The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  They all quickly realized that Maneka struck a discordant note. It made Rajiv annoyed to find her lying on a sofa in the sitting room smoking while Sonia was busy with the housework.

  “She doesn’t do a thing!” he said quietly to Sonia. “Who does she think she is?”

  Sonia shrugged, as though to say: that’s how things are. Neither did they like her way of treating the servants, shouting and showing no respect, very typical of the wealthy classes in India. Indira too did not like her vulgar, shrill behaviour. The problem was that the only place where she could find protection from the harshness of a life in politics was at home, and even that was disturbed now. Number 1 Safdarjung Road was no longer an oasis of peace and quiet.

  17

  Indira’s mood reflected the mood of India, which was unable to get back on its feet again after the Bangladesh war. Unemployment was rising, and with it numerous manifestations of the people’s discontent. The rate of strikes and demonstrations was harrowing, and many of them ended in violent clashes with the police. For Sonia, the task of doing the shopping could turn into a real string of disasters: streets blocked off, arbitrary diversions, stone-throwing, shops closed from shortage of stocks due to a transport strike, etc. There was not a single normal day. It was as if the nation had lost its way and had embraced anarchy. All over the country people talked about nothing except corruption, riots, lock-outs, sit-ins and strikes. Sonia was especially upset at the “sugar” scandal, as it became known, which caused the death of many people, including a lot of children. Some unscrupulous shopkeepers had started selling a mixture of sugar and ground glass. This turned out to be lethal and showed up the lack of sanitary control and complete indifference of the administration. Always thinking about her children, Sonia asked herself, horrified, “What if that sugar had ended up in Rahul’s playschool?”

  In view of the desolate state of affairs in the country, J.P. Narayan, a fragile man of 72, a hero from the freedom movement, as well as an old friend of the Nehru family, was able to unite different groups opposed to Indira. His programme proposed a federation of villages and aimed to launch a “total revolution”, a democracy without parties. It was madness, the vague idea of a Messianic idealist, but it served to galvanize the masses against Indira’s party, which they accused of corruption. In fact, the seeds of Indira’s downfall had already been sown and lay in the immense power she had managed to gather around her and which acted like a poison that infected everything, even her own home, through Sanjay. As there was no legal system of party finance, the Congress Party depended on substantial private donations. Aware of the power granted to them by the fact that they held an overwhelming majority in the national Parliament and in most of the state Parliaments, too many members of the party became greedy and expert at exchanging economic aid for political favours.

  JP’s movement managed to organize several important strikes, which ended in confrontations with the police. The protests degenerated into widespread rioting when it came to light that a leader of the Congress Party had permitted an increase in the price of cooking oil in exchange for an important donation from the producers. That was the spark that caused the people’s fury to explode. Homes and shops were pillaged, buses were burned and government property was destroyed. Rajiv was unable to return home for several days because his plane had not been able to take off when the airports were closed. Incapable of controlling all the swindles and shady dealings of the members of her party, Indira felt threatened. This fear was added to the paranoia that she had been feeling since the previous year, when a CIA-backed coup took place, which overthrew another Socialist, the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. She knew well who had orchestrated it, and feared that they might attempt to take advantage of the chaotic situation in India to try the same on her. Above all, because Nixon had just been re-elected, and Kissinger was once again at his side.

  What was to be done? She was not contemplating resignation, at least not without a fight. She attributed the riots to the malicious manipulation of the opposition, which was determined to oust her from power, and to a murky international conspiracy. She found it hard to believe that the people might be losing their faith in her. But she could not let anarchy go on spreading any longer, like a pool of oil, appropriately enough. So she plucked up courage to face the greatest challenge of her career, a national railway strike that was threatening to paralyze the country. Winning that showdown was decisive for her and for India. She was facing a million and a half railway workers who were demanding, among other things, an eight- hour working day and a 75% pay increase, a concession that it would be impossible to grant. “In a country where there are millions of unemployed and many millions more with unstable jobs,” she explained audaciously at a union conference, “what is needed is a fair share-out of opportunities. In this sense the workers should recognize that in our country having a job is in itself a privilege.” These words inflamed things even further, and so the strike was on. A million railway workers supported it. They suddenly upped the level of their demands: “What we want is to change the history of India and overthrow the government of Indira Gandhi.”

  As is usual in these conflicts, the lives of the poorest were at stake. Paralyzing the trains, thus affecting the transport of merchandise, was likely to cause a famine, something that Indira was not prepared to allow. So she applied a recent law (MISA, Maintenance of Security Act), which allowed preventive arrests to be made. An unprecedented deployment of police officers moved on the railway colonies, the old districts created by the English to house the railway workers and which were near the train stations. “It was like an occupied country,” a union leader would say, unable to get over his astonishment. At dawn the police went into the railway workers’ homes and arrested anyone who refused to go to work. Some families were thrown out of their homes —they were government property—and were forced to live out in the open. Sometimes the arrests were violent—there was one case in which the police set fire to a railway worker’s shack — and some strikers ended up being injured. In total, sixty thousand workers were arrested. Indira acted like a general in the heat of the battle. She sent the army and the navy to protect railway facilities from possible acts of sabotage. The military got the signals and telecommunications going, and worked the trains under the protection of armed guards. She was convinced that if she crushed this strike, there would not be another for fifty years.

  Indira was very clear-thinking, and fully in control of her faculties, as was usual with her at moments of high tension. She trusted herself. She tried to do several things at the same time, which was her infallible way of relaxing and finding solutions to difficult problems. One afternoon, when she was giving a press conference in the garden at home and she could see her grandson Rahul amusing himself on the grass by playing war games with plastic weapons, she had an idea. She thought the moment had come to give the go-ahead to the scientists who had been waiting for years to set off a nuclear bomb. It had been Nixon’s decision to send a nuclear aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal that had caused the acceleration in the Indian atomic programme. It was not exactly the idea of a little grandmother, but it was that of a brilliant strategist. She kept it secret until the moment of the explosion, which took place a few days later in Pokhran, in the Rajasthan desert, near the border with Pakistan.

  Just as she had foreseen, the news caused great enthusiasm among certain levels of the population who experienced it with real patriotic fervour. The MPs who stood up in the great hall of Parliament to congratulate each other seemed to have forgotten the urgent economic problems and the train strike. Indira had got what she wanted, which was to divert the country’s attention. Overpopulated and almost paralyzed, with an income per capita that placed it at number 102 in the world ranking, India became the sixth world nuclear power, largely out of internal political necessity. Criticism intensified abroad. Indira defended herself, “… India does not accept the principle of apartheid in any area, and techn
ology is no exception.”

  It took her 22 days to crush the strike with an iron fist. In spite of condemnation from the Press for the brutality of the repression, the middle class, the people who had always appreciated the punctuality of the trains, praised the firmness of the Prime Minister. The chambers of commerce too, although that did not mean many votes. For Indira it was a bittersweet victory. While the victory in Bangladesh had raised her to the category of goddess, this one left a bad taste in the mouth. The Prime Minister had shown that she could be harsh and even merciless. Her way of repressing the strike left a lasting wake of fear in wide sectors of society. The counterproductive effect of such severity was that the opposition became even more united against her. Even the most favourable political observers had to admit that her popularity was plummeting. In the elections that would take place in 1976, the defeat of the Congress Party now seemed like a real possibility.

  On June 12th, 1975, day broke with heavy black clouds in the sky which announced the long-awaited rains, or perhaps forecast fateful days ahead. At that time in the morning, the heat was already intense, but Indira continued her daily routine of doing twenty minutes of yoga exercises in her room. Her granddaughter Priyanka’s crying tempted her to interrupt her exercises, but as it stopped immediately, she thought that Sonia had got up and was dealing with the little girl. Then she had a shower and got dressed in five minutes, “something that few men can do”, she liked to boast. On her bedside table the books were piling up. With working days of sixteen hours, she had no time for anything, not being with the family or seeing her friends, and of course not for reading, and she missed it.

  She was having breakfast on a tray in her room with tea, fruit and toast when her secretary R.K. Dhawan, the one who had been so obliging to Sanjay, knocked on her door. He was bringing bad news. D.P. Dhar, an old friend and advisor of Indira’s, had died minutes before an operation to fit him with a pacemaker. This was the man who had been sent to Moscow at the time of the Bangladesh crisis to ensure the backing of the Soviets and who had acted since then as ambassador to the USSR. Another pillar of trust and friendship had disappeared from her life. Indira went straight to the hospital to comfort his family and to help in organizing the funeral rites.

  She returned home about midday, and there was more bad news waiting for her. Her secretary informed her that in the previous day’s elections in the state of Gujarat, the Congress Party had been beaten by the Janata Front, a coalition of five parties which included sympathizers of J.P. Narayan, the idealist who wanted to overthrow her. She was not too surprised. The bad thing was that those results forecast defeats in other states. Was it perhaps the beginning of the end? she wondered. Did not all human enterprises follow the same model of evolution as in nature, which is to say a growth stage, a development stage and then an end? She had tried to make peace with JP, but his Utopian idea of setting up a government without parties was unacceptable because it meant the death of democracy. She had expressed this to JP, but he was a revolutionary who still believed in great, abstract ideas. He did not leave off in his determination and he did not become more flexible in his demands.

  “You must agree with me that the government in Bihar is very corrupt,” said JP in a trembling voice.

  “Yes, everybody knows that,” replied Indira.

  “Then I insist that you dismiss it and call new elections.”

  “I can’t do that, JP. It is a democratically elected government and I have no authority to dismiss it.”

  There was no reconciliation, just the opposite. Indira ended up accusing him of having backing from the CIA and the United States to overthrow her, and he told her she wanted to turn India into a satellite of the USSR.

  However, at the end of the meeting, JP asked to see her alone, without her advisors. They went into the sitting room and there, to Indira’s surprise, the man made a gesture of personal kindness, in spite of how bitter their political confrontation was. He handed her an old folder that had belonged to his wife and which contained letters that Indira’s mother, Kamala, had written to her fifty years before in the clamour of the struggle for independence.

  “I had them put away since my wife died,” JP told her, “in the hope of giving them to you when I had the chance to see you.”

  Indira was moved by the gesture of this man who, nevertheless, was determined to destroy her. How strange politics is—she must have thought—that it allows hatred and love at the same time and in the same person. She felt a pang in her heart when she read those letters which brought her mother back to life, so fragile, always so ill, and which now revealed her unhappiness at feeling the contempt of Nehru’s sisters who found her too traditional and religious. She thanked JP from the depths of her heart, even knowing that he would keep his promise to intensify his crusade against her.

  The third piece of bad news of the day came at three in the afternoon. Still dressed in his pilot’s uniform, Rajiv burst into Indira’s bedroom. On his way back from the airport, he had met one of his mother’s secretaries who had filled him in on some news that had just come in on the teleprinter.

  “The verdict of the Allahabad Judge has just come out…” said Rajiv.

  “And…?” asked Indira, turning her head slightly, as though she expected the blow she was about to receive.

  Rajiv read her the text of the sentence that the secretary had given him. It said that the Prime Minister had been declared guilty of negligence in the electoral proceedings in the 1971 elections. As a consequence, the result of those elections was invalid. The tribunal gave the Congress Party twenty days to take the necessary steps so that the Government could go on working. Furthermore, it prohibited her from holding any public office in the next six years.

  Indira sighed and stayed calm. She looked out into the garden. Her grandchildren were playing on the grass. Everything seemed so normal and calm, except for the black clouds that still threatened to unload their rain. How curious life was, she must have thought. The biggest blow of her career had been struck against her in her birthplace, in the same courts where her grandfather Motilal Nehru had given his most brilliant arguments. She turned towards her son: “I believe there is no option but to resign. The moment has come,” she said without the slightest trace of emotion.

  She had been expecting a guilty verdict, but not one so out of proportion. The opposition had used a legal dodge to corner her. The sentence corresponded to the complaint that a political rival called Raj Narain had made four years previously to the court in Allahabad, having lost by a hundred thousand votes. The accusations were trivial and referred to the improper use of staff and government-owned transport during the previous electoral campaign. In private, everyone, including her adversaries, admitted that the charges against her were ridiculous and that the judges had overstepped the mark. According to the London Times newspaper, it was the equivalent of “removing a prime minister from office over a traffic fine”. But in the India of 1975, the people came out on the streets to celebrate.

  Her friend Siddharta Shankar Ray, head of the Bengal government, arrived at the house shortly afterwards. He was a trusted man, upright, one of the old guard of unconditional friends. The party was in uproar, he told her. Then he went on: “…What the opposition has not managed to do in the elections, it is trying to manipulate by means of a legal sentence.”

  “I have to resign,” said Indira impassively.

  The man took a seat. He looked at Indira: her face betrayed her infinite tiredness.

  “Don’t make that decision too lightly. Let’s think about it.”

  Indira shrugged.

  “Is there any other solution?”

  “We can always appeal.”

  “It will take months… We know how justice works here.” The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of two ministers, followed shortly after by the president of the party and several more colleagues. The house began to fill with people. Sonia offered them sweets and drinks. With her own eyes, she could see
how some were worried about losing their position, while others, on the contrary, were excited because Indira’s seat was up for grabs. The rumours, the uncertainty and the heat made the air seem unbreathable. Some talked to Indira, trying to dissuade her from presenting her resignation; others stood in little groups, weighing up the strengths of different leaders who could replace her. The still Prime Minister listened to them all, in silence. “I believe I should resign immediately,” she repeated.

  In the evening, Sanjay came back from the “factory”. He had heard the news on the radio. Coming into the house, he met his brother.

  “What is she going to do?” he asked.

  “Resign. She has no option.”

  “No,” said Sanjay, “that cannot be.”

  In a second Sanjay saw his dream of being a great businessman shattered. If his mother gave way to her enemies, he could say goodbye forever to Maruti Ltd. He went into the sitting room full of people, hardly saying hello to anyone, as was his custom, and he took his mother by the arm and asked to speak to her alone for a few minutes. They went into the study in the next room.

  “Rajiv has told me you’re thinking of resigning.”

  “We’re weighing it up. I don’t have many options.”

  “You mustn’t do it, Mother. If you give way now and resign because of those paltry charges, when you don’t have parliamentary immunity they will have you thrown into jail for any excuse they can make up.”

  “I have a clear conscience. We’re thinking about exchanging jobs. Let the party president take on the post of Prime Minister until my appeal is dealt with in the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, I’ll take over the presidency of the party.”

  “That’s crazy, Mother!” said Sanjay, and his shouts were heard in the sitting room next door. “Do you think once he’s in your job the party president will give it back to you? He never will. They all seem to be very loyal and great friends of yours, but you know better than I do that their smiles hide their personal ambitions. They all want your position. They all seek power. You must not resign under any circumstances.”