India
Page 9
In a broader context, the smashing of the Babri Masjid was less momentous than it appeared at the time. The act of destruction—widely filmed and photographed—did not prefigure the nationwide shattering of mosques or the emergence of a Hindu Taliban. The strictures of the Constitution and the broader Indian allegiance to secularism prevented this kind of focused religious assertion. Rather, the events of this year formed a pattern of atrocity since 1947, in which the usually harmonious relationships between hundreds of millions of people would at times turn loud and violent, spurred by politicians.
When Narasimha Rao took the premiership in the summer of 1991 after the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, the cupboard was bare. Many forms of economic stagnation had collided. The previous eighteen months had seen two prime ministers come and go, each one running a ragtag coalition of regional outfits, propped up in Parliament by a larger political party. Nobody owned the ensuing mess, with the result that the component parts or parties tried to take whatever they could, personally or regionally. Rao, near to retirement, was surrounded by ambitious colleagues within Congress like Sharad Pawar, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot (who had started out as a milkman, and changed his name after becoming an air force pilot) and Jitendra Prasada. He led a minority government, and there was every reason to think it would not last a full term.
It turned out to be one of the most important administrations since independence, headed by India’s most elusive and inscrutable prime minister. Born in 1921, P. V. Narasimha Rao was a widower with eight children who had started as a legislator in Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s. In his spare time he liked to translate novels from Telugu to Hindi and from Marathi to Telugu; he was also thought to know Urdu, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil, Arabic and Latin.11 The oddity was that he rarely spoke—I remember talking to an MP from the north-east who had just left a meeting with Narasimha Rao, unclear whether or not they had reached a deal because of the complete lack of verbal signals. Although he appeared to be a loyal servant of the Nehru–Gandhi family, it is apparent from his own novel The Insider that Rao had an ambiguous view of Congress politics, and an acute, cynical understanding of the arts of political manipulation and intrigue. He was careful to sideline Sonia, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi. Wherever possible, he kept every outcome open so that nobody knew in which direction his own thinking was heading. He was heavily superstitious and regularly guided by Chandraswami, a mystical adviser to the powerful and wealthy who was sometimes referred to in the press as “controversial godman Chandraswami.”
When Rao took office, India faced grave economic problems. The first Gulf War and the high price of oil had created a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, structural changes were agreed which brought in foreign direct investment, enabled industry to become more competitive and allowed the market to function in areas that had previously been closed. He picked an economist, Manmohan Singh, and a lawyer, P. Chidambaram, and let them get on with taking down the enveloping mass of state-administered red tape known as the “permit raj” (or “rule by permit”) which controlled much of the daily working of business. It was a revolutionary achievement. Although the economic reforms of his premiership would transform India, Narasimha Rao was not a neoliberal. Rather he wanted to raise government revenues through the generation of wealth by the private sector and hoped to have more money for the state to distribute. He continued the ruthless crushing of the Sikh insurgency in Punjab, improved relations with other Asian countries and devoted a substantial amount of his time to manoeuvring against his colleagues, sucking in money through corruption and paying it out to MPs to win crucial parliamentary votes.
His premiership came to an extraordinary climax in 1995 when he ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to pursue more than a hundred politicians and officials who were alleged to have been paid bribes. The spur was some coded diaries which had been found in a raid on a businessman suspected of buying favours from politicians of several parties. They contained lists of payments to named individuals. The normal practice in such situations was for the people at the top to be spared punishment. For reasons that remain opaque (perhaps he was seeking to gain a reputation for probity, perhaps he intended to rout his enemies, perhaps he just wanted to invert Indian politics), Rao told the authorities to go after everybody—senior business people, friends of the Gandhi family, leading opposition MPs like L. K. Advani, even his own ministers. Several had to resign when legal cases were brought against them.
Things did not work out in the way Rao had perhaps intended: much of the material in the diaries was inadmissible as evidence, and he became supremely unpopular within his own party. In the general election that followed, Congress lost ground, taking only 29 percent of the vote nationally. In the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh it won a mere 8 percent of the vote, against 33 percent for the BJP, with new rivals the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party taking 21 percent each.12 No party won a nationwide majority, and a composite government was formed from smaller parties. Rao was himself targeted by investigators, and his political career was finished after five years as prime minister. Despite the political loss, the economic changes brought in during his time in office were to be transformative.
By the time the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence struck in 1997, it looked as if the Congress party might be over. The once great movement of national liberation, which had sat astride the country’s political system for half a century, was in tatters. Narasimha Rao’s machinations had led to major politicians leaving, and his replacement as party leader, Sitaram Kesri, was an elderly, incompetent Congress functionary. Voters were bored by the corruption scandals, the obvious hypocrisy, the absence of direction and the on-off support for the latest coalition government. New parties were bubbling up across the country, and they seemed to have a stronger understanding of the experiences facing millions of younger voters. V. P. Singh’s affirmative action programme for backward classes was producing important social change, but even the people who had opposed it, such as the poor Brahmins of north India who felt they were now suffering discrimination, tended to avoid Congress.
The party was brought back from the edge by an unlikely person. Usually, when a political movement wins power, it is the result of a collective shift, with a figurehead at the top. In this case, the impetus came from a single, unlikely figure deciding to join a race that she had never wanted to take part in—Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s wife, who when she came to India from Italy in 1968 had been nervous to enter a roomful of people alone. She knew the party of her husband’s family was fragmenting; she knew too that this was probably the last chance to secure a possible political future for her children; and there was even talk that she and her family might be ordered to leave their large, government-supplied bungalow in New Delhi, 10 Janpath.
Half the people in the world who live in a democracy live in India, and an Indian general election can be like nothing on earth. During the 1998 campaign, when Sonia Gandhi joined politics, there were over 600 million registered voters, and ballot boxes had to be transported by donkey, mountain porter and fishing boat. Nearly 5,000 candidates ran for office, and some of these aspiring parliamentarians were bizarre. In Bihar, a candidate named Ravindra Kushwaha chose to file his nomination papers under the alias Santraj Singh because he was absconding from the police. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, the “bandit queen,” Phoolan Devi, a gang leader turned politician, was standing despite having sixty-three court cases pending against her. Not far down the road, Dhruv Ram Chaudhary was up for election. He had two cases registered against him for murder, five for attempted murder and two for dacoity. Meanwhile a candidate in Maharashtra, the fifty-year-old Mr. Deshmukh, interrupted his campaign to kill two dogs and a buffalo and burn banknotes worth Rs10,000, for no apparent reason. In Meghalaya, voters could choose between Adolf Lu Hitler Marak, Hopingstone Lyngdoh and Frankenstein W. Momin.13 (Such names usually came from parents in the north-east who liked their sound but did not realize the implications: others included Clutch, Billy
Kid and Bombersingh. An academic in Shillong told me he had a student called Latrine Born, who had changed the name on her behalf to Laktrang—which means “something you really want” in Khasi.)14
The level of anarchic violence in the 1998 election was substantial. In the southern industrial city of Coimbatore, dozens of bombs were detonated, killing thirty-six people, but nobody claimed responsibility. Polling day in Bihar was savage. There was widespread booth capturing, which involved a gang of men arriving at a polling station, disabling the police guard, stuffing the ballot boxes with voting papers marked in favour of their own party and delivering the boxes to the local returning officer. Across the state, bombs were set off and rival groups shot each other with home-made guns. After the first day of voting, the Hindustan Times had this front page headline:
AT LEAST 40 KILLED IN BIHAR
POLL VIOLENCE—POLICE PATROL PARTY
BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS
After Rajiv’s assassination, Sonia Gandhi had retreated from the world, seeing only her mother and sisters and a few close friends. Occasionally she would make public appearances or receive important foreign dignitaries, but most of her external contact was handled by intermediaries. In New Delhi, she became an object of fascination—the Sphinx, Jackie Kennedy, Mona Lisa. Her house was turned into a shrine to her husband’s memory, and she edited a moving and surprisingly revealing book about him, Rajiv, which contained a selection of his photographs. Initially derided as an uneducated outsider, an “Italian au pair,” Sonia proved a canny political operator. Many who knew her well found it hard to believe what she was doing, having always thought of her as apolitical. In her book Rajiv, there is indeed little sense of her future strategic talent. Lines such as “Rajiv drove through most villages and towns in his jeep. Wherever people were waiting, we would stop. If we were delayed they would stand by patiently, to see him, to talk to him” appear naïve, and could have been written by the wife of almost any Third World leader who was sure to be received with rapture.15 Over time, Sonia Gandhi would become an exceptionally commanding politician, exerting her unspoken will over the Congress party. Once again, the men in white khadi were afraid of “Madam.”
I went to one of her first public rallies. Not far from Delhi’s Red Fort, where the Mughal emperors once lived in state surrounded by half-naked eunuchs, lies Ram Lila Ground. People were streaming towards it, wearing Congress badges, Congress rosettes, sun shades and hair bands, chanting and jumping, shouting slogans, some barefoot in dhotis, some in shirts and ties. An auto-rickshaw passed, a pair of bell-shaped speakers attached to its roof, a man in the back blaring the injunction: “Aaj teen bajay sooniye Bharat ki ik lauti bahu, Sonia Gandhi”—“Today at 3 o’clock, listen to India’s one and only daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi.” Around 80,000 of us waited for five hours while a qawwal, singing as if from the heart, entertained the crowd. Up on the podium stood fabulously tall cutouts of Rajiv Gandhi, striding forward with his arm in the air, and beside him a giant Sonia, doing namaste.
When Mrs. Gandhi arrived, the crowd pushed forward against the bamboo barriers. Police shoved screaming people this way and that, and beat some of them with sticks. Dozens of Special Protection Group agents barked into walkie-talkies and cricked their necks as they listened to their earpieces. Head down, mouth set tightly, no time to waste, Sonia Gandhi scurried up to the front of the platform, wearing a man’s watch like her late mother-in-law. Behind her came her daughter, Priyanka, and son, Rahul, both now in their mid-twenties, waving and smiling. Mrs. Gandhi began reading her speech in a woeful voice, in heavily accented Hindi, telling the story of her life and how she had sacrificed her husband for India. Beside me an old man with a long yellowing beard and a strong nose was sobbing, tears running down his pitted face. A middle-aged woman, huddled into her sari, dabbed at her eyes with a pink tissue, shaking her head. Sonia had arrived in India with a return ticket, “but Delhi was the place of my second birth and the ticket, like my past, was lost in the mists of time” (which ignored the fact that she and Rajiv almost quit the country for Italy during the Emergency). She concluded her speech with a line of unadulterated cinema. “Dar gaye,” she rasped in her Italian accent, “ek aurat se dar gaye hain”—“The opposition are scared, scared of a woman.”
Nothing in Sonia Gandhi’s upbringing hinted at a political career. Born Antonia Maino, she grew up in the poor industrial suburb of Orbassano on the outskirts of Turin. Her father, Stephano, was a successful builder who had fought alongside the Wehrmacht against the Russians on the Eastern Front (he gave each of his daughters a Russian pet name, hence Sonia) and her mother, Paola, was a traditional housewife. Stephano remained an unrepentant fascist until his death, like many of his generation of Italian men, and kept a leather-bound edition of Mussolini’s speeches in his front room.16 The Mainos were a strict Roman Catholic family. The girls were not permitted to go out unchaperoned, and it must have been with trepidation that he allowed his attractive eighteen-year-old daughter to attend a language school in England.
Sonia stayed with a British family as a paying guest but felt homesick. One lunchtime at the Varsity restaurant in Cambridge, a mutual friend introduced her to Rajiv Gandhi. Sonia wrote later: “As our eyes met for the first time I could feel my heart pounding. We greeted each other and, as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight.”17 The friend, Chris von Stieglitz, called it “pure, simple, personal magnetism. It never disappeared. Three months before his death I remember her sitting on his knee; they were still acting like teenage lovers.”18 After the marriage, which took place against the wishes of Sonia’s father, they lived a carefree life in Delhi, away from politics, spending days with friends and going on picnics and excursions. Relations with Sanjay and Maneka were tense but detached. Sonia fulfilled the role of the faithful bahu, or daughter-in-law, buying impeccable clothes for Indira Gandhi and cooking her favourite dishes; in some respects, traditional family life in India and Italy was similar. Rajiv was a contented airline pilot, flying a Fokker Friendship and later a DC-3 on the domestic sector. Sonia Gandhi could never have anticipated how the untimely death of her brother-in-law followed by the murder of her mother-in-law would lead to her husband becoming prime minister, and how his assassination would in turn leave her with few alternatives but to become a politician herself.
During the 1998 election campaign, it was apparent that Sonia Gandhi was creating a popular reaction, but unclear whether this meant she could overcome the view that she was an outsider who had no business to be involved in Indian politics. Her opponents called her “Italy ki Maharani,” the “queen of Italy,” and Bal Thackeray, leader of the BJP’s chauvinist ally the Shiv Sena, asked, “How is it that when we ask one white skin to quit India, you are welcoming another white skin? … Our ancestors, who fought for freedom, overthrew the British.”19 Her Catholic religious background offered another line of attack: Narendra Modi said she might be in league with the election commissioner, who came from a Christian family in Meghalaya in the north-east. “Has James Michael Lyngdoh come from Italy?” he wondered. “I don’t have his janam patri [horoscope], I will have to ask Sonia Gandhi. Do they meet in church?”20
These jibes continued for several years, but it seemed from early on they had little genuine resonance with voters. I watched her visit the constituency of Medak in Andhra Pradesh, which had been Indira Gandhi’s seat at the time of her death. Voters here were predominantly Telugu-speaking agricultural labourers, living in poor conditions. When she flew into Medak in an orange and white helicopter to speak to a cheering crowd of over 100,000 people, she represented some distant ideal, a deracinated image unconnected to the reality of cropping sugar-cane by hand for twelve hours a day. A local revolutionary outfit, the People’s War Group, had ordered a boycott of her rally, but this was ignored. Some people came to see Sonia because they were paid by local village leaders, but most came voluntarily. One old man told me he had ridden four miles from Lingsanpally on his bicycle. “I have attended m
eetings of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, so let me see how Rajiv’s wife looks.” Unlike in Delhi, where outfits varied, all the women here wore saris and bangles and all the men had a dhoti and vest, except a handful of hard-faced local Congress leaders who wore slacks—and owned shoes.
As the crowd streamed towards the road, I spoke to Kondraopalli Pochamma, an agricultural labourer in her early forties with rings on her toes, poor teeth and a thin yellow sari. She earned about $20 a month, when she could find work. She had come to the political rally to see Sonia “and receive her message,” she told me, speaking in Telugu. “But I couldn’t follow a damn thing. Sonia’s accent wasn’t like Indira Gandhi’s.” All the same, she would vote for Congress. “Who else is there? Only the family has a soft corner and a wish to help the poor, especially women. I belong to a weaker [lower-caste] section. Our only hope is Sonia—we trust her, because she too has suffered.” Nobody I spoke to there was concerned about her foreign origins. “She married into an Indian family and so we consider her as one among us,” said Kondraopalli Pochamma firmly. “She is Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law.” In traditional Indian culture, the daughter-in-law is subsumed into the husband’s family, so for a Medak voter she was not much more alien than a Bengali or a Kashmiri.