The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  This, then, was the Drona who rose one day, bathed his feet in the sacred Ganga, and proclaimed that he could not take it any more. He had converted the petty criminals, but the biggest were the ones running the country - and they would not listen to him. The dishonesty and cynicism of the government of Priya Duryodhani was an affront to his conscience that Drona could no longer abide. It was time, he declared, for a People’s Uprising which would restore India’s ancient values to its governance.

  Where were all our protagonists at this time? You may well ask, and you would be right, Ganapathi, to do so. The trouble with telling a tale on an epic scale is that sometimes you neglect the characters in the foreground as you admire the broad sweep of the landscape you are painting, just as the overall picture fades occasionally from sight when you focus closely on the smudgy details of individual impressions. Let me, Ganapathi, make amends.

  Shall we begin at the top of the ladder of righteousness, with the son of Dharma? Yudhishtir was now a respected leader of the Opposition, sternly adopting the mantle of elder statesman which I was now too inactive to hold (yes, Ganapathi, you can be too old even to be an elder statesman). His earlier criticisms of Duryodhani, his principled resignations, gave him the saintly aura of one who has been right before his time - even though many would have preferred him to be more preoccupied with political, rather than urinary, tracts.

  Bhim was still in the army, which he had served so well in the war that destroyed Jarasandha and broke up Karnistan. He had his limitations, but below the neck there was still no one in India or its environs who could stand up to him.

  Arjun, perfect Arjun, had at last revealed a major imperfection: in-decisiveness. When the Kaurava Party split he could not find it within himself either to support his increasingly priggish elder brother or to endorse the view of the idealistic, bearded Ashwathaman. On this his self-contented brother-in-law gave him no advice except to do what he thought best. ‘If I knew what was the best thing to do,’ Arjun expostulated to the untroubled Krishna, ‘I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?’ But Subhadra’s brother smilingly declined to go any further in his counsel.

  Krishna himself seemed to find in the national convulsions a vindication of his preference for local politics. ‘Your national mainstream,’ he said to Arjun, ‘isn’t clean enough to swim in.’ He remained with the Kaurava Old Guard, one of our few supporters who did not need the blessings of Dhritarashtra’s daughter to retain his seat and who could therefore afford to keep his distance from her both geographically and politically. But Krishna’s opposition to Priya Duryodhani was not active enough to prompt Arjun to emulate him. Nor could Ashwathaman’s increasing irrelevance in the Kaurava ranks inspire Arjun to endorse his friend’s radical idealism. Priya Duryodhani seemed happy enough to keep Drona’s son on her Working Committee to let off occasional bursts of socialist steam, which she continued to ignore in practice as she fuelled her political gas-flames under blacker kettles. So Arjun ignored politics altogether and devoted himself - with great competence, but no greater consequence - to Subhadra, Draupadi and non-political freelance journalism.

  Our supporting cast did not benefit from any larger unity of purpose than the principals. Kunti, her hair now almost as white as the widow’s saris she had at last begun to wear, presided over the joint Pandava ménage like a dignified Mother Hubbard. She had given up the Turkish cigarettes of her insecure loneliness and now chewed Banarsi pan with as much red-stained confidence as any other Indian matriarch. Nakul, with his gift for speaking in the plural, had entered the national civil service from which Vidur had at last retired (while retaining enough governmental consultancies not to notice the difference). Sahadev, his silent twin, took his reserve and his gift for allowing himself to be told what to say into the foreign service. And I, Ganapathi, chomping reflectively on the new reality with my toothless gums, watching the few wisps of white on my scalp curl in dismayed betrayal, I sat, and aged, and saw, and dreamt.

  109

  Drona’s uprising was, of course, a peaceful one, so it was not really an uprising but a mass movement. It was, however, a movement that rapidly caught the imagination of the people and ignited that of the Opposition. Drona preached not only against Duryodhani but against all the evils she had failed to eradicate and therefore, in his eyes; had herself come to represent: venality and corruption, police brutality and bureaucratic inefficiency, rising prices and falling stocks in the shops, adulteration and black-marketing, shortages of everything from cereals to jobs, caste discrimination and communal hatred, neglected births and dowry debts - the whole panoply of national evils, including the very ones against which the Prime Minister had campaigned in the elections. Priya Duryodhani was being held accountable for the pledges she had failed to redeem, the hopes she had betrayed and the miracles she could not possibly have wrought. The sharpest focus of the movement was on herself: she was finally paying the price for her party’s complete identification with its Leader.

  Within months the movement had rocked the government to its unstable foundations. It did so by making the country ungovernable. In villages and towns, Drona preached a new civil disobedience, urging students to boycott classes, clerks to withhold their taxes, workers to strike at government-owned plants, legislators to resign from the assemblies to which they had been elected and the police to disobey orders to arrest the disobedient. It became clear that, for all their jingoistic hubris at the breaking in two of Karnistan, the people were judging the Prime Minister by the domestic goods she had failed to deliver rather than the strategic international stature she had diverted the government’s energies to attain.

  The Opposition parties quickly jumped on the Drona bandwagon. They gave it some of its lung-power, much of its muscle, and a great deal of its political thrust. With the Kaurava (O) and other parties in its ranks, the People’s Uprising soon turned its attention to specific targets, the most vulnerable of which were the Kaurava (R) state governments. These were led largely by inept minions hand-picked by Duryodhani solely for their loyalty; they were thus easily attacked. In Drona’s home state, the government was so completely paralysed by the need to contain his movement that its police spending reached the colossal sum of 100,000 rupees a day - yes, Ganapathi, one lakh of rupees, or enough to feed 20,000 Indian families and have something left over for dessert. In Hastinapur, after weeks of popular agitation culminating in a highly popular march by housewives banging empty pots and pans outside his residence, Duryodhani’s Chief Minister resigned. When New Delhi showed no inclination to hold elections for a new state assembly - preferring to control Hastinapur directly under ‘President’s Rule’ - Yudhishtir, the state’s most famous political leader, undertook a fast unto death. He hadn’t even lost a kilo before Duryodhani caved in and called new state elections - which her party comprehensively lost. The political tide seemed to be turning decisively away from the Prime Minister.

  I watched all this, Ganapathi, in increasing gloom. I was no admirer of Priya Duryodhani or what she stood for, but I was equally distraught about Drona’s Popular Uprising and where it was leading the government. For the independent India that I had spent my life trying to achieve to be wasting itself in demonstration and counter-demonstration, mass rallies and mass arrests, was pitiable. For the government to be devoting all its attention to policing opposition rather than developing the country was tragic. For our precious independence to be reduced to anarchy, betrayal and chaos was downright criminal.

  If only they had waited, Ganapathi! The next elections were not so far away; Drona and Yudhishtir could have rallied the Opposition around them, consolidated their organization and swept Duryodhani from power at the hustings. Instead they clamoured for her removal, and that of her party’s state governments, now; and they did so not in the assemblies, where the post- Gelabi Desh electoral wave had left them clinging to the jetsam of just a few seats, but in the streets.

  Priya Duryodhani had her back to the wall, and that was the position from which
she always fought the hardest. Especially when the wall itself appeared on the verge of crashing down behind her.

  Yes, Ganapathi. For right in the midst of this political crisis, an upright if excessively legalistic provincial court found the Prime Minister guilty of a ‘corrupt electoral practice’ for making a campaign speech for her parliamentary seat during the last elections from a platform shared with President Ekalavya. The President being a non-political national figure, Priya Duryodhani should not have ‘exploited his presence for partisan ends’. I don’t know what was more laughable, the suggestion that the Prime Minister stood to gain in the slightest from the President’s political lustre (all of which was reflected from her in the first place) or her conviction for an offence whose triviality was underscored by the far greater crimes perpetrated and perpetuated all around her and her government.

  The conviction - which deprived her of her parliamentary privileges pending appeal - gave the Popular Uprising just the spark it needed. They turned their movement into a massive orchestrated cry for her resignation, threatening to court arrest outside her home every day until she quit. More ominously for her, Drona began to talk to a faction within her own party, led conspicuously by his son Ashwathaman, which was calling for her to step down ‘temporarily’ in order to quieten the Opposition demands and give the judicial process time to work.

  But if there was one thing Priya Duryodhani had learned from her mother’s wasted sacrifices, it was never to put anything, anything at all, ahead of self- interest. She would not allow anyone to place a blindfold on her blazing eyes. And her instincts were confirmed by her closest advisor, the hand-picked President of the Kaurava (R) Party and the man known as ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’, the Bengali lawyer Shakuni Shankar Dey.

  Shakuni was an immense mountain of a man, oily and slick, with a gleaming bald pate, gleaming gold buttons on his immaculate silk kurta, and gleaming white enamel in place of the teeth he had lost at the hands of a grieving mob (which had expressed its grief with its fists after he had got a murderer off on a technicality). ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’ flicked a stray speck of lint off his spotless sleeve and turned to the Prime Minister.

  ‘Don’t resign, even for appearances’ sake,’ he said firmly. ‘Why gratify the howling jackals outside and give time for the opportunists within the party to wrest control from you?’

  ‘But do I have a choice?’

  Shakuni frowned his disapproval of the question. ‘The Prime Minister always has a choice,’ he growled. ‘You don’t have to do anything merely because it’s expected of you. But there is something else you can do,’ he added meaningfully.

  ‘What?’

  Shakuni rested manicured fingers on the prime-ministerial table in front of him. ‘Hit back.’

  The Prime Minister looked at him like a schoolmistress whose favourite pupil has given too pat an answer. ‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘But how? I can’t just lock up all those I’d love to put behind bars.’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘Oh, of course I can,’ Duryodhani said in exasperation. ‘But I wouldn’t last a day afterwards if I did that.’

  ‘You might not, if things were allowed to continue as at present,’ Shakuni said carefully. ‘But you could change the rules of the game. You could declare a Siege.’

  ‘But we already have.’ This was true: the state of Siege declared in the country at the time of the Gelabi Desh war had never actually been lifted.

  ‘Yes, but that Siege was declared to cope with an external threat which everyone knows has long since passed,’ replied the lawyer. ‘What you could do now is to declare an internal Siege. A grave threat to the stability and security of the nation from internal disruption.’

  ‘Which is true enough,’ Priya Duryodhani nodded reflectively.

  ‘No one has ever defined the permissible procedures under an internal Siege, which leaves it more or less up to us to define them,’ Shakuni added. ‘I think they could very safely include the preventive detention of some of our more obstreperous politicians . . .’

  ‘All of them,’ the Prime Minister said firmly.

  ‘Or, indeed, of all of them,’ Shakuni affirmed. ‘Not to mention censorship of the press, which is nowhere explicitly ruled out in the Constitution, suspension of certain fundamental rights - free speech, assembly, that sort of thing - and measures to put the judiciary in their place.’

  ‘Go on,’ Duryodhani said, her anxious pinched face brightening. ‘I like the sound of this.’

  ‘Of course, this plan will need the cooperation, or at least the signature, of the President.’

  The Prime Minister’s face took on its famous determined look. ‘It is time,’ she said pointedly, ‘that Ekalavya earned his keep.’

  110

  While this conversation - or something very like it, Ganapathi, for my sources were no longer as good as in the old days - was taking place, Yudhishtir, flanked by Drona and the assembled luminaries of the Opposition, was addressing a mammoth mass rally at the Boat Club lawns convened by the People’s Uprising movement to call for the exit of Priya Duryodhani.

  ‘As I get up and stand at this microphone,’ he declaimed, ‘as I stand here and look upon the hundreds and thousands of you gathered here before me, the lakhs of men and women who have come to see us all on the same platform, who have come to sense and feel our unity, our confidence, the strength of our commitment to freedom and justice and change, who have come to hear us because for once we represent your hopes instead of merely your dissatisfactions, as I see all this, I feel a surge in my heart.’ The crowd roared its approval at each pause, its excitement rising as Yudhishtir added clause to heady clause to bring his audience to a crescendo of vocal adulation. ‘I know,’ Yudhishtir declared, ‘I know, standing here, that change is at hand. I know that India can no longer be the same. I offer my respectful salutations in your name to our guru Drona.’ Enthusiastic applause. ‘I look from you to my colleagues on this platform’ - a broad sweep of his hand encompassed his former rivals and critics in other opposition parties and he named some of them, receiving a lusty cheer from each politician’s supporters in the crowd - ‘and I know that from now on there is no looking back’ - roars from the crowd - ‘that our differences are over’ - another roar - ‘that together we are going to seek and attain our supreme goal, the bringing down of this corrupt and iniquitous government.’ Another roar, this time louder than all the rest; the crowd on its feet; slogans raised by Kaurava (O) workers judiciously scattered amongst the throng - ‘Down with Priya Duryodhani! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Long Live Opposition Unity! People’s Uprising, Zindabad!’

  And so it went on, with even stiff-necked Yudhishtir provoking the exhilaration of the rallied mass, but there was still something staged, unreal, about this piece of political theatre. The court verdict had, inevitably, stirred the Opposition movement to greater boldness, just as the Hastinapur elections had prompted them towards greater unity. (There the disparate followers of Drona’s Uprising had banded themselves together in a Janata Morcha or People’s Front, which with the linguistic eclecticism of Indian politics had quickly become known as the Janata Front.) The Prime Minister’s court- directed loss of her parliamentary privileges now gave them the one thing they needed: a clear-cut issue on which they could unite.

  But their unity seemed purely expedient, their programme severely limited and their theatre all the more unreal. For several days now they had been calling on the Prime Minister to resign without the slightest thought of who or what might take her place. Demonstrations took place in every significant stretch of ground in the country to condemn the government and demand that the Prime Minister step down. To counter them, Shakuni had had busloads of rural peasants wheeled into Delhi from neighbouring farmlands on diverted public transport to express their support for the government in raucous rallies outside the Prime Minister’s residence. Sometimes the two groups had clashed; sometimes the innocent farmers had lent their vocal chords to the wrong cause. But they w
ere not the only ones who had no idea of the rest of the script.

  It was, I suppose, heady stuff, grist for the foreign news-magazines which reported on wars and political conflict in the same tone that they reported the goings-on in Hollywood bedrooms, but my own view of it was entirely ambivalent. I knew that in India there were really no blacks and no whites; nor was there a uniformly dingy grey. Instead, political morality and public values were a mystical, blurred, swirling optical illusion of alternating blacks and whites in different shades of depth and brightness. The Prime Minister ruled like a goddess: black to liberal democrats, black to her political opponents (who were not all liberal democrats), white to adoring impoverished sansculottes at rural public meetings, white also to contented corpulent capitalists who shrugged off her strident socialist rhetoric and fuelled her party’s electoral machine with the profits they made through her less-than-socialist policies. An honest judge had disqualified her from office by an impartial (if unimaginative) reading of the statutes: white to those who believed in the rule of law, white to her critics and enemies (who did not all believe in the rule of law), black to those who believed her hand at the helm was essential to steady India’s ship of state, black also to those sycophants and hangers-on who stood to lose personally from her downfall. It was a complex spectrum of blacks, whites and fluid greys; Brahminical ambivalence was therefore nothing to be ashamed of.

  My ambivalence, Ganapathi, was to become less and less tenable with time.

  111

  Yudhishtir’s grand show at the Boat Club received a rousing curtain-call, but there were to be no repeat performances. Later the same night Shakuni’s plans were put smoothly into motion, and teams of red-eyed policemen knocked before dawn at the doors of the Uprising’s leaders to take them away to the prisons and the ‘rest houses’ that would be their home for months to come.