The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  “Please,” Rajiv told her, “when you see her, try to convince her not to get into all this.”

  If she was going to listen to anyone, he knew his daughter would listen to Benazir, whose own father had been murdered after a parody of a trial under the orders of the military dictator. It was another example, close by and terrible, of the fate that awaited those who allowed themselves to be seduced by politics. “She doesn’t realize how dangerous it is,” Rajiv insisted to Benazir.

  He thought that as he was out of power, the threat hanging over him and his children would diminish, but the reports that reached him regarding his security kept him worried all the time. The threats against his life had increased. In 1984, he was top on the lists of three terrorist groups. Five years later, he was number one for a dozen organizations, including the Tamil Tigers. The Punjab problem seemed to have been solved, but there were other conflicts, especially between Hindus and Moslems, potentially equally as dangerous. “You have both lived in very difficult circumstances for a long time: five years in an area limited to the house and the garden,” Rajiv had written to his children on one occasion. “That is the time in your lives when you should have lived in freedom, meeting people your own age and discovering the world as it really is. Unfortunately, the circumstances have not permitted us to offer you normal lives.” That letter hinted at a feeling of guilt and at the same time of fate. Rajiv was aware that he was not master of his own destiny. What had catapulted him into politics had been an accident, then a terrorist attack had brought him to the highest position in the government of the nation, and, finally, the Bofors scandal had put him in opposition. He had not been able to change the direction of events and in that letter he seemed to excuse himself for the suffering it all might have caused to his children.

  In fact, the defeat in the elections was a blessing for Sonia. In August, they went to Mussoorie, in the mountains, and Rajiv drove the car himself. It was their first escapade together for 19 months and there, with the chain of the Himalayas as a backcloth, they celebrated what would be his last birthday.

  Then, at Christmas, when Rahul came back from Harvard, the whole family went to spend a week’s holiday at the country house in Mehrauli, the one that Firoz Gandhi had bought with the aim of spending his last years there quietly with Indira. They had never been able to live in that house, the details of whose construction Rajiv had supervised for years and paid for out of his savings. “It was the first time we had stayed in a house that was entirely ours,” Sonia would write. Rajiv took care to ensure that everything was just as it should be. The children helped to take out all the garden furniture and clean the aging inside while he prepared something to nibble, because he preferred that to formal meals. They hid the chocolate that he liked so much because they thought that since he had left power he had put on some weight. They remembered the Holi festivals they had spent there in their childhood, throwing coloured powder all over each other and ending up filthy. They played badminton and Scrabble and Sonia began to clear part of the garden of weeds with the idea of planting a small kitchen garden. The countryside had always called to her, since her childhood in Lusiana. How she would have liked to have her father there with them for that holiday! How he would have liked the house! She thought about him a lot. In her weekly phone calls to her mother in Orbassano, she almost let herself be carried away be the reflex of asking after her father.

  “We enjoyed every minute of the six days we spent there,” Sonia would remember. “It reminded us of our lives as they were back at the beginning, and the flavour of the lives we would have had if we could have chosen them for ourselves.” Many friends were surprised that they were still as romantically in love as the first day. “I wasn’t surprised because they were always very much in love,” Christian von Stieglitz, the common friend who had introduced them in Cambridge and who went to visit them during those days at the house in Mehrauli, would remember. “…For work reasons, I went to Delhi a lot at that time, and it was a pleasure to see them always so lovey-dovey after so many years of marriage. In private, they were always kissing and holding hands.” On December 9th, 1990, Sonia’s birthday, she received a present from Rajiv with a note: “For Sonia, who does not change with time, who is even more beautiful today than when I saw her for the first time sitting in a corner in the Varsity restaurant, that lovely day…”

  39

  But, as usual, the interval of happiness was brought to a close by political events, which moved forwards more quickly than Rajiv had expected. India was sliding down a dangerous slope, pushed by one of the parties of the coalition in power, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), the old Hindu fundamentalist Right that had so castigated Indira. The party had grown until it had become the most dangerous adversary of the Congress Party and a potential danger to the unity of the country. Backed by the RSS, an extremist militant organization, the BJP called for a “Hindu India” where the minorities would have to live under the thumb of the majority, not as equals. This philosophy was diametrically opposed to that of Nehru and the Congress Party, because it denied the founding principle of modern India, which was a secular state that proclaimed the separation of State and religion, and the equality of all religions before the law. The rise of the BJP coincided with a worsening of religious violence in the north of the country. These were disturbances that did not settle down of their own accord, but lasted until the forces of order put a stop to them. The origin of those disturbances was always the same and they were usually set off by a trivial detail, such as a dispute over the boundaries of a piece of land, or a space on the pavement, or because a pig urinated on the wall of a mosque or a dead cow was found near a Hindu temple. Whatever it was, as soon as the spark flared, the violence spread stunningly fast, fed by rumours, always false, which magnified the original incident, turning a mere confrontation between two individuals into a holy war between religions. The community organizations and politicians who identified with one or other of the factions, fed the fire of discord, so that from words they moved on to blows, then to knives, and so on until they were using Molotov cocktails and bullets.

  In India, conflicts of caste and religion began to feed on each other from the eighties, specifically after the entire population of a village of untouchables in Tamil Nadu took the decision to convert to Islam to escape the rigid Hindu system of castes. Those poor people even changed the name of the village, which from Menashkipuram came to be called Rehmatnagar. The Hindu fundamentalists screamed blue murder: “Hinduism is in danger!” and accused the countries of the Gulf of financing the Moslems of India. The reality was that the untouchables were finally reacting to centuries of oppression at the hands of the landowners, who in that area were high caste Hindus.

  Then, an apparently inoffensive event inflamed the spirits of the Hindu fundamentalists even more: the broadcasting in 1987 of a series based on the Ramayana, the most popular Hindu epic, the closest thing Hindus have to holy writings. The television adaptation, a mixture of soap opera and mythology, consisted of 104 episodes which were screened on Sunday mornings. It was such a smash hit that state television asked another Bollywood producer to film the Mahabharata epic. Both series became the soaps with the greatest audience in the whole world. 85% of Indian viewers saw all the episodes, a unique figure in the history of television.

  When the series were being shown, activity stopped all over the country. Taxis, bicycles and rickshaws disappeared from the streets. The phones stopped ringing. Prayers and cremation rites were postponed. Civil servants, housewives, shopkeepers, prostitutes, prisoners, water-sellers, sweepers, children, poor people digging amongst the rubbish… everyone left what they were doing to get in front of a television in someone’s house, in a shop, in the village square, or peeping through the windows of the houses of families that were privileged enough to have that extraordinary appliance. Many spectators believed what they were seeing word for word, as though the gods that came out on the screen lived in the world of men. When the god Rama c
ame out in the series, they lit a little oil lamp and started to pray there and then. In India, the most underprivileged sectors of the population are indifferent to the Western distinction between past history and current affairs, between truth and myth. For them, everything is true. The most hardened politicians, starting with Indira, always knew how to use that flickering frontier between people and gods in their favour.

  These two series unleashed a real tide of Hindu fervour. In fact the fervour had always existed, and had grown with independence, as a reaction to so many centuries of domination by the Moguls and then by the English. Nehru and Gandhi, very aware of the danger of this kind of fundamentalism—similar to that of the Sikhs or the Moslems, or the fundamentalism of Christians in other parts of the world, but more dangerous still in India because it was the majority religion—tried to preach the virtues of a secular state and to emphasize unity between Hindus and Moslems. Mahatma Gandhi paid for it with his life: he was assassinated by militants of the RSS, an organization that later became affiliated to the BJP. At the beginning of her mandate Indira was very aware of the problem and had to firmly confront hundreds of naked holy men at the doors of Parliament who were demanding the prohibition of killing cows.

  Rajiv and other members of the Congress Party were witness to how, for political purposes, the BJP exploited the religious feeling created by the screening of the series. In 1987, in agreement with two powerful social and paramilitary organizations that were ideologically similar, the BJP started a campaign that they called a “historic apology”. The aim was to knock down an old mosque built in the former Hindu capital of Ayodhya by a general of the Mogul emperor Babar in 1528. They claimed that the mosque had been built on the spot where the god Rama had been born.

  For the Indian Moslems, the campaign of the BJP and its allies was a direct attack on their rights and their religion. Preventing the Hindu hordes from destroying the mosque became a symbol of their survival. The ingredients for a complicated and violent conflict were all ready and waiting.

  n 1989, after the elections which cost Rajiv his job, another Hindu fundamentalist organization associated with the BJP launched a national campaign for every village of more than 2,000 inhabitants to pay for a brick destined for the construction of a temple to Rama less than thirty metres from the site of the mosque. It was a provocation for the Moslems. In Parliament, Rajiv urged the government to take a hand in things. The new Prime Minister sent the forces of order to interrupt the construction of the temple, but he was not able to get the different leaders to sit down at the same table to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. For his part, Rajiv made the gesture of visiting a venerated Hindu holy man who lived on the banks of the Ganges, a man who firmly believed that India was the common home of many religions, and that it should go on being so.

  One year later, the Hindu BJP turned the screws of provocation a little tighter. One of its leaders, a tall, serious and charismatic figure called L.K. Advani, made a call for thousands of volunteers from all over the country to converge on Ayodhya with the idea of galvanizing the chauvinistic passions of the Hindus. He personally led a pilgrimage which left from a small city in Gujarat, and he did so on board a motorized carriage which displayed large portraits of the gods and with loudspeakers that recited verses from the Ramayana. The peasants rubbed their eyes incredulously when they saw the procession go past followed by volunteers dressed exactly the same as the heroes in the series they had seen on television. That march raised the temperature of the tension on both sides so much that, in principle reluctant to intervene against one of the members of the coalition, the government ordered Advani’s procession to be stopped before it reached its destination.

  In reprisal, thousands of volunteers from the BJP attacked the Ayodhya mosque, armed with bows and arrows. A shiver of panic ran through the whole country. What would happen if in every district, in every village, in every city in the sub-continent a religious war broke out? Had the violence unleashed during Partition not been enough to inoculate India against confrontations based on religion? The consequences could be so terrible that it did not bear thinking about: atrocities against innocent people, the dismemberment of the country, perhaps a civil war. But the leader of the Hindu party seemed immune to common sense. Everything went in order to win votes, including placing a nation of 850 million people on the brink of the precipice.

  The police had no option but to act forcefully to protect the mosque from destruction. There were a dozen dead, some militants, some police. The Hindu party attributed the violent outcome to the police, and its leader, Advani, announced that he was withdrawing his support for the government. Long before Rajiv had predicted, the first government to substitute him had fallen.

  “Are you going to ask for elections to be called?” his daughter asked him.

  “No, the party is not ready yet. I don’t think we’d get any more votes now than in the previous elections. I’d rather wait.”

  Rajiv, the head of the party with the greatest representation in Parliament, found himself again in a key position. A rival leader of the Prime Minister who had just been ousted, asked for his support to form a government. Rajiv agreed to give it, but from outside, without being part of the new cabinet. An astute manoeuvre, which gave him control without having to take responsibility for what the members of the new governing coalition did. The fact was that Rajiv did not trust this leader very much, or his ministers, among whom was Maneka Gandhi, and he did not want to be associated with this administration, which he foresaw would be disastrous. He was convinced that in a question of months the people would be desperately calling for the return of the Congress Party to power. Then would be the time to call elections.

  Rajiv’s predictions were correct. The cabinet created by the new Prime Minister offered the most depressing collection of rogues even by Third World standards: “An extraordinary collection of the most pitiless and immoral opportunists to have ever entered the political arena of India,” according to the description of William Dalrymple, an English writer living in New Delhi.

  The split did not take long to come, and it occurred in a rather strange way. Sonia was once again very angry about the matter of security because, after losing the elections, the new government had taken away the highly trained bodyguards from the Special Protection Group, as if the fact that Rajiv was not in the government might make the threats disappear. The change had been so drastic that Sonia and Priyanka lived in a perpetual state of fear every time Rajiv went away on a trip. From being protected by hundreds of agents on every journey, he went out of the house accompanied by a single bodyguard, a good man, faithful and helpful, called Pradip Gupta: “If anything happens to Rajiv it will be over my dead body,” he once told Sonia when he saw she was so uneasy. But it was poor consolation. Rahul shared the same anxiety. He often called from the United States to check that nothing had happened to his father. In March 1991, he was so worried about the details that his mother told him about how shoddy the security measures were that he insisted on spending the Easter holidays at home. He accompanied his father on a tour of the state of Bihar and was astonished to see for himself the lack of care and resources and how exposed Rajiv was to any aggression. Sometimes the police were pushing the crowd aside and left him on his own in the car, other times they did not get far enough ahead and Rajiv was once again left exposed. Before he set off again for the United States, Rahul said a few words to his mother which she did not really want to believe, but which turned out to be premonitory: “If you don’t do something about it, I’m afraid the next time I’m back will be for Dad’s funeral.”

  The problem was not only the lack of support from the government, but also that Rajiv was obsessed with the idea of keeping close to the people. He had been told that he had lost the elections because he had projected the image of someone distant and almost arrogant. The presence of bodyguards was an impediment when it came to forging an image as an accessible politician, which was what he wanted. “Liv
ing under a terrorist threat or death threat has never bothered me,” he had declared. “I have never let it interfere in my way of thinking. Yes, it has caused me problems because of all the fuss that security implies… but if I have to die for what I believe, I would not hesitate.” Christian von Stieglitz spent a few days with them in those days, together with Pilar, his Spanish wife. “Pilar did not know New Delhi, so Rajiv took us on a tour. We got into a little Suzuki that he drove himself, and roared off, with his bodyguards following as best they could in a white Ambassador, until he managed to lose them. It can’t have been easy to be one of Rajiv Gandhi’s bodyguards! I couldn’t stop thinking that he was taking too many risks. I remember one afternoon we went to the Qutub Minar, the highest monument in the city. Rajiv was between my wife and me chatting to us as we walked among the ruins. At a given moment, I turned round and saw that about a thousand people were following us a certain distance away, not daring to get too close to us. They were very surprised to see Rajiv strolling around like just another tourist. We carried on walking and suddenly Rajiv bent down and picked up two little white flowers from the ground. He went over to the crowd and gave them to a little girl who was looking open- mouthed at him with her big, dark eyes.” When Christian made a comment about the risks he was taking, Rajiv answered: “I can’t distrust the man in the street. I have to live my life.”

  The one who could not live was Sonia. One weekend when they were spending some time at the house in the country at Mehrauli, it was she who noticed two characters who were watching the house and who were not the usual bodyguards. She told Rajiv, and he went out to ask them who had given them orders to watch them, and that is how he discovered that it had been the head of the local government, a man who belonged to the party of the new Prime Minister. Annoyed and disconcerted at what he considered an unacceptable intrusion into his private life, Rajiv called the Prime Minister and demanded that the surveillance be taken away, and he also called for the resignation of the head of government who had given the orders. “It was a matter of trust,” said Rajiv. “I had placed my trust in that man, and we backed his government. And now I discover that we are not to be trusted and they set two policemen to watch our house. What does this mean?” The new Prime Minister tried to play down the matter and tried to calm Rajiv’s anger, because he had no other way out. As regards his own party, he could not fire civil servants or local heads of government at the request of the leader of the Congress Party. On the other hand, if Rajiv took away his support, he would lose control of Parliament. But Rajiv insisted on getting to the bottom of the matter. As the man did not respond to his demands, Rajiv threatened to boycott Parliament. So, four months after being sworn in, that Prime Minister was forced to present his resignation to the President of the Republic.