‘Joy baba, it is so good to see you again. And all grown up too,’ said Sukanya, holding him at arms length to examine him.
‘Joy baba’. How odd it was to hear that old nickname again. Sukanya had been the only person who had ever called him that.
An involuntary smile rose to Jayesh’s face as he responded, ‘Well, you look just the same.’
‘Liar,’ laughed Sukanya, as she turned away from him to greet his wife. ‘And you are Malti, of course. How did he manage to convince such a beautiful, intelligent woman to marry him?’
Malti laughed delightedly, Jayesh joined in after a beat, and the ice was broken.
Once the pleasantries were over, though, Jayesh got his first glimpse of just how tough a political operator Sukanya had become.
She began in her usual forthright style. In addition to the sixty Poriborton Party MPs, she had already garnered the support of ten Independents and two of the smaller parties, which had eight MPs apiece. That brought the strength of her coalition to eighty-six MPs. If she decided to go with the LJP, then that combination already had the numbers to form the next government. But if she decided to align with Jayesh’s SPP instead, then they would still be three short of the magic 273 mark. In that case, Jayesh had to sweeten the pot by winning over some of the Independents and other smaller parties himself. How many additional seats could he bring to the table?
Jayesh admitted, with a rueful smile, that so far the SPP leadership had had very little luck in appealing to the smaller parties and Independents. Karan Pratap and the LJP had the big bucks and they were spending them very generously to buy the support of all the floating MPs in the fray. He simply didn’t have the money power to match theirs.
He did, however, believe that he could get Didi Damyanti over to their side. If they could get her to join forces with them, then their numbers would be unbeatable.
Sukanya’s face darkened at the very mention of the ‘D’ word. ‘That is impossible,’ she cut in, her Bengali accent deepening as her emotions got the better of her. ‘I cannot be in the same government as that woman. If you want to ally with her, then this meeting is over. You can go across to her house and negotiate with her. I want to have nothing further to do with you,’ she had shouted, her voice rising higher with every syllable.
Jayesh was dumbstruck. He had never encountered anyone who lost control so spectacularly and so quickly. Those who had warned him about Sukanya’s legendary temper hadn’t been exaggerating. Seeing her husband look visibly shaken and at a loss for words, Malti gamely stepped in as peacemaker.
‘No, no, Sukanyaji. There is no question of that. You are our first choice. Actually, you are our only choice. If you feel so strongly about Damyantiji, then of course we will respect your wishes and have nothing to do with her.’
Sukanya didn’t look in the least bit mollified, sitting quietly in her chair, her mouth set in a mutinous line.
By then, Jayesh had recovered enough of his wits to try and appeal to Sukanya’s emotions. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you. That’s the last thing I wanted to do. I have never forgotten the kindness you showed me when I was a young boy. And I am grateful to this day.’
Sukanya’s face softened, both with the memories of those days, and with the fresh jolt of guilt she felt as she remembered her abandonment of ‘Joy baba’.
‘I have very fond memories of those days as well,’ she said, in calmer tones. ‘But you know my history with Damyanti. You know how she played your father against me. You know how she has tried to destroy my political career at every turn. Surely, you of all people should know that I cannot ally with her.’
Jayesh accepted defeat and nodded glumly. It was left to Malti to ask Sukanya what they should do to win over the Independents and smaller parties.
They simply did not have the money to make the same kind of offers that the Karan Pratap gang was making. The going rate for each MP had gone up to thirty crores, and it would only increase in the coming days if neither side could get the requisite numbers. And the SPP, having languished out of power for so long, had cleaned out its coffers in fighting the general election. There was no way they could get access to that kind of money.
Oh never mind that, Sukanya responded, sweeping Malti’s observations aside with a magisterial hand. Money was not an issue. They simply had to ask. And they would receive.
The only issue was time. They needed to step on it to get to the floaters before the LJP. If they dallied around too long, they would miss the bus.
Jayesh and Malti took their cue. They bid Sukanya a hasty goodbye, and headed back to the war room at their bungalow. It was time to initiate Operation Buy An MP.
▪
The sad truth was that Jayesh and Malti had, in fact, left it too late. By the late evening, when Karan Pratap and Arjun Pratap arrived at Didi Damyanti’s bungalow, at the head of an LJP delegation, they had already bought over all the MPs still in the fray. As many as twenty-six MPs from the smaller parties in the field had joined their number along with four Independents. Now, if they could get the Dalit Morcha’s fifty-five MPs on their side, they were home and dry with 275 seats.
But that was easier said than done. Damyanti was sticking to her line that all the demands on her wishlist had to be accommodated. There was absolutely no room for manoeuvre, as far as she was concerned.
Karan Pratap was equally adamant that there was zero chance of him appointing anyone—let alone someone from another party—the Deputy Prime Minister in his government. He was willing to give Damyanti the finance portfolio, or even the home ministry. And he had no objection to her becoming the chairman of the allied front they would form along with some other smaller groups. But Deputy Prime Minister? The only way that would happen was over his dead body.
Of course, he didn’t phrase it in such an infelicitous way. Instead, he maintained a judicious silence and left it to Arjun and his party leaders to try and convince Damyanti that she did not need fancy titles to prove that she was the second-most important person in the government. Everyone knew that she was the queen of Indian politics, the maharani of her Morcha, they told a glowering Damyanti. What need had she of any other titles?
But Damyanti stood her ground against the endless flattery. She turned even more intransigent when the LJP leadership tried to appeal to her better nature and asked her to sacrifice personal ambition for the good of the country. And she became openly hostile when Karan finally dared to suggest that they had other options as well.
‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘If you have other options, then you are welcome to exercise them. But please remember that I have other options too. And so far, I have given you a patient hearing. But my patience will not last forever.’
Unfortunately, that’s when Karan Pratap’s patience ran out as well. A man who was not accustomed to hearing ‘no’, he didn’t cope very well with rejection. And his first instinct was to lash out at the person inflicting it upon him.
‘And nor will mine,’ he retorted sharply to Damyanti, ignoring Arjun’s restraining hand on his arm. ‘We have been more than reasonable so far, but patience is not a one-way street. I can assure you that nobody will give you a better deal than the one we are offering you. And if you do get a better deal than this, then my advice would be to take it.’
With that, Karan got up and exited the room, leaving his delegation no option but to scramble after him, while Damyanti sat open-mouthed wondering if she had overplayed her hand.
Arjun certainly believed that Karan had overplayed his. And he minced no words telling him just that as they drove back to Race Course Road.
How could he antagonize Damyanti with an outburst like that when he knew full well that they had little chance with Sukanya? She hadn’t even agreed to meet them as yet though he had it on excellent authority that she had spent close to an hour closeted with Jayesh and Malti Sharma that morning. It wasn’t hard to figure out where her sympathies lay.
Karan was unrepentant. ‘Do you really want to get
into bed with a woman like that?’ he asked his brother. ‘If she is being so unreasonable now can you imagine what she would be like if I were to appoint her Deputy Prime Minister. She will be insufferable then. She will hold our government to ransom every single day. She will threaten to withdraw support at the drop of a hat. And I will tell you right now: I am not prepared to put up with that. If the only option is allying with Damyanti, I would much rather sit in Opposition for the next five years!’
Arjun, who had never seen his brother so angry, tried to calm him down. But Karan was not willing to listen to the cool voice of reason. He had had it with being dictated to by Didi Damyanti. He simply wasn’t going to take it any more.
He would take his chances with Sukanya. She couldn’t possibly be more of a challenge than this two-bit Dalit leader who fancied herself the queen of the world.
▪
Through the day, the TV news channels had been focused relentlessly on how the task of government formation was going. Camera crews thronged the various party offices, hung around outside the bungalows of the various players, stood vigil at Race Course Road, monitoring the comings and goings of politicians and trying to figure out what was being plotted and planned in those closed-door meetings being held across town. The anchors meanwhile pontificated in studios, spinning out every combination and permutation that could conceivably yield a government, aided by a revolving panel of experts who floated from one studio to another, spewing the same old nonsense.
The truth was that nobody knew anything. Sukanya Sarkar ran a notoriously tight ship, so there were no leaks forthcoming from her camp. The members of the Dalit Morcha were so terrified of Didi Damyanti that there was no question of any of them talking to the media, even if it was off the record. And the circle of trust in both the LJP and the SPP was so small and tight that there was an information blackout on that front as well.
So, in the absence of any news, the news media did what it does best: it speculated. And then it speculated some more. And then, a little bit more.
Some insisted that Sukanya had already agreed to tie-up with the SPP and that she and Jayesh would head to Rashtrapati Bhavan early the next morning to stake their claim to government. Others were equally adamant that Karan Pratap and Didi Damyanti had cobbled together a rag-tag coalition and would pip the other combine to the post. And then there were those who swore that neither Sukanya nor Damyanti had made up her mind about whom to support. And that it would be days before it became clear who got to rule India for the next five years.
There was only one genuine newsbreak that came through on that day. And that, ironically, had nothing to do with government formation, though it could be argued that it was tangentially related to the general election itself.
At 4.30 that afternoon, all the news organizations in the capital were tipped off that the CBI was making a significant arrest in an ongoing investigation. So, by 5 p.m., every news organization of any consequence had sent its reporters and camera crews to the CBI headquarters, where they formed a solid phalanx outside the high gates as they waited to find out more, working their phones to get in touch with their sources within the bureau.
But nobody was willing to talk. So, the assembled hacks were reduced to pumping one another for information. The consensus that emerged was that the arrest must be related to the L’Oiseau scandal. And there were some who insisted that they had it on the highest authority that Madan Mohan Prajapati himself was being taken into custody. So, some of the media party peeled off to take up vigil outside the gates of the former Defence Minister’s bungalow.
Only one media person knew for sure that this was not the case. Gaurav Agnihotri had been called early that morning by his cousin, Abhay Budhiraja, who was heading the investigation into the Asha Devi photos scandal. The cyber unit had made a breakthrough in the case, he had told Gaurav in the strictest confidence, and tracked down the person behind that now-infamous YouTube video. The man in question was a member of the SPP social media cell, and he would be arrested that afternoon. Nobody else knew about this so if Gaurav dispatched a camera crew to the address he was texting him, NTN would be assured of an exclusive.
Thus it was that when Rajesh Ramanujan was dragged out in handcuffs out of his Malviya Nagar home, there was a NTN camera crew stationed outside to capture the scene and uplink it to the studio, so that the entire country could watch as the events unfolded in front of a knot of curious bystanders.
Sitting in the back of the police van, Ramanujan could not for the life of him figure out how it had come to this. He thought he had covered his tracks so well, bouncing around servers across the world to shield his identity when he uploaded the video. How on earth had the dolts of the Delhi Police’s Cyber Cell managed to track him down?
Well, the truth was that the Delhi Police had had nothing to do with it. After being frustrated by the complete lack of progress in their investigation, and finding no joy with the R&AW’s cyber unit either, Karan Pratap had taken matters into his own hands. He had got in touch with the Israeli Embassy in Delhi on the quiet and asked for its help in hiring a crack team of Israeli hackers to try and trace the source of that video. But even the Israelis may not have had much luck if Ramanujan hadn’t got a little careless as time went on.
The last time the link to the Asha video had been taken down by YouTube he had left it to one of his assistants, Ashish Basu, to upload it again. And Ashish, a cocky young chap who didn’t believe in following all the rules that Ramanujan had laid down, had screwed up. In the narrow window of opportunity when he was actually uploading the video, the Israelis had managed to worm their way past his firewalls and get into his system. Once that was done, it was child’s play to trace the computer network to Ramanujan’s garage in his family home, from where he conducted his black ops on behalf of Rajiv Mehta.
Of course, there was nothing to link Ramanujan’s off-the-books operation to Rajiv Mehta, to the SPP, or to Jayesh Sharma directly. But everyone who moved in Delhi’s political circles knew that Rajiv Mehta used Ramanujan to do his dirty work for him in the cyberworld. So, when the CBI deputy director announced in a hastily-arranged press conference for the benefit of the media thronging outside, that a man named Rajesh Ramanujam had been arrested for leaking private pictures of LJP leader, Asha Devi, it didn’t take long for the media to work out who was really behind the photo scandal.
Everyone knew that Ramanujan could not have pulled this off on his own. Clearly, he had taken his orders from Rajiv Mehta. And everyone knew that Rajiv Mehta took his orders from Jayesh Sharma. So, never mind all the shocked denials emanating from Rajiv and Jayesh’s offices, dissociating themselves from Ramanujan and dismissing him as a loose cannon. There could be no doubt that it was the dirty tricks department of the SPP that had tried to derail Asha’s political career. And that it was Jayesh Sharma (who laid such store by his own squeaky-clean reputation) who was behind the leak of those dirty pictures.
It was hard to say which of the three women reacted more badly to this disclosure.
Asha, who had spent the last few days nursing suspicions of her siblings, believing that they may have been behind the leak of her pictures, was consumed by remorse. How could she have allowed herself to be persuaded of her brothers’ guilt by Harsh Gulati and his insidious murmurings? Gulati had clearly been placed in her inner circle by Madan Mohan so that he could drive a wedge between her and her brothers. And he had nearly succeeded, she thought, remembering the dark thoughts she had entertained about Karan, Arjun, and even Radhika.
Malti, on the other hand, was furious—both with her husband for what he had done and with herself for her own credulity. How could she have possibly believed Jayesh’s denials when she knew in her bones that he was behind the photo leak? When had she turned into one of those pathetic women who swallowed every lie their husbands told them because to do otherwise would upturn their perfect little worlds? And how had she ended up married to a man who would release dirty pictures of a young woman ju
st to reap some political mileage?
And then, there was Sukanya Sarkar, watching the drama unfold on TV with fascinated horror. Jayesh Sharma—her ‘Joy baba’—the family man who floated above the fray on a cloud of his own moral superiority had leaked the naked photos of a young woman so that he could profit off her bare body. How could she have misjudged the man so badly? How could she have possibly thought that he was the man she should ally with to form the next government of India?
Jayesh was a low life of the worst kind: one who pretended to virtues that he did not, in fact, possess. Sukanya had spent her entire political life dealing with men like him; every single interaction leaving her feeling dirty and used.
But she didn’t need to do that now. She was the one in control. She was the one calling the shots.
And Jayesh Sharma was dead to her.
TWENTY
While the rest of the country was obsessed with who the next Prime Minister would be, there was a small group of men in a dark interrogation cell in a heavily-guarded building in Delhi who were focused on finding out the truth behind the assassination of the last PM.
After months of coming up empty, they finally had something on Gopi Goyal. His only son, Nitin, had gained admission to Harvard Law School, and put in an application for a student visa at the American Embassy. The Americans had been inclined to give him a visa (why should a child, the argument went, pay for the sins of his father?) but had desisted when the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) recommended that they hold off until there was some clarity on Goyal Senior’s case.
Now, the interrogators informed Goyal, his son’s fate was in his hands. If he wanted Nitin to fulfil his dream of studying Law at Harvard he needed to cooperate with the investigation into Birendra Pratap’s assassination. He must give up everything he had on Akshay Trivedi. He had to share the information he had on the conspiracy to kill the Prime Minister. He needed to bring the shadowy figures behind the plan into the spotlight. It was time to reveal all that he knew.
Race Course Road: A Novel Page 35