by Javier Moro
Rajiv won hands down in the elections in December 1984, with a better result than his grandfather or his mother had ever obtained. Sonia congratulated him warmly, although she felt intuitively that the news brought them a little closer to the edge of the precipice. For the last three years her husband had been an MP in Parliament only responsible for Amethi, and one of the secretaries general of the party. Now he had 544 constituencies in his care and the responsibility for governing an immense, volatile and sometimes ungovernable country seized up by a huge State apparatus. Had not an English politician written that the chain of the Himalayas seemed small in comparison with the load that a Prime Minister of India bears on his shoulders? The dynasty had received the mandate from the people, a mandate on a national scale, but Rajiv had no illusions about the reasons for his success: “Above all it’s been because of my mother’s death… No one really knew me, what they have done has been to project the expectations they had of her on to me. They have made me into the symbol of their hopes.” The one to lose catastrophically was Maneka, in spite of having run a very dynamic campaign. The wave of sympathy for Rajiv, and perhaps the fact that she was the daughter of a family of Sikh origin, wiped her off the map of politics, at least for the moment. Now it was clear who was the real heir to the mantle of the Nehru-Gandhis.
Sonia and the children found it even harder to struggle to get over the trauma of Indira’s violent death because, after fifteen years living in the same house, they had to leave it and move to another considered safer and more appropriate as the official residence of the Prime Minister. It was nearby, in Race Course Road. Now that terrorism had become an inescapable reality of political life in India, the family was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by an impressive deployment of security forces. In part it was a question of an unnecessary display, on show to make up for all the errors they had made with Indira. The responsibility for protecting the Prime Minister no longer fell to a paramilitary force, but to a specialized professional group, the Special Protection Group, created precisely because of the recent assassination. “Their presence put an end to what was left of our privacy and freedom,” said Sonia. Suddenly, one day, she had a fright when she was in the garden, with her pruning shears in her hand, and she saw a kind of Martian on a tree branch, totally dressed in black, with balaclava, bullet-proof vest and submachine gun in tow. “I’m on duty,” the man told her. On another occasion when she had to go out in a hurry to buy something in the American store, another Martian prevented her, in the doorway.
“Madam, you cannot go out now.”
“What do you mean, I can’t go out? I need to go to the American Embassy, I have guests tonight…”
“Madam, you have to get used to letting us know a little in advance. We cannot react in an improvised way. There are more than a hundred agents in charge of the protection of your family at the moment.”
“About time!” thought Sonia, with no option but to call a friend and ask her to do her a favour and buy what she needed and bring it home for her.
Although it was annoying to live like that, there was no choice but to get used to it. The security agents wanted to prevent Rajiv from carrying on with the custom he inherited from his mother and his grandfather of seeing hundreds of visitors very early in the morning. They asked him questions and listened to him, sitting on the lawn. But he insisted on keeping it up, even if only for three days a week. It was important for him to be able to take the pulse of the people. And he also used it to perfect his Hindi, which he spoke with mistakes in syntax and sometimes in pronunciation.
At home they woke up at six o’clock in the morning with the morning tea which was served to them on a tray. At eight thirty, the whole family gathered for breakfast. Rajiv went straight off and Sonia stayed tidying the house and, if she had time, reading and taking cuttings from the press. The children had stopped going to school the day their grandmother was killed. According to the police, it was too dangerous for them to go to a place where an armed man could easily get in. So now some private teachers arrived at about ten o’clock to teach them at home. Sonia took advantage of that time to go out shopping or to an exhibition. She always went out dressed immaculately, because she was aware that she was subject to implacable public scrutiny. “She has more saris than Imelda Marcos has shoes,” said one rumour. What she had was Indira’s collection of saris and shawls, mostly gifts, which, as Prime Minister, she had accumulated on all her trips all over India. Sonia had inherited them.
In the evenings she stayed with the children and they looked for ways to amuse themselves without going out, such as watching videos. On Sundays she wanted to keep up the custom of inviting her close friends for brunch, although Rajiv was rarely able to attend because he was so busy. But it seemed to her that it was important to keep up an appearance of normality. All the visitors, including the Quattrochis, had to be searched and pass through a triple barrier of metal detectors before being admitted. They got together in the garden and chatted gaily in Italian, French, English and Spanish, while they tasted Indian treats served on thalis, typical little tin dishes. Sonia surprised them with some dishes difficult to prepare in India, such as prawns in garlic sauce, which became a Sunday favourite.
Apart from those stolen moments, normality was a pipe dream. Any little delay on Rajiv’s part—and he tried hard to have lunch with the family whenever he could—caused big scares. The only moments of normal life came when they went on holiday to Italy in the summer and over Christmas. There too there was surveillance, although not so overwhelming. In New Delhi, they lived like prisoners.
What Rajiv had to give up altogether was his hobbies, especially photography, in which he had reached a good professional standard. He did not have time to listen to his favourite songs or to attend any concerts of classical Indian music with Sonia and their children. But he was determined to go on being a competent pilot, because it was his passion and furthermore, it gave him a certain sense of security after the uncertainty of politics. He asked a colleague to let him know when his flying licence was about to run out so he could renew it by accumulating the hours required. This he could always do by piloting the planes himself in which he travelled all over the country. But there was no time for anything that was not his activity as Prime Minister. “For me there was only time for action. I set myself to restoring confidence, to restoring friendship and fraternity between communities which had lived together for centuries,” he declared.
Rajiv had received a poisoned inheritance from his mother: the Sikh problem. It was crucial to be able to solve it in order to get back to peaceful general coexistence. He thought that first it was necessary to bring down the tension, so he began by using good sense: he declared that he was open to any compromise to solve the problem as long as it did not constitute a threat to the integrity of the nation; he freed the extremists arrested during the last months of his mother’s regime, and he promised to initiate an investigation into the massacres of the Sikhs in Delhi. The leader of the Sikh moderate party, as eager to achieve peace as the Prime Minister, finally signed the initial premises of an agreement. Immediately after that, Rajiv announced elections in the Punjab for September 1985, with the aim of transferring the administration of that state to the moderate Sikhs and making them responsible for the struggle against the extremists. But the terrorism continued, with small bombs in Delhi and the outlying area and, above all, with the explosion of an Air India Boeing 747 in mid-flight from Toronto to Delhi. The attack, which cost the lives of the 325 passengers on board, was attributed to two groups of Sikh extremists. That night, Rajiv met with his cabinet, and Sonia waited up for him until four o’clock in the morning. She was very aware of the size of the threat that was hanging over her husband, and both she and the children were living in terror. They saw the members of the Special Protection Group with scepticism. It was true that they were always there, perhaps too much, but in view of the audacity of the Sikh terrorists… would they really be efficient?
; While she waited for Rajiv, Sonia spoke on the telephone with her family in Orbassano. Since Indira’s death, her parents were very worried about what might happen to them and they were always watching the news. Any trace of pride that Paola, her mother, might feel about the fact that her daughter was the first lady of India was overshadowed by the fear of another attack. Sonia always reassured them, although her mother was able to recognize the fear in her voice, in spite of the distance and the interference.
Rajiv kept his cool and did not give way to the temptation to respond to violence with more violence, as his mother would perhaps have done. He granted the Punjab exclusive use of Chandigarh, the city designed by Le Corbusier, as its capital, in exchange for a promise of loyalty on the part of the moderate Sikh party, and he announced economic measures, such as the building of a hydro-electric dam to alleviate the problem of the shortage of energy in that state. He wanted to play his cards right and win over the moderates.
But on August 20th, 1985, it all came apart again. The leader of the moderate party who had been going round the villages and cities of the Punjab calling for the support of the people, “selling” the agreement with Rajiv to his people, was shot down. Once again a tragedy, once again an impasse. The fanatics were imposing their tyranny and boycotting any negotiated solution. In Parliament in New Delhi, Rajiv’s ability to get a rapid solution to the problem began to be doubted. But he was not daunted and decided to go ahead with the elections in the Punjab. In the same way as his mother’s assassination had catapulted him to power, he thought that the murder of the Sikh moderate would create a wave of sympathy for that party. He was right. For the first time in the history of the Punjab, the moderates won hands down in the polls. The result was a clear victory against extremism.
But the Sikh fanatics were not going to disappear without a fight. In another attempt to create tension, they dug themselves in again in the Akal Takht, the temple razed to the ground during Operation Blue Star and which had then been rebuilt. This time they were claiming that the reconstruction had profaned the temple; in fact, any pretext would do to have recourse to violence. Once again, weapons reached them through the passages and tunnels of the complex. Outside the Golden Temple, young extremists redoubled their attacks against Hindus and anyone who was not considered sufficiently devout, such as barbers and hairdressers for example, whose activity clashed completely with the Sikh precept of never cutting the hair, since what God had created should be respected, including the hair. They were classed as enemies of the Sikh people and in consequence were the targets of attacks by the more orthodox.
“The only answer is military action…” on hearing this phrase, Sonia started to shake. She had heard it before, from her mother-in-law. The result was there to be seen… Indira’s son was suddenly at the same crossroads. Was more sacrilege necessary, when the previous sacrilege had not solved the problem? Where would this spiral of violence end? As if that were not enough, events were repeating themselves with macabre similarity. Just like in the earlier occupation, a police officer was gunned down near the temple, putting the government on the ropes and forcing Rajiv to take a hand in the matter.
“What are you going to do?” a distressed Sonia asked him.
“Besiege them until they surrender.”
From his office in New Delhi, he personally directed Operation Black Thunder. He gave strict orders to the army and the police not to enter the temple under any circumstances and to seal off the area, blocking all the secret passages, as well as the ways of entry and exit for goods. The waiting seemed to go on forever. In the early days, the terrorists fired into the air and let off intimidating bursts of fire. Apart from these skirmishes, there was absolute silence reigning in the Golden Temple. The waters of the sacred lake reflected the surrounding temples like a mirror, and everything was so motionless that it was as if time itself had stood still. The terrorists were expecting an attack, and even tried to provoke one, but the only response they got were the echoes of their own shots. The army and the police were always unsure whether or not they might be able to get supplies through some channel that had escaped their control, and this kept them in a state of extreme tension. Outside, the inhabitants of the Punjab prayed in silence for their holy places not to be profaned again. Sonia followed it all from home, in New Delhi, and every time the phone rang, her heart missed a beat. Finally, after ten days, Rajiv’s voice at the other end of the phone gave her the good news:
“They’ve surrendered, it’s over. The strategy’s worked. There’s been no violence and no need to go into the temple.”
Sonia breathed a sigh of relief, although she was not entirely relaxed. Living without tension was a luxury beyond her reach. The terrorists had failed in their attempt to provoke the government. As always, when people want to repeat history, it ends up as a parody of itself. This time they came out of their hideout half dead with hunger and thirst. More than two hundred of them surrendered. Rajiv’s victory became even more patent when the Press published photos of the inside of the temple, which showed the great lack of respect the terrorists had shown for that holy place. There were excrements everywhere, piles of clothes, broken objects and splashes of blood, the result of fights between them. They were completely discredited in the eyes of their fellow believers.
1 See Five past midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro, Scribner, London 2002.
36
Rajiv’s critics, who accused him of lack of character, had to admit that his qualities as a peace-maker brought results. The great advantage he had lay precisely in the difference in style between him and his mother and the majority of Indian politicians in general. He brought new blood. He believed that his mother’s and his grandfather’s Socialist policies made the working and development of the economy seize up. He was convinced that the Licence Raj, which his mother had helped to back up, drowned the entrepreneurial spirit of Indians and encouraged corruption. Speeding up permits in exchange for a bribe was current practice among civil servants. As a pilot in a state-owned company for fourteen years, Rajiv had suffered from the notorious incompetence and knew what he was talking about. His efforts to make the administration more efficient and to relax controls gained him reproaches from Leftist intellectuals. According to them, liberalizing trade and relaxing controls would make India a country that depended too much on foreign capital. They identified him more with the growing middle class than with deepest India. They accused him of having been born with a silver spoon, of speaking English better than Hindi and even of taking his in- laws on holiday to the Ranthanbore National Park. Taking a holiday was frowned upon in India, especially for a politician. But Rajiv wanted to invite his father-in-law to see tigers in the same national park where he had spent his honeymoon with Sonia.
Finally Stefano Maino had agreed to visit his favourite daughter. This was the first and only holiday of his life, an opportunity that Rajiv was not going to waste, and that is why he did his utmost to spoil him. Also part of that trip was Stefano’s old friend, the mechanic, Danilo Quadra. Sonia was happy to be able to entertain her father after so many years. She felt that it would be his only visit to India because Stefano had never liked travelling and because now he suffered with his heart and was somewhat fragile.
“He’s always worrying about you, even before your mother-in-law’s assassination,” Danilo told Sonia.
Stefano had been very afraid since before Sonia had escaped from his control, since the far off day when he had said to his wife, “They’ll throw her to the tigers.” He was also afraid for Rajiv, that bravo ragazzo as he called him. Too bravo to be a politician in a place as turbulent and poor as India, thought Stefano. The spectacle of the poverty moved him, perhaps because it reminded him of his childhood, when he was a cowherd and time went by exasperatingly slowly and his belly was empty. It had seemed as if things were never going to get any better and that the scarcity, boredom and limitations would go on forever, as he saw reflected in the eyes of the young
people in Indian villages. Sonia was always telling him off because he was very prone to giving generously to the poor: “If you carry on like that, you’re going to have all the beggars in India chasing after you,” she said to him, reminding him that the majority of beggars worked for the mafias and that it was better to give money directly to the people that cared for the poor. But this man, sparing with his words and seemingly so hard, took no notice because he could not resist the smile of a child putting his hand in through the open car window. At the end of the trip, when they got back to New Delhi, his friend Danilo confirmed it to Sonia, shrugging his shoulders in a sign of impotence: “There’s nothing to be done about it, he likes giving money away to everyone.” Stefano Maino was faithful to his own memory.
Rajiv was too “Western” to be able to hide it, and even very British in his manners and in his way of holding in his emotions. Once, defending himself from an attack by the opposition, he said that they wanted to make India go back into the Middle Ages, an expression that belongs to European, not Indian, history. It was true too that his degree of identification with the poor was not as intense as his mother’s or his grandfather’s, but he thought that if the urban middle classes became wealthier, that would end up benefiting the poor in the villages. The old party dinosaurs reminded him that the important thing was to hold on to the loyalty of the voters, of whom the immense majority were miserably poor. What sense was there in having a policy that would not benefit them in the short term? Did Rajiv perhaps want the party to lose in the next elections? The young Prime Minister found himself trapped between giving greater freedom to businessmen to earn money, and keeping the grassroots loyal, the poor. That was his greatest challenge, and he knew that it was not going to be easy to win. In order to fight against being branded as the “Prime Minister of the privileged”, which his detractors wanted to impose on him, and which in a democracy of poor people was very detrimental, he did what his mother would have done: he travelled exhaustively round the country. He even joined in a great pilgrimage in order to improve his image among the masses. According to Sonia, who went with him on many of these trips, her husband was untiring. “He walked so quickly that I had to ask him to slow down so that the rest of us could keep up with him. As he had got used to sleeping no more than four or five hours a day, he used to have a nap between the different stops, giving me instructions to wake him if someone was waiting. Sometimes I let him sleep a few more minutes… Then he would protest, but at least he rested.” Sonia witnessed the feeling that he aroused in the people. “People responded more to his personal charm than to the post he held. It didn’t matter whether he was in a tribal village in the north, a city in Tamil Nadu, in the heart of rural Punjab or in the slums of Bombay. Rajiv did not belong to any caste or ethnic group. He was Indian and everyone considered him as one of them.” He drove his own four-wheel drive vehicle in rural areas. Wherever there were people waiting, he would stop to chat. “If we were delayed,” Sonia would say, “they carried on waiting patiently to talk to him, and to see him. In remote places, late at night, a peasant would bring an old oil lamp close to his face and I could see a gleam appear in his eyes as he recognized his smile. He would ask us to accompany him to introduce us to his family, to name his newborn children, to wish the newly married couples in the village luck,” How far off was life in New Delhi from those remote corners… from the huts where they shared the little food the people had, where they listened carefully to the descriptions of the deprivation there and where they asked questions in order to find out how they could help them. “I see a lot of love in people’s eyes,” said Rajiv, “and friendship, and trust, but above all, hope.” Rajiv firmly believed that technology could eliminate poverty, or at least mitigate it. He remembered his mother, and the efforts she had made to set the green revolution in motion, taking scientists out into the field and organizing meetings with local politicians and peasants. When they criticized him for setting aside large sums of money from the State budget for scientific research centres, he defended himself by saying that the farmers of the Punjab would never have been successful if they had not had access to tissue cultivation and genetic engineering. “We can have failures if we experiment,” he said, “but if we don’t do that we will never get anywhere.” The contradictions in India were scandalous: “How was it possible to launch satellites into space and not be able to provide the population with drinking water? he asked himself. He began to discover that it was not from lack of technology, but because of an inability to apply that technology to the problems of the poor. From there emerged an idea of his that he called Technological Missions, an ambitious programme of research in six areas which Rajiv, after his tours in rural districts, identified as priority: drinking water, literacy, immunization, milk production, telecommunications and renewable energies.