are all listed in hundreds of studies about Alzheimer’s and the traumatic emotions their caregivers have to confront. I had no one strong or mature enough to whom I could confide my worries and sadness. George Sahib was a famous public figure. One could not announce such things publicly. It would have been intrusive and too heart-rending. I was, perforce, the only close and committed caregiver since George Sahib’s brothers lived far away, and his wife and son had distanced themselves decades ago. His political colleagues kept a safe distance on matters of incomprehensible sickness. Old colleagues who cared, lived in other parts of the country and could not give up their work and families to look after him on a daily basis. His non-political friends only made awkward enquiries. Political opponents like Mani Shankar Aiyar either mocked or ignored him until they discovered the truth of his jumbled responses, and graciously apologized. I felt alone and isolated in this new, unexpected maze that was becoming part of the quotidian.