The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  As usually occurs with someone who shakes up old structures and ideas, he became the object of scorn. In New Delhi they called him ingenuous, they said he wanted to leap from the oxcart to the mobile phone, something that would yet end up happening thanks to his vision and his forcefulness in those early years of his government. Three decades later, the photo of a mahout talking on his mobile from the back of his elephant, which was moving tree trunks, would become the publicity image of an Indian phone company. It was under the government of Rajiv Gandhi, and thanks to the intervention of Indians who lived abroad, mainly in the United States, that an inter-urban and international phone system was installed, functioning via satellite and bringing the phone to all parts of the country, making it available to those poor people who lived in the utmost isolation.

  In the capital they also laughed at his slogan “A computer in every village school by the 21st century”. It sounded like the dream of a rich kid because, in effect, many schools in the villages did not have electricity, or even a blackboard. But the truth is that Rajiv immediately understood the potential of computers, which years later would serve as a boost for the economy of India. He thought that the industrial revolution had allowed Europe to gain its pre-eminent position and he did not want India to miss the bandwagon of another revolution, that of electronics and computers. Less than a month after being named Prime Minister, he reduced the import tariffs on computer components and computers. Then he gradually eliminated many of the controls over the computer industry and he promoted the use of computers in schools, banks and offices, strongly stimulating local industry. Under his mandate the economy began to be deregulated: “We have to free ourselves of the controls without giving up control,” he said. The middle classes went through a much desired expansion for a long time. People were able to buy televisions, radios, cameras, watches and domestic appliances that were previously unavailable because of the very high tariffs, so high that most of those objects were acquired as contraband. They were good years for consumers and for business. For the first time since independence, the creation of wealth was not considered a crime or a sin.

  The repercussions of these measures on Sonia’s life were immediate, making her work as first lady easier. In preparation for official dinners, she no longer had to go off on a pilgrimage round the markets of New Delhi to find cheese, for example or olive oil or a food mixer. Little by little, the outside world was beginning to come into age-old India and India, in turn was beginning to open up to the world.

  But in the eighties the country was still a hotbed of conflicts, and the work of a Prime Minister could be compared to that of a fireman putting out fires. After the Punjab, he spent time on pacifying the region of Assam, in upheaval from the influx of Moslem refugees who were still coming in from Bangladesh fifteen years after the war to seek work. He also worked hard to achieve peace with the tribal communities in the northeast, such as the Bodos, the Gurkhas, and the Mizos, in a series of agreements which won a reduction in and even a halt to secessionist violence. On those visits, he had no qualms about wearing astonishing hats or wearing very colourful local costumes as a symbol of friendship, exactly as Indira would have done. He laughed at himself seeing himself like 424 that, and he very sportingly put up with having his leg pulled. He never lost his sense of humour, and was disconcerted when someone did not catch on to his jokes. When Rajiv came home, he hurried to show Sonia and the children the objects he had been given on those trips, whether it was an old woman’s pipe from the Mizo, a wicker basket or a carved shell, and which he then kept in his office like real treasures. In his heart of hearts, he knew that achieving peace and security for the different peoples of India meant also achieving them for his family, or at least that is what he believed until October 2nd, 1986, when the Sikh conflict reared its ugly head for the last time.

  That day, while they were attending a ceremony to celebrate the 117th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi in the mausoleum dedicated to his memory in New Delhi, they clearly heard an explosion.

  “It’s the backfiring of a scooter,” a member of the Special Protection Group said, very sure of himself.

  Rajiv and Sonia sat on the ground while the priests recited the prayers in memory of the father of the nation. When the ceremony was over and they got up to go, they heard more explosions. The guard closest to Sonia was injured on the forehead. Panic spread. The people in the crowd shrieked as they scattered. Rajiv protected his wife with his own body when other police officers surrounded them and got them away. “… So it was a scooter!” Sonia repeated in indignation. The frustrated assassin was captured immediately. He was a Sikh, who had fired from the top of a tree. No one was injured, but for Sonia the attempt was a reminder that they could not let down their guard for a moment. She came home very upset, with a great need to hug her children to check that they were also fine, because there was always the possibility that the attack might be part of a wider conspiracy. But this time that was not the case and the Sikh had acted alone.

  37

  Suddenly, it looked as if Rajiv had got fatter. Could Sonia’s penne all’arrabbiata that he liked so much be responsible for that prominent belly? his friends asked sarcastically. No, the guilty party for that bulky torso under a cotton shirt was a thick bullet-proof vest that he was forced to wear since the last attempted attack. From now on, he made his journeys in one of two groups of identical cars, so that no one could know which one he was travelling in. And every time he went out, hundreds of policemen patrolled the city in a state of alert. And the children now only saw a small group of the children of their parents’ lifelong friends, who, in spite of being known by the security guards had to submit to meticulous searches before coming into “the fortress”, as they called the family residence. Sonia stopped her restoration classes in the National Museum which she had taken up again in her scarce free time, and she began to compile the letters between Nehru and Indira with the idea of one day publishing them. It was a job that she could do at home and which could also serve her husband, who was always seeking good phrases and ideas for his speeches. Digging deep into the family memory, she recognized many of the conflicts and problems that her husband was facing because, in another way and in another time, Nehru and Indira had also had to struggle with them: how to control the power of the bureaucracy, how to calm regional tensions, how to lift the country out of poverty. Contempt for personal safety seemed to be a common trait in the family. Neither Nehru nor Indira nor Rajiv had much respect for “security” in general, because it distanced them from the people and reminded them more of a dictatorship than a democracy. They thought that if someone really wanted to kill them, they would always find a way to do it. Sonia was not convinced. She was beginning to realize that if Rajiv had not ended up as Prime Minister, with all the power of the State to protect them, perhaps now they would all be dead. She went into a cold sweat just thinking about it. The circumstances of life had put her family into a spiral that forced them to flee forwards. As there was no chance of stopping or going back, Sonia had no option but to change, accept her role and find a way to adapt and take advantage of what life was offering her. It was not easy, because the atypical situation of the family created unexpected problems for them. For example, Rahul and Priyanka were coming to an age when they ought to go to college. Where should they be sent? Sonia knew for a fact that they were not going to be safer from Sikh revenge abroad than in India, so the problem became a source of great anxiety. It was then that Rajiv suggested sending them to the American College in Moscow. Of all countries, the USSR was one of the safest and besides, there was no Sikh community there. Sonia did not like the idea, so for the moment they set it aside.

  As first lady, Sonia accompanied her husband abroad. They travelled on board a Boeing 747, specially fitted to accommodate the entourage of the Prime Minister, made up of assistants, ministers, journalists and naturally, a unit of agents from the Special Protection Group. During long flights, Sonia would bury herself in
a book, something she had loved to do since she was a child, while Rajiv reviewed speeches with his assistants, adding last-minute touches or a suggestion inspired by some of Nehru’s or his mother’s letters. Rajiv liked those journeys on which he slept little and worked a lot. It seemed as if he was more at ease abroad than at home. “It’s good to be among friends,” he told Margaret Thatcher as soon as they arrived in London. Sonia tried to make herself as invisible as possible. It was not easy to refuse to attend receptions at which her presence was required or to avoid making speeches. “She is a very reserved woman who does not like to be the centre of attention,” explained her husband, to excuse her. There was another reason: it was not good as far as internal politics was concerned for Sonia to be talked about, because automatically her foreign origins would be brought up, a weak point that first Maneka and then the Hindu fundamentalist Right, were using to discredit the Prime Minister.

  But Rajiv felt very much at home among international statesmen. Actually, he had been brought up among them and spoke the same language as they did. He did not project the image of an obscure politician from the Third World, but that of a modern, progressive man with ideas of his own, able to take on any world leader. He was backed by his achievements in his first two years in power, which added up to more than any other prime minister in a comparable period of time. When he was criticized because his policy of economic openness brought him close to the United States, or vice- versa, when they accused him in the West of moving India closer to the Soviet Union, he liked to repeat one of his mother’s phrases: “We keep ourselves straight and we don’t lean one way or the other.” Rajiv got President Reagan to make an exception to his policy of not selling India technology that could be diverted to countries in the East. He wanted an American super-computer that would help to predict the development of the monsoons with a high degree of precision, something that he thought would be invaluable to the peasants. Reagan understood and agreed to his request.

  For Rajiv, those trips meant attending interminable round tables, ceremonies, conferences and treaty-signings. Above all, he enjoyed visiting laboratories and front- runner companies that produced the latest advances in technology and he always asked himself how they could be applied to India in order to alleviate poverty. In Japan, Rajiv praised the “first Asian country to have assimilated scientific knowledge” and underlined the achievements of his own country: “In 1947, we did not even produce lathes; today we build our own atomic reactors and we launch satellites into space.” He was especially satisfied at having come out with flying colours from what he considered as the greatest challenge of his mandate, the 1987 drought, classed as the most severe of the 20th century and which affected 258 million people and 168 million head of cattle. He took the matter firmly in hand, keeping in close contact with the local civil servants responsible for the programmes of development and aid, ensuring that what was left over in the reserve was distributed appropriately and that the cost of the emergency aid was turned into investments for development, for example by digging wells and carrying out irrigation works. His dedication and almost military planning, which reminded many of his mother’s ability for organization, meant that the country did not have to import grain and, for the first time in its history, India came out of a drought on a national scale without famines, without epidemics, without deaths and with a positive gross national product. “It was a great satisfaction for him!” Sonia would say.

  On other fronts, the results were not so encouraging. In foreign policy, Rajiv had inherited a serious situation in Sri Lanka, partly created by his mother. The former island of Ceylon was a country with a population of 17 million, mostly of Sinhalese culture and Buddhist religion, except for a minority in the north: two and a half million Tamils, professing Hinduism, who had strong racial and linguistic links to the 55 million Tamils who inhabited the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This minority had always felt sidelined by the Sinhalese majority. They felt that they were treated as second-class citizens, especially since the government declared Sinhalese to be the official language of the island in the 50’s. Years of resentment led to the emergence of a guerrilla group, the Tamil Tigers, who sought independence for their territory in the north-eastern corner of the island. For years, the Tigers were able to count on discreet backing from India. The head of government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a former Tamil film actor turned populist, provided them with weapons, money and refuge. Indira turned a blind eye for reasons of internal political strategy, since this man was her only ally in the south and she needed his political backing.

  In 1983, the Tigers were so strong that they intensified their armed struggle. The government of Sri Lanka reacted with every means at its disposal and in a brutal manner, so the conflict went into a spiral of terrorism and repression which reinforced even further the Tamils’ desire for independence. The very high levels of savagery and brutality on both sides provided a bloody contrast with the Paradise-like beauty of the island. The serene expression of the Buddhas carved in stone by the ancient dwellers on the island soon seemed out of place.

  When Rajiv came to power, he came face to face with the problem that an avalanche of refugees were crossing into India, fleeing from the offensive of the island’s army. Apart from the logistical problem it meant to feed and house thousands of people, there was the risk that the discontent of the Tamils from the island might infect those on the sub-continent, feeding the desire for independence of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, one of the states with a very marked personality of its own, and creating more secessionist tension in India, as if there were not enough of that already.

  “You remind me of your mother, when she had to deal with the first wave of refugees from Bangladesh,” Sonia told him. “At first she didn’t really know what to do.”

  “What has to be done is to fix the problem at source, that’s what she would have thought. We mustn’t give the Tamils in Sri Lanka reasons to come here. The problem has to be dealt with in Colombo. Like my mother, who had to fix it in Bangladesh.”