by Javier Moro
Rajiv sent a series of special envoys to Sri Lanka, whose mission it was to convince the government of the island to grant a certain degree of autonomy to the Tamils, letting it be understood that if the government made peace with the Tamils, India would promise to completely cut off aid to the guerrillas. But the government of Sri Lanka, having embarked on a military solution, took no notice. It continued with its offensive and imposed a blockade on the peninsula of Jaffna, the territory of the Tamils in the north-east of the island. Petrol, foodstuffs and medicines began to run short.
“They aren’t taking any notice. They have to understand that India cannot sit back and do nothing. If they don’t invite us to help in finding a solution to a problem that threatens us directly, we’ll intervene without asking for permission.”
“Another war?” said Sonia. “Think about it.”
Rajiv planned his move well. In the blockade he saw the opportunity for India to assert itself once and for all. He decided to send five cargo planes escorted by fighters to the Jaffna peninsula to help the population by dropping them forty tons of rice, medicines and various other supplies. It was a gesture inspired by humanitarian motives and at the same time by India’s desire to reaffirm itself as a power in the region.
The pressure worked. The president of Sri Lanka finally signed an agreement with Rajiv, according to which the Sinhalese government granted wide-ranging autonomy to the Tamils. The agreement also stipulated that an Indian peace-keeping force would be transferred to the island. The Sri Lankan army would withdraw its barracks, and the Tamil Tiger militants would be persuaded—or forced—to give up their weapons. “This agreement not only puts an end to the conflict,” Rajiv declared, “it also brings peace and justice to the minority communities of the island.”
“Your mother would be proud of you,” Sonia told him.
But it was not like Indira’s victory in Bangladesh. Rajiv had sold his chickens before they were hatched.
The Sinhalese majority, fearful that their interests would be prejudiced by the concessions made to the Tamils, reacted violently to the terms of the agreement. When Rajiv travelled to Colombo at the end of July 1987 to ratify it, the agents of the Special Protection Group who accompanied him tried to dissuade him from reviewing the guard of honour as protocol required. “It may be dangerous,” they told him. “Uncontrolled elements may have infiltrated and there’s a lot of tension on the island…”
“What? Here we are to sign an agreement that guarantees their peace and security … and you’re going to tell them that I’m scared to review the guard of honour?”
His bodyguards, who knew how stubborn their boss could be, did not insist. A short time before, one of them had suffered the anger of the Prime Minister personally. He had dared to complain that Rajiv drove too fast in his Range Rover, a gift from King Hussein of Jordan. He liked to drive from home to his office in Parliament in it, and his guards could not follow him down the streets of New Delhi. Rajiv had found the man too insolent and had asked for him to be transferred. The pressure of his job made traits of stubbornness and determination emerge in Rajiv which were reminiscent of his brother and his mother.
So he went on with his programme and accompanied the president of Sri Lanka in reviewing the guard of honour, with music from a military band, martial salutes and all the paraphernalia. Suddenly, a soldier dressed in the white uniform of the navy, broke ranks and threw himself at him, with the intention of hitting him on the head with the butt of his rifle. Rajiv saw the attack coming and ducked just in time to avoid the blow, which would have cracked his skull open, and which he received fully on his shoulder. It all occurred so quickly that most of those present did not realize what had happened. Rajiv wanted to minimize the incident and refused to be treated by doctors. He stood listening to the national anthem, putting up with the pain, and he continued with his agenda, imperturbably. Only when he got back on board the plane for the return journey did he allow himself to be treated by his doctor. He would have liked to wait and tell Sonia himself, so that she would not have a fright, but television had already sent the pictures all round the world. Sonia and their children had seen them at home in the sitting room and once again they had their hearts in their mouths. Another small incident had arisen to remind them of the constant danger in which they lived. “For a long time,” Sonia would say, “he could not move his shoulder or sleep on his left side.”
Rajiv had not yet landed in New Delhi when the Sri Lankan government asked for the military aid clause to be put into practice. A peace force of several thousand Indian soldiers was dispatched to the island with the aim of supervising the ceasefire and disarming the guerrillas and, once their objective was fulfilled, returning. But the troops were regarded with suspicion by both sides: by the Sinhalese majority, which accused them of violating their sovereignty, and by the Tigers, who until then had thought that India was on their side. When the soldiers in the peace-keeping force asked them to lay down their weapons, the Tamils suddenly added more conditions that were unacceptable, making a mockery of the agreement. They went back into the jungle, from where they launched bloody attacks on the peace-keeping force. By having to defend themselves, the Indians ended up being even more involved in the conflict, taking on the role that the Sri Lankan army had previously had. Rajiv came to send almost seventy thousand soldiers, which spread panic in Parliament in New Delhi:
“The Prime Minister is turning Sri Lanka into India’s Vietnam!” they accused him from the opposition benches.
Rajiv had been very ingenuous to think that the Tamils would stick to the rules. “They broke each of the promises they had made to us,” Rajiv would declare. “They deliberately set out to destroy the agreement either because they were unable or unwilling to make the transition from an armed conflict to a democratic process.” Rajiv had put all his money on one card, but the Tamils left him in the lurch. Because he had taken away the backing they had always enjoyed in India, they saw him as a traitor to their cause.
Frustration, disillusionment and exasperation were also the lot of a prime minister, especially when the results of regional elections seemed to confirm the predictions of the hawks of his party, who had warned him against a policy that would not give immediate results to the poor. In 1987, the Congress Party lost in several states, causing an increase in discontent among the old guard, who began to question Rajiv’s leadership of the party. Added to the Sri Lanka problem and the electoral defeat, there was a scandal that caused irreparable damage to his image as Mr Clean. On April 16th, 1987, Swedish radio announced that millions of dollars had been paid in commission to Indian civil servants and members of the Congress Party by the Swedish armaments company, Bofors, in connexion with a contract for the sale of 410 mortars to the Indian armed forces. The contract had been the result of Rajiv’s decision to improve the equipment of the Indian army, the fourth largest in the world after the United States, the USSR and China.
Rajiv and his government reacted fiercely to the allegations on Swedish radio, several times denying that commissions had been paid. The opposition smelt fear in the ranks of the government and launched an attack on the Prime Minister with all the means at its command. The Press came to accuse him covertly of having taken a commission through Sonia’s family, alluding to the proximity between Turin and Geneva, as though to let it be understood that shady Swiss accounts had been used, handled by the family or friends of the family. There were even reporters who phoned Sonia’s parents back in Orbassano, and poor Stefano Maino suddenly found himself involved in alleged arms dealing and payment of commissions! The only thing those calls did was to alarm them even more, because the distance made their anxiety greater, and the fear of what might happen to their daughter and grandchildren was already great. After digging deeper into the affair, the Indian press brought to light the name of a businessman who had been involved in several contracts for the sale of helicopters and arms to the Indian state by Italian companies. Ottavio Quattrochi, the exubera
nt friend who had been part of Rajiv and Sonia’s intimate circle of friends for years, must certainly have received a fat commission in the Bofors deal. From that to insinuating that Quattrochi had passed part of the commission on to them abroad, there was only a short step, which the reporters happily took. What a juicy scandal!
Although no publication could provide proof, the damage was done and Rajiv’s naiveté and lack of experience did no more than make it worse. Instead of ignoring the baseless accusations, he came out in his own defence in Parliament: “I declare categorically in this high assembly of democracy that neither my family nor I have received any commission whatsoever in these Bofors transactions. That is the truth.” But the truth no longer mattered. The important thing for Rajiv’s adversaries was that he had taken the bait, that instead of ignoring the allegations from the start, he had reacted so strongly that he had opened up the Pandora’s box of insinuations and false suspicions. He again denied that commissions had been paid or that any Indian citizen had benefitted from that contract, and by doing so he sank deeper into the mire of the scandal. In a country where even a postman gets a small bribe for handing over the post to a poor man in a hut, where the practice of the middleman exists in all facets of life and is as old as the culture itself, it was hard to believe that in a contract of a thousand million dollars no one had received a cent. In spite of the fact that a joint parliamentary committee concluded that the process of drawing up and evaluating the contract had been objective and correct, that the decision to adjudicate it to Bofors had been based only on merit and that there was no evidence of intermediaries at the time the contract was signed, Rajiv was already subjected to a public verdict, and that verdict accused him of hiding something. “Perhaps it is true that Rajiv is not involved in corruption,” the Press admitted. “But then he must be involved in hiding that corruption!” they immediately proclaimed. When a reporter from India Today asked why Rajiv was not responding to this last allegation, he replied in annoyance, “Do I have to answer every dog that barks?” Later, Rajiv admitted that neither he nor his cabinet had known how to handle the problem. In fact, he had reacted like a decent man. He had not done so like a hardened politician might have done, looking for a scapegoat and putting the blame on him. He did not count on the fact that he was moving in the dirty world of politics where the truth was not the important thing, but manipulation of the truth in order to spread doubt and damage the image of the adversary. Sonia was sad for him, and furious at being involved in such a piece of nonsense in such a ridiculous but destructive way, through her family and the Quattrochis. She realized that she had become the target of all the criticisms and that not even in their own home was she free of it. That was the end of the Sunday brunches. Neither Maria nor Ottavio Quattrochi nor any of the businessmen or diplomats they knew ever came back to the Prime Minister’s residence again. How unfair, thought Sonia. Especially because she had been a firsthand witness to the general terms of the negotiations. They had taken place over a lasagne that she had cooked personally for the occasion. It was in January 1986, and the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, on a visit to New Delhi, had come for lunch at home. He and Rajiv had become friends during some conferences on disarmament at the headquarters of the UN in New York. Rahul and Priyanka had also been present at that lunch, during which both statesmen openly discussed the terms of the contract and Rajiv insisted on his veto on intermediaries, precisely to make the cost of the transaction cheaper.
How could Sonia forget Olof Palme, so committed to the problems of the Third World and who shared so many points of view with Rajiv, such as opposition to the apartheid regime or support for the non-aligned countries? Less than a month after that meal, Sonia was horrified to find out on television that, on February 18th, 1986, the Swedish leader had been assassinated in the middle of the street, when he was coming out of the cinema with his wife. My God! Was there nowhere safe left in the world? If something like that happens in Sweden, what can happen to us here in India?
Suddenly the Bofors affair became a crusade that the opposition used to throw Rajiv out of his post, although the reporters and newspaper editors felt frustrated at their inability to provide definite evidence of misappropriation of funds on the part of the government. No one seemed to know who had received the money from the Swedish company, not even the government, and Rajiv even less. But everyone admitted now that the clause in the contract which vetoed the intermediaries had been violated. Had members of the Congress Party, disassociated from the government, received it and had the money ended up in the coffers of the party? Had Ottavio Quattrochi received it, using his proximity to power? Was that possible without the person ultimately responsible, in other words the Prime Minister, knowing? Rajiv always maintained that it was not, but the doubt weighed like a ton of bricks. The climate of uncertainty smashed his credibility to pieces. During the first two years of his mandate, he had enjoyed favourable press and seemed incapable of doing anything wrong. Even the opposition had found it difficult to criticize his actions, limiting themselves to criticizing his style: “Indian politics no longer smells of the poor, as in the time of Mahatma Gandhi,” a famous journalist from a rival party had declared, “now, with Rajiv, it smells of after shave.”
“At the beginning nothing I did was wrong,” Rajiv would say. “Suddenly, nothing I did was right. Of course, neither was true.” From calling him Mr Clean, they began to call him pejoratively the boy, with the intention of comparing him unfavourably with his mother. “Would the boy be up to it?” was the topic of an editorial in a daily newspaper.
Actually, most of Rajiv’s problems had to do with his inexperience in politics and his candour as a human being. He found it hard to set the limits between loyalty to friends and the good of the public. The name of the Bachchan brothers, childhood friends in whose home Sonia had lived during her first days in India, became associated with murky financial scandals. A more prudent prime minister would have distanced himself from them. But Rajiv did not: rather the opposite, he felt resentful because his friends were being criticized. His mother had always said that in politics there are no friendships, but he was too good a friend to be a good politician. At first, he refused to admit that his friends might fail him and he would rather see a conspiracy among his political adversaries than the truth. However, many trusted friends that he had named as advisors ended up disappointing him. One of them, a pilot, the one asked to remind him when his flying licence would run out and to deal with matters in his constituency in Amethi, was accused by the Press of building a swimming pool made of marble imported from Italy at his home. Once again, instead of distancing himself from him, Rajiv came out in his defence and made a comment that did more political harm than if he had really made an error in government. He said casually that many pilots had homes with swimming pools, a declaration which, made in any country in the West by a head of State who had also been a pilot in an airline company, would not have caused any furore at all. In India it got people’s backs up. The opposition threw in his face his lack of respect for “Indian sensitivity”. He was very criticized for his habit of taking a few days holiday at New Year with his family in exotic places, such as the Lakshadweep Islands, in the Indian Ocean, or the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal. In the West it would have seemed reasonable for someone who worked so much to deserve a break, that his children who lived shut up all year might enjoy a few days of freedom and safety, but in a country as poor as India, the fact that the head of the government had a good time was frowned upon. Actually, Rajiv and Sonia continued with their habit of gathering as a family at Christmas and the New Year, but in 1988 they stopped doing so in Italy. In October that year, Stefano Maino had been struck down by a heart attack and they thought it was better to invite the family somewhere that would not remind them of their former gatherings around the patriarch.
Sonia went to Orbassano for the funeral, practically incognito, and hardly allowed herself to be seen. In addition to the security problems ther
e was a logical feeling of profound desolation and a desire to be with the family, with her mother and her sisters, digging deep into their memories and consoling each other. On hearing the sound of the first spadeful of earth that the gravedigger threw on to the coffin, Sonia shuddered. Part of her life was being buried forever. She would no longer hear the advice of that wise man from the Asiago mountains which, now she could see, had marked her more than she had ever thought.
Back in the house, she was chatting to Danilo Quadra, Stefano’s old friend, who went over the last moments of the life of the former shepherd. He told her that they had been playing dominos in Nino’s bar, in Orbassano square, as they had done every day for years, and that he got home, to that house that was a symbol for Stefano of his success in life. And that was the last time he saw him alive. Next morning at 8 o’clock he dropped down dead, while reading a newspaper on the terrace. He died without any suffering. A few days later, Danilo told her that Stefano had been annoyed since he had found out about the renewed outbreak of attacks on Sonia in the Indian press.
“’They don’t want my daughter there because she’s from here,’ he told me. Is that true?”
“I don’t think so,” said Sonia. “The ones that don’t like me are those who are against my husband.”
“He was annoyed that just because you are Italian, the Indian government avoids any contracts with companies from here,” Danilo went on to tell her. “A few days before he died, he told me that Fiat had made a very good offer for the sale of tractors, but that in the end the Japanese went off with the contract… because your husband’s government was afraid of being accused of favouring Italian companies. Is that right?” Danilo asked her again.