by Javier Moro
But there were also photos and film clips of the tragedy that went with independence. Rajiv told Sonia that Nehru was heartbroken when he made his famous independence speech. A recording reproduced his voice on the night of August 15th, 1947: “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge … At the stroke of midnight, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom …” Listening to Nehru’s voice like that made Sonia shiver. Rajiv explained to her that his grandfather knew that while he was announcing the greatest news in the history of India, the city of Lahore, the ancient capital of the Mogul Empire and the most cosmopolitan city in the sub-continent, which now belonged to Pakistan, was burning in an orgy of violence. It was the beginning of a tragedy of gigantic proportions known as Partition. The independence of both countries unleashed a movement of ethnic and religious cleansing unparalleled in history. The Hindus, who had lived for generations in what was now Pakistan, were forced to flee. Inversely, the Moslems in India fled in the opposite direction. The film clips of those columns of refugees and the accounts of the atrocities committed—whole families burnt alive in their homes, women thrown off moving trains because they were of the wrong religion, daughters raped in front of their parents …, left Sonia horrified.
“And what about non-violence?” Sonia asked timidly, seeing that her pre- conceived ideas about the peaceful nature of Indians were collapsing.
“Gandhi managed to stop a lot of the violence with his fasting …” Rajiv answered, “but in the end not even he could escape from religious fanaticism.”
Then he told her that when he was four his mother took him to visit Mahatma Gandhi one day at the home of the Birlas, a wealthy family that gave Gandhi lodging and support every time he came to Delhi. Gandhi was very depressed about the declarations of Hindu extremists who accused him of treason for having defended the persecuted Moslems, and for all the tension the country was undergoing, although the violence of partition had stopped by then. “I cannot go on living in this madness and this darkness,” Gandhi had said to the photographer Margaret Bourke-White that very morning. Gandhi, who was like a member of the family, was very affectionate towards Rajiv. While the adults chatted and tried to relax the atmosphere with a joke or two, little Rajiv played with some jasmine flowers his mother had bought for Mahatma. In a photo you could see how the little boy twined them round Gandhi’s toes.
“He stopped me with a gentle gesture of his hand,” said Rajiv. “‘Don’t do that’, he said to me, ‘we only put flowers on the feet of the dead.’”
He went on to tell her that that same afternoon, while he was going to prayers in the centre of the garden, a man came up to Gandhi and putting his hands together, he greeted him “Namaste!”, he said, then he looked him straight in the eye, pulled a Beretta pistol out of his pocket and fired three shots at him at point-blank range. He was a Hindu fundamentalist.
The exhibition showed pictures of the chaos that followed the attack. Perhaps the most dramatic was the photo of Nehru standing on a car roof, calming the population with a megaphone in his hands. Everyone wanted to get near to say farewell to the “great soul”. A loudspeaker reproduced the words that Nehru addressed to the nation on the radio that terrible night: “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. Our beloved leader, the father of the nation, is no more. The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. In a thousand years’ time it will still be shining. The world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.” Sonia felt a shiver when she heard that voice that seemed to come from beyond the grave.
“My grandfather was always obsessed with the idea of keeping India united and secular,” Rajiv explained to her. “He used to say that the nation could only survive on those two values … and I think he was right.”
Other photos showed Nehru with Gandhi, some smiling and obviously in agreement, others serious and disagreeing; Nehru with Chinese, Soviet, and American leaders; with scientists like Einstein, with writers like Thomas Mann and Pearl S. Buck … In the end, Sonia stood for a long time in front of the photos of the whole family gathered together in Anand Bhawan, looking for likenesses. Rajiv was finer than his father Firoz; he had the elegance of his mother, she thought. The patriarch Motilal looked like her own grandfather, Stefano’s father, with his broad face with its strong, square jaw and a moustache just as thick. She did not notice the caption of the photo that spoke about the eternal dilemma of the Nehrus, torn between political duty and personal need, and that in that conflict, duty had always won. Although Sonia was visibly affected by everything she had just seen, she could not measure the scope of those words or imagine that some day their meaning would pursue her.
7
The happy life of the lovers in England left a victim: Rajiv’s studies at Trinity College. He failed all his subjects that year. He would never be a scientist. He had already warned his mother that his studies were too hard and that his results would be catastrophic. Indira did not reproach him; after all, she too had failed at Oxford, although the circumstances had been very different: she had never had a proper schooling, and as a young girl she was always ill. Of the members of the family, only Nehru had shown genuine academic ability. His grandson Rajiv was not a great student, or a great reader or an intellectual like his grandfather either. He had always liked practical things, technical matters, understanding how a machine works, attempting to fix it if it breaks down. He was able to set up his own loudspeakers to listen to music, or pull apart a radio to fix it. He was good with his hands, a quality he had inherited from his father.
Rajiv had to leave Cambridge and fall back on Imperial College in London, taking more technical classes in engineering and mechanics. But now he had a clear idea of what he wanted. He had spotted an advert from the flying school in Wiltshire at Thruxton, an old RAF base near Southampton that had been turned into a school for pilots. He wanted to take advantage of the summer holidays to start taking flying classes. Becoming a pilot had an advantage added to the sheer pleasure of flying: it was the fastest way of earning a living, an essential requirement for marrying Sonia. Much faster than a university degree. As he did not want to ask his mother for money, he decided he would work to pay for the hours of flying time and the instructor until he passed the first exams.
In July 1966, Sonia went back to Italy with the certificate of Proficiency in English from the University of Cambridge under her arm. The postman again became the person who most frequently visited the family home on Via Bellini to the exasperation of the Maino parents who, in spite of having permitted the meeting with Indira, were still opposed to their daughter’s romance with Rajiv. She said openly that one day she would marry him. Her parents tried to dissuade her. Stefano suggested that she should wait until she came of age before she made any decision: “It’s only another year,” her mother added. “A decision like that cannot be taken lightly. You might regret it later for the rest of your life.”
“While you are our responsibility,” her father went on, “I cannot allow you to marry that boy. We are sure he’s a nice young man, it isn’t that … but I would not be doing my duty as a father if I were to say: go ahead, go off to India, marry him. Don’t you understand? Just wait a little longer.”
It was a reasonable proposition, but love understands few reasons. At the age of twenty waiting is torture. Post Office strikes, so frequent in Italy, became Sonia’s greatest enemy that year. Rajiv continued to write every day, telling her how happy he was learning to fly over the English countryside. He was flying in a bi-plane, a Tiger Moth, a model from the thirties, an agile, responsive plane that provided him with hours of intense pleasure. The goal was to fly solo, and to achieve that he had to accumulate a minimum of forty hours with an instructor. That was the basic requirement for then taking the “civil pilot’s” exam, and after that going on up the ladder until he managed to become a commercial p
ilot.
Rajiv had thought about making a visit to Orbassano. He wanted to convince Sonia’s father to let her travel to India. “I want you to go to India,” he wrote to her, “and stay with my mother, without me, so that you can see things as they really are, and, as far as you are concerned, in their worst light because I will not be there and you will not have anyone to turn to. That way you will get to know the country and the people … I do not want to drag you into anything without you knowing what it all implies. I would feel responsible if, later on, something turns out wrong and you feel hurt in some way—in your feelings or in something else. I do not want to have to call anyone to account, except myself, and that is why I do not want to lie to you or deceive you.” The letter showed a certain moral stance and Sonia was moved, although pessimistic about the probability of her father approving of the plan.
In order to pay for the trip to Italy, Rajiv was forced to lay his hands on more money. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write before now, but I’ve managed to get a job as a bricklayer on a building site,” he said in another of his letters. “I’ve been working up to ten hours a day, plus an hour and a half travelling, so when I get home I’m exhausted. I’m so stiff I can only write slowly.” These were letters full of love and of hope for the future, although the last ones revealed a great fear. Rajiv was worried about the news reaching him from India. The Prime Minister had died from a heart attack while he was on an official visit to the Soviet Union to sign a peace treaty with Pakistan, after a short war. “India is going through a very turbulent situation, a very bad time …” he wrote to Sonia. “I have the feeling that many people are going to want my mother to be Prime Minister. I hope she does not accept: it will end up killing her.”
Rajiv was right. The faction that controlled the Congress Party wanted his mother as Prime Minister: “She knows all the world leaders, she has been round the world with her father, she was brought up among the heroes of the struggle for independence, she has a rational, modern mind and she is not identified with any caste, state or religion. But above all, she can make us win the 1967 elections,” wrote one party leader. There was another even more powerful reason: they wanted her in that role because they thought she was weak and would be malleable. The old party bosses were convinced that they could go on in the key positions, enjoying the privilege of making decisions without the responsibility of making them. The best of all possible worlds. Actually they did not know Indira Gandhi. At 48, she did not know herself yet either.
The day before her election as head of the government, the highest authority in the second most densely populated country in the world, Indira had written a letter to Rajiv saying that she could not get a poem by Robert Frost out of her head. For her it summarized very well the crossroads at which she stood: “How hard it is to keep from being king when it is in you and in the situation.” She also told him in the letter that on that day, at dawn, she had visited Mahatma Gandhi’s mausoleum to bask in the memory of the man who had been another father to her. Then she went to Teen Murti House, now a national museum, and stayed for a long time in the room in which Nehru had died. She needed to feel his presence. She remembered one of his letters when she was 15: “Be brave, and the rest will come on its own.” Well, the rest had come. She was going to cross the threshold of her new existence, a life for which, deep down, she had always been preparing herself, even if she did not admit that consciously.
After her father’s death, she had dreamed of withdrawing from the world. She toyed with that idea for a while, and even thought about renting a little flat in London and finding a job there, doing anything, perhaps as a secretary in some cultural institution or other. To flee from herself, that is what she was seeking. But soon reality overtook her, and she could not go on dreaming of her own freedom. She had to solve specific problems. She had been left without a home and from her father she had inherited his personal possessions and his royalties as an author, and not much else. Nehru had been using up his capital, because his salary as Prime Minister was not sufficient to cover his public expenses, and he was not one to dip into the coffers of the Treasury. It is true that Indira inherited the old mansion of Anand Bhawan in Allahabad, but that had so many expenses that keeping it up was a heavy burden. Besides, she had two sons studying in England. How could she pay for all that? By retiring from the world? She realized it was a pipe-dream, a fancy. Her life had been too dominated by politics for her to be able to retire so young. People came to see her every day, people of all classes and conditions, as they had done when her father was alive. The same crowds that thronged Teen Murti House now came to see her. They came to greet her, to set out their complaints, for her to listen to them, to say a few words to them and show interest in their problems. They were the same poor people, the poor of eternal, ancient India, the poor in whose name Gandhi and her father had fought. Indira was not going to abandon them: that would have been an insult to Nehru’s memory. On the contrary, she received them and listened carefully to what they wanted to say to her. It was they who really comforted her wounded heart. From them she gained the strength to move on, to find a meaning to her life. Those poor people made her realize that what she had really inherited had been her father’s power.
She also felt Nehru’s presence when she went in and out of the Parliament building in the landscaped centre of New Delhi, a gigantic, circular building of beige and red sandstone with a verandah full of columns. Inside, under a thirty-metre high dome, the representatives of the people elected her by 355 votes against 169. Her party voted for her en masse. In her short speech she thanked them. “I hope not to betray the trust you have placed in me.” She was radiant, very aware that her appointment with destiny had arrived. She was going to take possession of that “vast spread of Indian humanity” according to Nehru’s description.
The residence assigned to her was in the same district of New Delhi as the old palace-like mansion. Number 1, Safdarjung Road was a typical colonial villa with white- painted walls, surrounded by a nice garden. It had four bedrooms of which she turned two into an office and a reception room. She made it clear that every day between eight and nine in the morning, the house would be open to all comers, without regard for their position or social status. These were the same hours that Nehru had set aside for the same task.
Indira explained to Rajiv the reasons that had forced her to accept the candidature. During her months in charge of the Information Ministry, she had found herself pushed into dealing with a serious national crisis that was not within the jurisdiction of her own ministry. The crisis caught her on holiday in Kashmir, the beautiful region the Nehru family came from. As soon as she arrived, she found out that Pakistani troops, disguised as civilian volunteers, were on the verge of capturing the capital, Srinagar, in order to encourage a pro-Pakistani revolt among the population. Indira disobeyed the Prime Minister’s orders to return to Delhi immediately. Not only did she remain in Kashmir, but she flew to the front when hostilities broke out. “We shall not give an inch of our territory to the aggressors,” she proclaimed on a tour of the northern cities. The Press praised what she had done: “Indira is the only man in a government of old women,” the headlines read. The correspondents who followed her were astonished to witness how Indira was welcomed everywhere by huge crowds shouting their enthusiasm. The Pakistani army was defeated. India, and Indira, emerged victorious, giving rise to the idea that later would take hold of the people’s imagination: “India is Indira; Indira is India.”
All this occurred while eight thousand kilometres away Rajiv was learning to control his Tiger Moth in the skies over England. “… If my mother does not stand as Prime Minister, everything we have achieved since independence will be lost,” he told Sonia in a letter that seemed to contradict the previous ones. And the fact is that in his own way Rajiv was experiencing his mother’s conflict, which was the whole family’s conflict, from duty to the nation and the inheritance of their father and grandfather, to the demands of a
private life. When Rajiv heard that his mother had been elected Prime Minister, the letter that Sonia received was full of the anguish this new situation created for him. “If anything happens to my mother, I won’t know what to do. You cannot imagine how much I depend on her, on her help in any situation, especially with you. It’s going to be much harder for you than for me. For you, it will all be new and she is the only one who can really help you. I don’t know what I would do if I ever lose her.”
His mother’s photo was on the front pages of the international press. At a newspaper stand in Thruxton, the village near the airbase, Rajiv bought a copy of The Guardian newspaper: “No other woman in history has taken on such a responsibility, and no country of the importance of India has ever handed over power to a woman under democratic conditions,” said the report. The photo of his mother was also on the cover of Time magazine: “Turbulent India in the hands of a woman,” said the headline. Although she claimed she was not a feminist, the whole world was curious to know how a woman with so little experience in administrative matters was going to face up to the immensity of the problems that awaited her. As immense as the nation she was to govern, made up of a complex mosaic of peoples who shared races, religions, languages and cultures of enormous diversity. A country with a Hindu majority, but with over a hundred million Moslems, which made it the second largest Moslem country on the planet. Not counting the ten million Christians, seven million Sikhs, two hundred thousand Parsees and thirty- five thousand Jews whose ancestors had fled from Babylon after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. A land in which 4,635 different communities lived together, each with its own traditions, and languages as ancient as they were diverse. But English, the language of the colonizers, was still the common language after the imposition of Hindi was rejected by the southern states. A country that still suffered striking inequalities, with corruption ensconced in all levels of society and a paralyzing bureaucracy. A country known for its high spiritual achievements and at the same time for its dreadfully poor levels of material welfare. Perhaps the greatest achievement of that nation forged by Nehru and Gandhi is that it was still free, in spite of the string of curses and overwhelming problems inherited from the British colonists. In spite of what an English general had predicted at the moment of independence: “No one can make one nation out of continent of so many nations.”