The Red Sari: A Novel

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The Red Sari: A Novel Page 21

by Javier Moro


  Accepting defeat was not an easy thing for Indira. Could she withdraw with her tail between her legs over something so trivial, she who had spent her life in politics and had been Prime Minister for almost a decade? It did not fit in with her idea of dignity. Could she leave her party colleagues in the lurch, when all of them depended on her? The whole country? Did they not say that India is Indira and Indira is India? Was she going to allow J.P. Narayan to kill off democracy and sink the country into anarchy? She was tired, it is true, and sometimes even depressed at not finding solutions to the ills of the country. If she only had to listen to her inner voice, the voice that called for serenity, perhaps she would opt for resignation. For herself, she would do it. But she was not alone. She thought of Sanjay… What would become of him if she lost her job? They would hurl themselves at him like bloodhounds and devour him for having dared be enterprising, or simply for being who he was. What would become of the rest of the family? Power showed itself to be a necessary defence against all the enemies that same power had created over the years. Power protected the family. Without that shield they were in danger.

  Indira went back into the sitting room. “I am determined to fight to keep my job,” she told her lawyer. They agreed that he would ask the Supreme Court to put off the sentence until the court decided about her appeal. The manoeuvre would allow her to gain some time and to remain as Prime Minister until she could gather forces and support. As soon as she announced her decision, the tension in the house relaxed. To hide their disappointment, those who were already dreaming of taking over from her broke into the most servile praises. Sonia was perplexed. Deep down, she would have liked her mother-in-law to resign, because she missed a more peaceful lifestyle.

  18

  Over the following days, Sanjay and his henchman, secretary Dhawan, organized demonstrations and marches in support of Indira. They had no qualms about requisitioning the vehicles of the municipal transport company of Delhi to bus in thousands of demonstrators. The whole party apparatus mobilized so that their voices could be heard loud and clear in support of Indira. Specially chartered trains arrived in the capital full of supporters for the rallies.

  Now Sonia and Maneka could not go in and out of the house so easily because there was a permanent crowd at the gates calling for Indira’s presence. She came out once a day to greet them. Neither Sonia nor Rajiv liked the look events were taking on. She was frightened because the car that took her to Khan Market one morning had been hit by a stone. There was only a scratch on the bodywork, but it had been enough to make her feel afraid. In addition, living with Maneka was becoming more and more difficult for her. And Sanjay seemed like another person. She rarely saw him, but when she did he was no longer as affectionate as before. She realized that Maneka’s presence was poisoning relations between the two brothers, and between her and Sanjay too.

  “Why don’t we go to Italy for a while,” she asked her husband, “until things get back to normal?”

  Rajiv thought it was an excellent idea and agreed that it would be good for the children. But he was clearly worried.

  “How are we going to tell my mother? Can we abandon her at a time like this?”

  Sonia remained thoughtful, and did not answer him. For the first time, she was afraid, for herself and for the children. The atmosphere had never been so charged.

  On June 20th, 1975, Sanjay had the idea that the whole family should attend a solidarity rally that he had organized at the Boat Club in New Delhi.

  “It’ll be good for the people to see us all together,” he had said.

  “I’d prefer it if you didn’t decide for us,” Rajiv spat back at him.

  “It’s for Mother’s sake,” his brother answered.

  They were in a compromising situation, so Rajiv and Sonia reluctantly agreed. It was perhaps Sonia’s first political act. Being in front of a crowd of over a hundred thousand made quite an impression on her. Dressed in a khaki sari, she was next to Rajiv, Maneka and Sanjay, behind Indira. From up there it made her dizzy to think about the vast expanse of her adopted country. So many people, so many beliefs, so many religions… When her mother-in-law turned round to them, Sonia smiled at her. She suddenly saw her in contact with the people she was always talking about, that privileged contact that justified all the upsets and which was now not something abstract but utterly real. They were there, at her feet. Sonia was able to see the enormous support of the people, which Indira still enjoyed, and which exceeded by far the mere presence of the supporters paid by Sanjay. She got goose pimples when she heard her mother-in-law tell the crowd that serving the country was the tradition in the Nehru-Gandhi family, and that she promised to go on serving until her last breath. It was the first time that Indira had been seen flanked by her family, and the rally was a great success. Sonia realized how much Indira needed to have her family at her side. No, it was not the moment to abandon her.

  JP’s followers organized counter-demonstrations outside the palace of the President of the Republic and in several cities in the immense country. The journalist Oriana Fallaci was the first to hear from the lips of an opposition leader that they planned to block the entrance to number 1, Safdarjung Road with hordes of people in order to turn Indira into a prisoner in her own home. “We’ll camp there day and night,” said the leader. “We’ll force her to resign. Once and for all. The lady will not survive our movement.”

  On the morning of June 25th, Indira called Siddharta Shankar Ray, the head of the Bengal government, to her office at home. He was in New Delhi by chance, and when the sentence was made public, he had advised her not to resign. He found her very tense. Her desk was covered in reports from the Intelligence Agencies.

  “We cannot allow it,” Indira told him. “I have information that at a rally tonight J.P. Narayan is going to ask the police and army to mutiny. It is possible that the CIA is involved. You know that I’m high on the list of people hated by Richard Nixon… What can we do?”

  Ray was an expert in legal matters, and had a reputation for honesty and toughness. He still thought Indira should remain in her job. She continued describing how the country was deep in chaos.

  “We must be able to stop this madness. I feel as if Indian democracy were a child, and just as sometimes you have to shake a child, I think we have to shake the country to make it wake up.”

  “Are you thinking about a state of emergency?”

  Indira nodded. Actually she was not seeking advice about what decision to make, because she had already made it the day before. Her son Sanjay had mentioned it to her, but the idea had not come from him but from his protector, Bansi Lal, the chubby head of the government in Haryana who had provided him with the land to build the factory. According to Bansi Lal and Sanjay, there were at least fifty politicians in the country that it was necessary to remove from public life. Naturally, the first was J.P. Narayan.

  Declaring a state of emergency was a way forwards… But what option did Indira have? Between a dishonourable step-down and the state of emergency, she preferred the latter.

  “I want to do it all impeccably from the legal point of view,” the Prime Minister specified.

  “Let me study the constitutional aspects. Give me a few hours and I’ll be able to tell you something.”

  “Please be quick,” she asked.

  Ray went away and came back at three in the afternoon. He had spent several hours going over the text of the Indian Constitution, and the American one too.

  “Under Article 352 of the Constitution,” he told Indira, “the government can impose a state of emergency if there is the threat of aggression from outside or internal disorder.”

  “J.P. Narayan’s call for the army and police to mutiny is a sufficiently serious threat, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Then by doing that they’ve fallen into their own trap.”

  “In effect. They’ve handed you on a silver tray the justification you need to suspend parliamentary activity and to imp
ose a state of emergency.”

  There was a silence. Indira’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. One thing was missing: the signature of the President of the Republic, but he was an ally and Indira did not doubt his loyalty.

  “Will you go with me to the President’s palace?” she asked Ray.

  “Let’s go.”

  With the four-line document that the President signed that same night in the splendid Ashoka hall of the old Viceroy’s palace, and which ratified the proclamation of a state of emergency, the biggest democracy in the world became a virtual dictatorship. The government of India was now authorized to arrest people without prior authorization, to suspend civil rights and liberties, to limit the right of interference of the courts and to impose censorship.

  Rajiv had been away on a flight for two days, and on one of the stopovers of his route, he was very surprised to read in the papers that his mother had declared a state of emergency the day before. No one had said anything to him. The measure went against his peace-loving nature, and although he was not a political man, it seemed to him that it went against the democratic principles of the family tradition. What concerned him above all was that his mother had given way to his brother’s insistence. No one knew Sanjay’s hold over his mother better than he. For some obscure reason, his mother was incapable of resisting the emotional blackmail to which his brother subjected her. And no one knew Sanjay better than he did—his strong points, his limitations and the danger he could represent. So he was disturbed and alarmed, and Sonia’s idea of going to Italy for a while went through his mind again.

  “I don’t know what we should do,” Sonia told him. “I’m very worried about your brother’s behaviour. He’s getting more and more involved in politics.”

  She told him that Maneka was in Kashmir, where Sanjay had sent her at Indira’s indication, since she was worried that the girl, being so talkative, might reveal her intentions regarding the declaration of the state of emergency, which they had kept a complete secret until it was announced. She went on to tell him that the day before Sanjay had had a meeting in Indira’s office with secretary Dhawan and the deputy Home Secretary until very late.

  “Do you know what they were doing? They were getting in touch with heads of local governments and they were sending them orders for arrests. They had a blacklist of “enemies”. The worst thing isn’t that, the worst is that they were doing it in your mother’s name.”

  “I know they arrested J.P. Narayan in the early hours—I heard that at the airport,” said Rajiv with a sigh. “A police patrol took him in handcuffs to jail. It seems that Narayan couldn’t believe it; it seemed incredible to him that Mother should have taken such drastic steps.”

  Sonia went on to tell him that at three o’clock in the morning, after having helped Indira to complete the draft of the speech that was going to announce the state of emergency to the people, Siddharta Shankar Ray was getting ready to leave when he met secretary Dhawan in the corridor. Dhawan told him, “The steps have now been taken to cut off the electricity supply to the main newspapers of the country and to close the courts.”

  “Ray was thunderstruck,” Sonia continued, “and he was furious. He asked for your mother to be woken. She was exhausted after such a long day. At that moment Sanjay came out and began to argue with Ray. Do you know what he said? He said: ‘You have no idea how to run a country!’”

  “As if he knew!” said Rajiv, looking up.

  “The fact is that he didn’t go until your mother appeared. She was astonished because she didn’t know a thing about those orders for arrests. Your brother had given them. She asked him to wait for a few minutes and she went off to talk to Sanjay.”

  “What Sanjay is after with those measures is to protect himself and his business, making it appear that he is also protecting Mother from the legal actions that have been undertaken against her.”

  “Your mother may be tough and authoritarian, but she has principles too. Her eyes were red from crying when she came out of the room where she’d been shut in with Sanjay. She told Ray that the newspapers would have electricity and no court would be closed.”

  “But that’s a lie,” said Rajiv. “Today there are no newspapers on the street because they’ve had their electricity supply cut off. Sanjay has got away with it again.”

  It would have been a great success for Indira if the state of emergency had lasted only a short time, and especially if Sanjay had not grown as a power in the shadows. The first day, when the Information Minister, I.K. Gujral, a cultivated and respected man with a gentle manner, arrived at his office in Akbar Road, Sanjay ordered that all the news bulletins should be first submitted to him before they were broadcast. Usha, sitting in her office, witnessed the scene.

  “That is not possible,” the man told him. “The bulletins are confidential.”

  “Well, from now on it will have to be possible.”

  Indira was in the doorway and heard the conversation.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The minister repeated his explanation.

  “I understand,” Indira told him, “if you don’t want to give them to Sanjay, I suggest that a clerk from your ministry brings them to me every morning so I can see them.”

  The minister left with the firm intention of presenting his resignation, but he was called back in the afternoon to what they were now calling “the palace”, which was nothing other than Indira Gandhi’s residence. Sanjay asked him to deport the BBC correspondent, a very well-known and well-liked journalist named Mark Tully, for having sent a report that “distorted” the facts.

  “It is not the job of the Minister of Information to arrest foreign correspondents,” Gujral answered him.

  When Sanjay immediately reproached him for the fact that his mother’s speech had not been broadcast in its entirety on television, the minister lost patience.

  “If you want to speak to me, you’ll have to learn to do it politely,” he told him. “You are younger than my son and I don’t owe you any explanations.”

  He did not have time to present his resignation. Indira called him that same night to relieve him of his post “because under the circumstances the Ministry of Information needed someone who could deal with matters more firmly.”

  The new minister announced extremely harsh censorship laws, including prohibiting people from quoting Nehru and Gandhi’s declarations for freedom of the Press, which was a cruel irony of history. One by one, the representatives of the international Press were invited to leave.

  The only one of her ministers who questioned the need to impose the state of emergency was relieved of his position and replaced by Bansi Lal, the head of the Haryana government, and the first to suggest the need to impose the state of emergency… At the age of 29, just because he was his mother’s son, Sanjay was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in India.

  The censorship of the Press was harsher than when the British had imposed it during the struggle for independence. At least, at that time, the newspapers were authorized to report the names of those who had been arrested and the jails where they were being held. Now people found out by rumour where their loved ones were, almost all of them members of the opposition. Some one hundred thousand people approximately were arrested without charges or trial. The conditions in which they were held were so tough that 22 detainees died in their dirty, overcrowded cells. If the railwaymen remembered how the strike had been crushed, now no sector of the population was safe. The most talked-about arrests were perhaps those of the Maharanis of Jaipur and Gwalior, former princesses who led parties in opposition to Indira in their respective states and who were locked up in the infamous Tihar jail in Delhi, alongside criminals and prostitutes. Gayatri Devi, the elegant Maharani of Jaipur, did not complain about the filth, or the promiscuity or even the stench. She only complained about the noise the other prisoners made and asked a friend to send her some wax earplugs.

  Meanwhile, Parliament granted Indira the same immunity as
the President of the Republic and state governors enjoyed. The Prime Minister was retroactively absolved of all the charges of electoral fraud that she faced and which had been what triggered the current state of emergency.

  Once again, guided by her survival instinct, Indira found herself in absolute control of the country, now more than ever, although the manipulation of democratic procedures was bringing her a growing number of enemies, both within India and abroad. But in the early days, the state of emergency was greeted with relief by part of the population, especially the urban middle classes. Even Sonia had the impression that she was in another city when she went to take her son to school, and not in the New Delhi of recent times. The atmosphere was of amazing calm. There were no interruptions in the traffic, or demonstrations, or sit-ins, or outbreaks of violence against her mother-in-law. Even the taxi drivers and rickshaw men drove on the right side of the road. Like her, a large part of the population was happy that the strikes and riots were over and they could enjoy a certain measure of peace. In the cities, the people celebrated that they could walk around again without feeling afraid, as the level of criminality had fallen sharply owing to the increased number of policemen and the toughening of the law. Aware of the new atmosphere of seriousness, the civil servants worked full days and with greater efficiency. The trains and planes were punctual, to the relief of those that used them, including Rajiv, who could now enjoy a more stable family life, without the delays of recent times which made him arrive home at impossible hours. Enormous posters with Indira’s face on them decorated roundabouts and squares: “The difference between chaos and order,” said a slogan next to her photo.

 

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