The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  The idea that Indira had restored peace and order in the country also took root abroad. Usha, her private secretary, was the one in charge of bringing and reading out or writing down the articles in the international Press that had to do with the current situation in India. Very often sitting at the table in the dining room she read out the headlines or letters that were published. “The authoritarian government is gaining wide acceptance in India”, said a headline in the New York Times. But there were other openly hostile headlines which provoked worrying looks between Sanjay and his mother. One day Usha was on her own in her office when Sonia came in. The two women greatly appreciated each other.

  “Usha, I think it’s best if you don’t read any of the criticisms that come out in the foreign Press in front of everyone. I’m not saying it for Mummy’s sake—as she now called Indira—but because I don’t want anyone to give you black looks.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” Usha told her. She had also noticed that the atmosphere had changed and was wary now of Sanjay’s influence over his mother.

  They could silence critical voices in India, but not abroad. Dorothy Norman, Indira’s best friend for so many years, was overtly hostile towards her. She gathered signatures from American personalities—the writer Noam Chomsky, the tennis player Arthur Ashe, the Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the paediatrician Benjamin Spock, etc.—to publish a text in the Press deploring the harsh measures of the state of emergency and calling for it to be lifted. Among the signatories, humiliating Indira even more, was Allen Ginsberg, the poet she had met in London when she went there to inaugurate the tribute to Nehru and who years later had sung of the sadness of the Bangladeshi refugees. That hurt. The correspondence between the two of them ceased and would not recommence until four years later. Her other friend, Pupul Jayakar, confronted Indira when she came back from a trip: “How can you, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, allow this?” Indira was not expecting it and was dumbstruck. No one dared to defy her openly.

  “You don’t know the seriousness of what is happening,” she said. “You don’t know the plots against me. JP never liked me being Prime Minister. He has not yet discovered his true role… What does he want to be? A martyr? A saint? Why can’t he accept that he’s just a politician and that he wants to be Prime Minister?” she answered.

  Indira told Pupul that it was her intention to maintain the state of emergency for only two months, and that anyway she was going to take advantage of that time to launch a twenty-point programme to bring the country out of its underdevelopment. Among those measures there were two that were revolutionary: the illegalization of slave labour and the cancellation of poor people’s debts with village money-lenders. Pupul realized it was useless to argue with Indira. The only thing she could do was to listen to her so that her friend could feel free to empty her heart to someone she trusted. Pupul knew her well and knew how alone she felt. Although she deeply disagreed with Indira, she decided to remain close at hand.

  19

  It was Indira’s intention to announce the end of the Emergency on August 15th, 1975, on the same day and in the same place as her father had made his famous independence speech 28 years previously. At that historic moment, his words had left her brimming with emotion. She had declared to the BBC correspondent, “You know, when you go from extreme pain to extreme pleasure, you are left kind of numb. Freedom is something so great that it’s hard to assimilate.”

  Now her car drove along the wide avenues of New Delhi, from where all the beggars and wandering cows had mysteriously disappeared — this was one of the marvellous effects of the order imposed by the state of emergency. She was heading for the Red Fort in order to give back that freedom to the people—the same freedom that she had been forced to hold to ransom—when her chief of protocol gave her some news that upset her deeply. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, her friend, the hero that she had restored to the presidency of Bangladesh, had been overthrown in a military coup. But that was not the worst: Sheikh, his wife, three sons, two daughters-in-law and two nephews had had their throats cut. The participants in the coup had made certain that a Rahman dynasty would not survive.

  Indira was devastated. “I noticed that there was something strange, the moment she began her speech,” her friend Pupul would say, standing in the crowd at the Red Fort. “Her tone of voice was forced as though she was trying to hold in powerful emotions, and that voice took away her ability to move people.” Pupul was listening carefully to the speech, in which Indira spoke about freedom, about the need to take harsh measures, about the notions of sacrifice and service, about courage, about faith, about democracy … but not a word about the end of the state of emergency.

  Pupul went to see her that night and found her in a state of shock. Indira was convinced that the CIA was implicated in those deaths (which turned out to be true). And she did not want to end up like Allende, as recently she had repeatedly told the British Labour leader, Michael Foot. She thought that what had happened in Bangladesh had been the first in a chain of plots to destabilize southern Asia and to change the ideological colour of its governments. She was convinced that she would be the next victim. The chief of the Intelligence Agency had confirmed that they had discovered several plots to get rid of her. According to Pupul, she was paranoid, suspecting everyone, and convinced that every shadow hid an enemy.

  “Who can I trust?” Indira asked her. My grandson is the same age as Sheikh Rahman’s son. Tomorrow it could be him. They want to destroy me by whatever means they can, me and my family.”

  It was the first time that Indira had realized that it was not only she that was in danger because she was Prime Minister. Her whole family, including her grandchildren, were targeted, she thought. She was a prisoner in a vicious circle that she no longer knew how to break. In those circumstances, she thought that it was not the moment to put an end to the state of emergency. On the contrary, it was necessary to take steps to protect herself by intensifying the arrests without trial and the activities of the Intelligence Agency.

  Indira felt safe in crowds, but in her house, now heavily guarded, she began to feel she was in danger. The truth is she was sick with fear, tired of wielding power, worn out with so many struggles, and disappointed at the lack of results. She was an intensely patriotic woman and she had absolute faith in the destiny of India. But she realized that her leftist policies had been unable to pull India out of its poverty. How to make India into a modern, prosperous and strong country? She no longer knew which formula to use, except an iron hand, which went against her own traditions. She had put India, her family and herself in a situation with no way out, and she did not know how to escape.

  Instinctively she turned to her sons. The older one, Rajiv, could not be of much help to her. He had expressed his disagreement with the Emergency several times, and he had also done it in public, and whenever he could, in front of his friends. Contact between them was reduced so much that, since he was at work a lot and not much at home, he found out about his mother’s tours and decisions from the newspapers. Furthermore, Indira knew that he was not going to feel sorry for her. Even Sonia had expressed regret about an old political rival who had ended up in jail in the first wave of arrests. “It must be terrible for you with your father in jail. I’m really sorry about it,” she had told this politician’s son at a reception and these words came to the ears of others who wasted no time in spreading Sonia’s sentiments in the New Delhi gossip circles. Indira did not harbour a grudge about it; she had always thought that Rajiv was no good for politics and that neither he nor Sonia were able to understand the heartfelt reasons that had led her to take that decision. On the other hand, she knew that Sonia was insisting on going to Italy with the children for a while until the situation returned to normal. Nothing is so contagious as fear…

  That left the younger one, Sanjay, her favourite. She saw him as full of energy, strong and loyal. Arrogant, true, able to put his foot in it better than anyone, but a son she could trust, who was at h
er side and took on her problems. And who, she thought, she could always control. Besides, there was another reason, which had nothing to do with a mother’s sentimentality. Sanjay was ferociously anti-Communist and defended liberal policies which encouraged private initiative and the business turn of mind acumen of the people of India. His experience with the Maruti had convinced him even more of the need to free the country of so many bureaucratic obstacles. Indira thought she could use her son to open up the economy and make a turn to the right. And not only out of simple conviction, but out of political need. In effect, radical Communists had infiltrated her party and called for the “elimination of private property as a fundamental right” in the Constitution, among other Stalinist-type measures that they wanted to impose. Indira had stopped them in their tracks stating that any shortcut that did not respect democratic procedures was dangerous. But they represented a threat which could easily cause a split in the Congress Party. Through her darling boy Sanjay, she thought she could counteract them.

  Indira was so afraid that something might happen to her son that she asked him to move to another room. “I don’t want you to stay here, so near the main entrance and the street, it isn’t safe,” she told him. “It’s better if you move to the room at the end of the passage, the one next to mine.” A friend asked her the reason for the change and she said, “I don’t feel very well. I sleep in my room and Sanjay is in the room next door. If something happens to me during the night, I can call him straight away.” The truth was that Indira wrapped herself in Sanjay like one of those Kashmir pashminas that she liked so much and she did so to protect herself from the cold she felt in her soul, not realizing that her son was her biggest problem and, in a sense, her greatest threat.

  Sanjay had been left without any money and, convinced now that no Maruti vehicle would ever come out of the factory, he was selling off the structure for scrap iron. He had left the car dealers in the lurch after they had got into debt with the banks to build attractive showrooms and now they were being forced to sell their properties to pay off those loans. As if that was not enough, Sanjay ordered the arrest of the only two dealers who dared to claim back the advance money they had paid.

  With the Maruti disaster, cars no longer interested him. Now he took to flying, like his brother. Before the Emergency he had gained a qualification as a private pilot and as he loved speed, he immediately became fond of acrobatic flying. His weakness for machines that went faster and faster and the excess of confidence he had in his own abilities scared most of his acquaintances and friends, who were frightened to fly with him. Maneka ended up being his only passenger.

  Sanjay needed a cover in order to be able to operate parallel to his mother. To justify his extra-constitutional power, Indira decided to place him at the head of a dying organization, the Youth Congress (the youth wing of the Congress Party) and in a ceremony in Chandigarh, the ultramodern capital of the Punjab designed by Le Corbusier, he was named a member of the Executive Committee. But everyone understood the subliminal message: Sanjay was officially Indira’s heir. The Prime Minister, who had been merciless to the princes because they put birth before talent, was now succumbing to the same temptation and was setting up her own dynasty.

  Rajiv and Sonia watched Sanjay’s rise with amazement and displeasure, confused and often embarrassed for him. The Press called him the “Messiah”, the “Sun” or “the voice of youth and reason”: They saw him always surrounded by sycophants whom they called chamchas, which in Hindi means a spoon, alluding to the curved movement required when handling that item of cutlery. They were tough individuals hiding under a docile appearance, skilled at manipulation, with no real knowledge of the government’s problems, and with little education or training, just like Sanjay. A mixture of politicians, henchmen and thugs. The only thing they were interested in was to get what they could out of their closeness to power. They began by revitalizing the coffers of the Youth Congress, organizing themselves into brigades that demanded donations, almost always with intimidation. The shopkeepers of Delhi complained to Rajiv or Sonia that the young men from the Youth Congress were extorting money from them. But Rajiv’s protests fell on deaf ears.

  “Don’t believe all the lies people tell you,” his brother invariably told him.

  The truth is that no one seemed to take responsibility for the bad things, only for the good.

  Because there was also a good side to Sanjay’s intentions. As soon as he had been nominated for that position, he added four more points to his mother’s programme, which he, personally, ensured were carried out. The four points were: to fight the encroachment of illegal slums in a campaign to beautify the cities; to eradicate illiteracy and the dowry system and to promote family planning.

  In theory, no one disagreed with these measures, especially the fight against overpopulation, caused in part by the success of health programmes which had managed to greatly reduce infant mortality and which had increased life expectancy from 27 to 47 in a couple of decades. In sum, now there were more people living more reproductive years. The advances in agriculture, industry and education could not keep up with the increase in population. There was more wealth, but also more poverty. More education, but also more illiterates. “Nowadays, if we create a million jobs, we already have ten million going for them,” Sanjay had said. “Industrial development and the increase in agricultural production are no good if the population continues to grow at the present rate.” He was right, that was no way to get rid of poverty. It was not in the idea, which was obvious, but in its putting into practice where Sanjay went wrong, managing to completely discredit the state of emergency, and, in passing, his mother.

  In the end it was the poor, those that the state of emergency was supposedly helping, who suffered most. Sanjay’s men chose sterilization as the most appropriate method of reducing the population of India. The other methods of family planning had produced poor results. The pill was not available yet and the diaphragm was impossible to use for peasant women who lived without any privacy whatsoever. For a while, hope of controlling the birth rate centred on condoms. Elephants came to the villages with loads of condoms which were supposed to be distributed free among the people, but the children discovered that it was great fun to blow them up and tie them to sticks to play with, and so they intercepted them. The irony of the government’s slogan that said that family planning produced happy children did not escape anyone … Male sterilization turned out to be the cheapest, most efficient and safest method. Furthermore, there was money from the West for carrying out those programmes.

  Sanjay began touring the country, encouraging heads of local governments to do better than others were doing. “The head of Haryana has managed 60,000 operations in three weeks. Let’s see how many you can get!” he told them. The objectives to be achieved were announced to the heads of district, who were rewarded if they did better, or the opposite—they were transferred or downgraded if they did not. A system like this encouraged the abuse of power. Modest government civil servants had to agree to go under the surgeon’s scalpel to get their back pay. Lorry drivers and rickshaw men did not have their driving licences renewed unless they showed a sterilization certificate. The same condition was applicable to the slum dwellers who requested a deed of ownership of their shacks to legalize their situation. An anthropologist named Lee Schlesinger was a witness to how the campaign began, after a lightning visit by Sanjay Gandhi to the village where he was carrying out his research. Local civil servants prepared lists of “candidates”, in other words those who already had three or four children, and a few days later police vans arrived to take them to the nearest health centre where, in exchange for 120 rupees, a tin of cooking oil or a transistor, they came out sterilized. Later, when they heard the van was on its way, some men fled into the mountains. However, others had themselves operated twice in order to get more than one reward.

  In the cities, people became afraid. Delhi was left without any workmen, which was unheard of in a city wher
e people arrived from the countryside in search of work. Immigrants returned to their villages to avoid the fatal incision to their genitals. In November 1975, the celebration of Nehru’s birthday, which included free snacks for hundreds of children, had to be cancelled because the mothers refused to send their little boys in case “Sanjay Gandhi’s doctors” castrated them. Soon the official sterilization certificate became an essential requirement for dealing with all people’s needs in their day to day lives.

  It was inevitable that a campaign like this would soon come up against strong resistance, especially when the false rumour was spread that sterilization led to impotence. To fight that resistance, the government set up a quota system through which the salaries of police officers, teachers, doctors and nurses were paid only after they had motivated a certain number of people to submit to a vasectomy. Naturally, the victims of this pitiless policy were the weakest, the poorest, the most discriminated social groups like the untouchables or certain Moslem and tribal communities which were in principle those who had always supported Indira unconditionally. They did not understand how their goddess, for whom they had always voted, could punish them like that. Was that the reward they were to receive for their loyalty?

  Indians were not used to the State dictating the size of their families to them. India was not a dictatorship like China, where decisions taken at the top could be carried out by force. That dictatorial tradition did not exist. Here, children were a very valuable resource, something like their parents’ social security, because from the time they were very small, they worked in the fields, in workshops, in textile factories, or begging on the streets. Families were large because the more children there were, the more hands there were and, as a result, the more resources there were. For the poor peasants, labourers and homeless beggars, the possibility of having children represented almost the only act of individual freedom by means of which they could enjoy life. Taking away from the poor the pleasure of making and having children was to take away the only thing they had. But of course Sanjay could not see that as his heart was blinded to the suffering of the poor. Neither did he have any experience in government, in the art of handling civil servants and bureaucrats. By attempting to shake up the stratified administrative hierarchy to make it more efficient, by using methods such as the threat of transfer, dubious incentives to sterilization or the threat of being investigated by the tax authorities, what he achieved was for that tacit brotherhood of bureaucrats, which had been tied together by invisible bonds for centuries, to unite even more in order to defend itself from the attacks. On one hand they flattered him, and on the other they boycotted him. He was too naïve to see it.