Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  That was the thought that suffused Karan’s every waking moment. Who killed Baba? Why did he have to die? Would he ever find out the truth? Or would the matter remain unresolved forever while conspiracy theories swirled around the assassination?

  As Prime Minister, Karan had lost no time in constituting a commission of enquiry, headed by a former Supreme Court judge, Mohinder Verma, to preside over the investigation into Birendra Pratap’s death. The Verma Commission, as it had been styled by the media, had already started work in its offices but judging by how long it took the Jain Commission to complete its enquiries into Rajiv Gandhi’s death, they were in for the long haul.

  So, Karan tried his best to occupy himself with work so that he didn’t end up obsessing over his father’s death to the exclusion of all else. It wasn’t difficult to do. The Prime Minister’s schedule was punishing at the best of times. But now that the president had dissolved parliament on the advice of the cabinet, and the Election Commission had notified the dates of the next general election, his party work had also increased dramatically.

  As a result, while he spent his days dealing with the work of government, his evenings were reserved for the LJP, and his workday often went as long as twelve to fourteen hours, with short breaks at mealtimes.

  An early riser, Karan always set his first meeting for 8 a.m. (much to the consternation of the bureaucrats who had to attend) after he’d had breakfast with Radhika and the kids. The cabinet secretary (or CabSec as he was called, in government shorthand), Kalpesh Mishra, was the first to arrive at Number 7 with all the files from the various ministries that had landed on the Prime Minister’s desk. Some of them Karan signed instantly, others he sent back with his remarks annotated (in his trademark red ink) on the margins for re-consideration. As PS to PM, Kutty sat in on all these meetings, though Sengupta was only involved if the subject fell within his purview as NSA (a continual sore point with him).

  The afternoons, after a quick pit stop at Number 5 for lunch, were reserved for one-on-one interactions with ministers of his government or for meetings of the various cabinet committees that he chaired as Prime Minister. The most important of these was the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), which decided on matters of national security, India’s defence expenditure and made significant appointments, and Karan concentrated on this over the committees on economic affairs and political affairs, which he also chaired.

  But Karan could never sit through any of the CCS meetings without becoming deeply irritated with Defence Minister Madan Mohan, who never allowed the other members (the finance minister, the home minister and the foreign minister) to have much of a say. The way the chap behaved, it was as if he was Prime Minister in all but name.

  Karan marked the distinction between government and party work by taking a little break for tea. That was the only time he could spend an hour or so with his daughters; more often than not he got back for dinner so late that Kavya and Karina had already been tucked into bed by their mother. Despite his best efforts, Karan never managed to wind up his party work at a reasonable hour.

  Arjun joined him at these meetings, looking more alert than he had for a long time. Perhaps the shock of Baba’s passing had jolted him into cleaning up his act. And maybe the sobering conversation the two brothers had had after the funeral rites were over had had some impact as well. So, for once, there was someone who had Karan’s back as he mediated between bickering party leaders and their endless demands.

  One of them wanted a seat for his son, who had just returned after doing his postgraduate degree at Harvard. Surely Karan, who had been groomed by his own father, could understand his feelings on this matter? Another wanted him to cancel the ticket given to a known history-sheeter; after all, weren’t they all committed to ridding politics of criminal elements? Karan, who knew full well that the criminal in question held unquestioned sway over parts of that state, and could do untold damage to the LJP if he was rebuffed, struggled to find a good response to this request. And thus it went, on and on and on.

  And then, there were the chunks of his schedule that were blocked off with an enigmatic ‘Reserved’ attached to them. This was when the Prime Minister met people with whom he wanted to hold confidential meetings without his entire secretariat being aware of them. These were held in his study at Number 5, far away from the prying eyes of the staff at Number 7. And as the money-raising for the elections gathered apace, a constant stream of industrialists arrived for closed-door meetings with the PM, the face-time serving as compensation for the crores they had promised to cough up.

  It helped enormously that his entire day was spent within the same complex, and the world came to him rather than his venturing out, so he could utilize every moment of every hour without wasting time on such mundane things as a commute. But Karan had always known that to establish his presence as Prime Minister he would soon have to start functioning at least part of the time at the PMO in South Block. It was necessary for the government officials to meet him and interact with him (as Queen Elizabeth put it so eloquently, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’).

  Towards that end, Karan had been pushing for the SPG to release him from his caged existence at Race Course Road. And finally that had happened, and here he was in his South Block office, seated at the antique desk that had seen so many Prime Ministers come and go. (There was also an antique commode in the attached bathroom, a bit of a tourist attraction with visitors when the PM was out of the office!)

  The only change that Karan had made to the décor was to hang two large colour portraits of his father and mother on the facing wall, so that he could look upon their faces while he worked. Otherwise the room remained the same. The desk with three facing chairs, a four-seater sofa with a coffee table placed in front of it on the right hand side, and a vast expanse of carpet.

  Once the delegation of security chiefs had made their customary small talk, the entire party headed for the conference table in the adjoining room. Karan took his seat at the head of the table, with Sengupta and Kutty on either side. Kalpesh Mishra, as cabinet secretary, was also in attendance to take notes; given the confidential nature of these proceedings, the staffers who usually attended had been kept out.

  There was a bit of milling around as everyone else worked out where they should sit. And finally, all of them found their places: Anil Bhalla, the chief of R&AW, Suresh Shastri, the director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Balvinder Singh, the head of the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the central counterterrorism agency of the country.

  Five minutes into the meeting it was clear to Karan that nobody had any new information to share with him. Yes, there had been some chatter on the usual jihadi sites and networks, but with nobody coming forward to claim credit for the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, they were at a dead end there.

  They had identified the toxin that was used to kill Birendra Pratap—a rare Batrachotoxin derived from frogs native to Central and South America; which led to instant paralysis and cardiac arrest—but were no nearer discovering how it had been brought into India.

  R&AW had tapped all its sources within international intelligence networks—the Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) in America, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of Britain (more commonly known as MI6), Israel’s much-vaunted Mossad, among them—but none of them could point them in the direction of the manufacturer of the poison pen. Even South Korea, best placed to spy on its bête noir, North Korea, had come up blank.

  And despite applying the best enhancement techniques on the videos of Birendra Pratap’s last moments, it remained unclear when exactly the poison pen had been deployed and by whom. Perhaps the Prime Minister would like to have a look?

  Karan nodded. Until now, he had avoided looking at any footage of the moment when his father collapsed and died. But maybe it was time to bite that particular bullet.

  Even so, he flinched when the large TV screen in front of him suddenly came alive with images of his father’s last, ill-
fated rally. And there was Baba, immaculate in white, wandering down towards the barriers, smiling widely as he approached a child perched on his father’s shoulders, holding up a sign which read, ‘Singh is King.’ He saw his father move down the line, shaking hands, and then suddenly fall down and out of range of the cameras.

  It really was impossible to tell what had happened. And yet, Karan felt that it was incumbent upon him to make sense of that little tableau. Irritated with himself, he took out his annoyance on the assembled men.

  ‘This simply isn’t good enough, you know,’ he said, ‘I need some answers. And I need them quick. What am I going to tell the people? That even a month later, we are no closer to being able to tell who killed their Prime Minister? That is simply unacceptable. You will just have to do better, gentlemen!’

  Karan Pratap looked fiercely around the table, but nobody was willing to make eye contact with the Prime Minister.

  ‘Oh come on, for God’s sake!’ he exploded. ‘Say something. Don’t you chaps have a single thought between your many heads?’

  The silence was finally broken by the R&AW chief. ‘Sir, we may not have any evidence so far, but I think it is safe to say that Pakistan is the prime suspect here. Why would anyone but them want to kill the Prime Minister?’

  Balvinder Singh wasn’t having any of this. ‘That’s not exactly true. We have as much of a threat from internal terrorism. And there is no way that we can rule out a Chinese involvement either; they may have commissioned a Maoist group to carry out the assassination. We really can’t commit ourselves to any one scenario here. It’s much too soon to make that kind of decision.’

  ‘Yes, I agree with you on that,’ interrupted Arunoday Sengupta smoothly. ‘But the Prime Minister has to give an impression of doing something. Otherwise he—and the government—is going to come across as weak.’

  ‘Well, one option would be to put more troops on the Pakistan border and increase the alert level,’ said Bhalla. ‘That at least gives the impression of strength.’

  Sengupta shook his head. ‘We tried that after the attack on parliament. Remember Operation Parakram? All that expense. All that tension. For so long. And what did we achieve? Exactly nothing!’

  ‘I agree with Arunoday,’ said IB chief Shastri. ‘There is no advantage to us going on the offensive at the border. Or in increasing tensions with Pakistan. We have an election to hold in less than three months. We need to concentrate on getting our security together for that. We can’t let Pakistan distract us at a time like this.’

  ‘You have a point there,’ said the usually reticent Kutty. ‘We need to focus on internal security now rather than risk a conflagration on the Line of Control.’

  Kalpesh Mishra nodded in agreement. Turning to Karan, he said, ‘Sir, we have to begin allocating security resources to the states that go to the polls in the first round of elections. We really cannot afford to open up another front at this time.’

  Bhalla, however, was not ready to concede the point just yet. ‘But what is the contradiction here?’ he asked. ‘We don’t use the army for election duty or to maintain internal security. So, what is the harm is deploying more forces at the western border to put Pakistan on notice?’

  ‘I don’t think that is a good idea,’ Sengupta interjected. ‘We cannot afford to move forces from the eastern border at this time. Haven’t we learnt any lessons from the Doklam standoff? The Chinese held us in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation for months before the situation was resolved. And if anything, they are even more aggressive now. I don’t trust them not to take advantage if we move some troops away from the eastern frontier.’

  And thus it went, back and forth for another thirty minutes, until Karan thought that his head would burst. Finally, Kutty called a halt to the meeting, saying that any decision could wait until the Prime Minister had been briefed by the three service chiefs. A meeting with them had been scheduled later today and by the evening the path ahead would be clear.

  While the rest collected their papers and phones and shuffled out, Karan gestured to Sengupta and Kutty that they should stay. Once the door was shut, he asked, ‘What do you really think? What should I do?’

  Sengupta advised caution. The immediate risk of rioting in the aftermath of the PM’s assassination had been seen off with the quick deployment of paramilitary and army troops at sensitive areas. But the danger was far from over. They had to keep a strong security cover all over the country until the elections were over. So maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to needle Pakistan at the same time.

  ‘Also, sir,’ added Kutty. ‘I believe that you should now focus on the elections and start campaigning along with Arjunji. Don’t worry about the government. Kalpesh Mishraji, Arunoday and I can take over as far as the routine day-to-day stuff goes, while you restrict yourself to the big picture. You know you can trust us. We are like your family, sir.’

  Ah. His family. Now if only he could trust his family just as implicitly as he did his cabinet secretary, his national security advisor and his principal secretary.

  Almost as if he had read his thoughts, Kutty cut in, ‘There is another matter, though, that I want to bring to your attention.’ His agitation was obvious even through all the bureaucratese.

  ‘It’s Asha Devi, sir. I think that she may become a problem going ahead.’

  Wrong, thought Karan. She has been a problem from the day she was born. But all he said was a neutral, ‘Why do you think so?’

  Kutty pulled out a file from his briefcase and proceeded to read out the highlights from the IB report he had received just this morning. Madan Mohan Prajapati had been in touch daily with Asha Devi over the last two weeks. The two of them spoke for about ten minutes on average, though one call had lasted as long as thirty-five minutes. They couldn’t tell what they had discussed because they had been careful to talk via WhatsApp, a service that could not be monitored or tapped. And he had paid four visits to Number 3 RCR in the last two weeks, all of them lasting about thirty minutes. The IB didn’t know what they had discussed but it was clear from the secretive nature of their dealings that the two of them were up to no good.

  The IB had also conducted a survey across the country, covering a mix of urban and rural areas. The results were a bit unsettling. Asha Devi’s popularity was climbing every day. The people of India seemed to have taken the grieving daughter—whom they had now seen on their TV screens so often that she felt like a member of their own family—to their collective bosom. Between 70 to 80 per cent of the respondents had said that they would like her to contest in the elections. And when asked who would be the best successor to Birendra Pratap, she had scored a healthy 35 per cent compared to Karan’s 65, a remarkable performance given that she had been missing from the political scene for a good three years.

  This was bad news, thought Karan. With Madan Mohan and his massive war chest behind her, the adoration of the party cadre who had been completely won over by her beauty and charisma, and the huge measure of public support she had already garnered, Asha was perfectly poised to conduct a coup and unseat her brother.

  Okay, maybe that was overstating the case. He still had control over the party. And who would dare oppose the Prime Minister (and party president) even if they did prefer his sister to him? But if this trend persisted, well then, Asha could certainly cause him serious problems in the future.

  Clearly, she would have to be dealt with. Another task to add to his already overwhelming to-do list. Karan sighed, said goodbye to Kutty and Sengupta, and settled down to deal with all the files weighing down his in-tray. He had an hour before the service chiefs arrived. It was best to put the time to good use.

  ▪

  Gayatri Sharma and Kavya Singh had been best friends ever since they were six years old. They had started off as deskmates in kindergarten, sharing their tiffin with one another and whispering secrets when the teacher looked the other way. And since then, their journey through the classrooms of Aakriti School (a prestigious Delhi ins
titution, originally set up to educate the progeny of the bureaucrats who were stationed in the nation’s capital, it now harboured as many kids of politicians, industrialists, media mavens and other members of Delhi’s eternal elite) had been undertaken hand-in-hand.

  Needless to say, neither of their mothers was happy about this unlikely—and frankly, bloody inconvenient—friendship. Radhika Pratap had had visions of Kavya becoming best friends with Sasha, the only daughter of mega-industrialist Sachin Malhotra, so that she and Karan could tap him for political donations and other favours. But no matter how many play dates she set up for the two young girls, friendship refused to spark between them. After one memorable occasion, when Sasha dramatically threw up the birthday cake that Kavya had force-fed her, Radhika had decided to give this up as a lost cause. Projectile vomiting was as far as she was prepared to go.

  Malti, on the other hand, had tried a different tack. She had taken to inviting dozens of Gayatri’s classmates over to the house, in the hope that this would dilute the intensity of her bond with Kavya. It didn’t work. The two girls inevitably gravitated towards one another, leaving the rest of the party to rub along as well as they could. As a good attorney (the best that money could buy, actually), Malti recognized when a strategy wasn’t working. So after a few months, she gave up and accepted the inevitable.

  Jayesh Sharma and Karan Pratap Singh may be implacable political enemies. But their daughters were best friends—and looked likely to remain so for the rest of their lives. Their families would just have to make their peace with it.

  In an initial burst of enthusiasm, Malti and Radhika had arranged a few dinners for the two sets of parents to get to know each other better. But while Jayesh and Karan—who had much in common as children of politicians—managed to rub along reasonably well, the two wives hadn’t taken to each other at all. Malti didn’t know what to make of a woman who thought that discussing the latest episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians was acceptable dinner-party conversation. And Radhika felt that Malti was always trying to show her up by deliberately bringing the conversation around to international geopolitics, which, to put it mildly, was not her area of strength.