The cortege came along led by bands of young men chanting:
Jab tak sooraj chand rahega
Sanjay tera naam rahega
[As long as the sun and moon go round,
Sanjay will thy name resound]
Back home I pondered over this strange phenomenon. The only explanation I could find was that in the last year or two of his life, unnoticed by anyone, a Sanjay cult had grown.
It was very much like the cult of Che Guevara based on the worship of a man who lived dangerously, cocked-the-snook at convention and tradition, was more feared than loved, and above all feared nothing himself. All these applied to Sanjay. I recall his saying that a leader who is feared is more respected than a leader who is loved. “That’s why when I tell them to do something, they damn well do it”.
Who will now become the leader of the Sanjayists? I don’t see the mantle drop on the shoulders of his brother, Rajiv. He is too withdrawn, unambitious, and a man of the family. Nor on Kamal Nath or Jagdish Tytler or the young Scindia. None of them has the derring-do or the panache that was associated with Sanjay. The only possible inheritor of the cult figure is Maneka. She is like her late husband, utterly fearless. And when roused, the very reincarnation of Durga astride a tiger.
Jag Parvesh Chandra
As a people we Indians find success very hard to digest. It gives us flatulence and we let off gas of self-esteem from either end. Of the many friends who made it to the top in their professions, I can count those who retained modesty on my fingertips. Unique among them is one who the higher he rose, the humbler he became and more willing to do things for everyone who knocked at his door. He is Jag Parvesh Chandra, currently Chief Executive Councillor of Delhi.
I have known Jag for over fifty years since he was a boy at college in Lahore. He was a good tennis player but no great scholar. Then I had dealings with him as a publisher. Whatever little business and money he earned was lost in the Partition. For years he shared a tiny flat with his widowed mother and unmarried sister. He spent his time working for the Congress Party and journalists’ organizations. He could be met every morning at the Coffee House expounding his hairbrained projects like “miss a meal a week”, Bazar on Wheels and consumer protection. He fought elections; won some; lost others. Most evenings I ran into him strolling about our local market discussing shopkeepers’ problems with them. And almost every evening he would ask me, “When are you inviting me for dinner?” I did a few times. Reluctantly. Then one fine morning Jag became the elected head of the capital city, its Chief Minister. He moved from his cubbyhole to a ministerial bungalow with a three-acre garden, sentries at the gates, a car with a red light on its bonnet and an armed escort following him. I thought I had seen the last of the Jag Parvesh I knew. Not a bit. He continued knocking at my door and offering me his services. “If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me. Now I am in a position to do so; tomorrow, who knows? When are you inviting me for dinner?” I had nothing to ask for but was charmed by the man’s utter humility.
A few days ago he rang up and insisted that I come to his bungalow to acquaint myself with a new project he was about to launch. On his lawn a police band was playing Punjabi folk songs; the garden brightly festooned with marigolds. For every guest there was a shower of kewra water and a rosebud: Ministers, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, retired Governors and civil servants. All the fuss was over a new coffee house he has planned in the heart of New Delhi. “Since the old one was demolished, there is nowhere for writers, journalists and budding politicians to meet, talk and let off steam,” he explained.
“Why do you call it a Coffee Home and not a Coffee House?” I asked him.
“When I am thrown out of this house, I will have no place except this Coffee House to call my home,” he replied with disarming candour.
There is no one in Delhi more concerned with the city’s grim future than this man from Gujranwala who has made it his home.
V.P. Singh
My first encounter with V.P. Singh was some time in the spring of 1985. He was Minister of Finance; I, a little-noticed backbencher in the Rajya Sabha. It was on a Thursday morning when the Prime Minister is present in the Upper House during question hour and attendance is higher than on other days. Down the list of questions was one regarding the non-clearance by Customs of woollen garments and blankets sent by Sikh communities in England and Iran for the victims of the anti-Sikh violence following Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. Most of those parcels were addressed to me by name but despite frantic efforts to get them released, the People’s Relief Committee had failed to get round the bureaucrats of the Delhi Administration to issue a certificate of clearance. Thousands of men, women and children had spent the winter months shivering in the cold while sweaters and rugs sent for them gathered dust in the Customs sheds. That morning I had received a notice from the Customs demanding Rs 75,000 as demurrage for not having cleared goods sent to me. Understandably, I was in a highly agitated frame of mind.
The question had been put by me. It was answered by V.P. Singh’s deputy, Janardhan Poojary, in the usually devious way Ministers adopt to answer awkward questions. The parcels, he said, were not addressed to any person and no one had taken the responsibility for clearing them. I raised my hand to put in a supplementary. Fortunately for me, the gargantuan-sized Vishwajeet Singh of the Congress (I) roared at the top of his voice to say that the Minister’s statement was incorrect and that he knew that most of the crates were addressed to me. As I stood up and waved the Customs demand on me and letters showing the callousness of Delhi Administration babus, there were loud cries of “shame” from all sides of the House. I saw V.P. Singh turn to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and whisper something in his ear. He waved for Poojary to sit down and took the floor himself. He apologized to the House for the delay and promised that the entire consignment would be cleared within twenty-four hours. That evening he rang up and told me that if the consignment had not been cleared by next morning, I should let him know. The next morning the Secretary of the Ministry and V.P. Singh again rang me up to find out whether their orders had been carried out. They were, with despatch I had never known. By the afternoon we had tons of sweaters and blankets in the godowns of the People’s Relief Committee. Although the winter was over, we were able to provide every single afflicted family with clothing for several winters to come.
That one encounter was good enough for me to form a most favourable impression of the man. Till then I had only known him through newspaper reports and had heard him speak in Parliament on matters of commerce and finance. He was amongst the most competent Ministers but by no means the most outstanding in the Treasury Benches. There were many others who came as well prepared as he and quite a few with greater power of oratory.
It was after the Fairfax affair and his sudden transfer from the Finance to the Defence Ministry followed by his ouster from the government, suspension, and dismissal from the Congress Party that, from being one of the many possible candidates for succession to Rajiv Gandhi, he emerged as the most likely successor. This was not entirely through his own efforts. After Fairfax came Bofors, the German submarine deal, the Bachchan brothers’ business morals: Rajiv’s troubles came not in single spies but in the proverbial battalions. He tried to ward them off, waving his arms like one attacked by a swarm of hornets. And was stung all over his face. The once Mr Clean acquired a visage swollen with innuendos of corruption, sheltering corrupt friends and insulting the President. Instead of relying on advice of trustworthy tellers of unpleasant truths he lent ears to self-seekers like Dinesh Singh ever eager to return to the Treasury Benches and the likes of loudmouthed K.K. Tiwari and the greasy Kalpnath Rai to bray to their trumpets. Within two years of his spectacular victory at the polls, Rajiv Gandhi achieved the incredible by turning from a vote-catcher to a vote-loser, from being the Congress Party’s best bet to remain in power to its biggest handicap. Those that began to desert his sinking ship were not rats but men who felt that the only chance of k
eeping it was to change the pilot.
It would appear that from the day V.P. Singh was inducted into the Central Cabinet, he took his role as that of a broom to clean the Congress stables of corruption. In a short poem in Hindi published early in January 1985 entitled “Jhaaran ka Dhan” (wealth of the duster), he wrote:
DUSTER’S TREASURE
Let me lie where I am
It is only dust that I have gathered
If you manhandle me
Even this may go out of hand and be scattered
I spent some hours talking to one of V.P. Singh’s closest friends since his schooldays and cross-checking facts and opinions with V.P. Singh’s wife, Sita Kumari, and their family friends.
Vishwanath Pratap Singh was born at Allahabad on 25 June 1931. His father was the Raja of Daiya, a large zamindari yielding a revenue of about Rs 2 lakh per year. He had two wives: one bore him two sons, C.S.P. Singh, who later became a judge of the Allahabad High Court (then the youngest judge of any High Court in the country; he met a tragic end); and Vishwanath Pratap Singh. The second wife had three sons, Sant Bux, Harbux and Rajendra Singh. They were Gaharwar Thakurs, a branch of Rathore Rajputs descended from Manik Chand of Kannauj, brother of Raja Jai Chand. The siblings from the two wives of the Raja of Daiya lived under the same roof in absolute harmony. V.P.’s hero and guide-philosopher of his earlier days was his stepbrother, Sant Bux, a Congress Party member of the Lok Sabha.
V.P. was torn away from under his father’s roof when he was only five years old. The neighbouring Raja of Manda (about Rs 3 lakh annual revenue) being issueless, adopted him as his son. He forbade V.P. from having anything to do with his real parents and brothers and being tuberculous himself, kept his adopted son at a distance. For a few months he was looked after by an English couple, Mr and Mrs Cook, and thereafter by Amar Singh Mathur, a civil servant who was appointed his guardian. He lived with the Mathurs and came to look upon them as his real parents. V.P. recounts an incident when he was a student at Allahabad High School. One day a boy in a senior class came to see him and introduced himself, “Don’t tell anyone, but I am your elder brother Chandra Shekhar Prasad.” So strict had been the segregation that V.P. had been unable to recognize his real brother C.S.P. Thereafter, the two met regularly, but in secret. When the Raja Bahadur of Manda died in 1941, the adoption was challenged in court by collaterals. The estate had in any event been so badly mismanaged that it had fallen into debt and was placed under government control through the court of wards.
It was now the turn of the Raja of Daiya to play the heavy-handed father. He manipulated Amar Singh Mathur’s recall to service to claim custody of his son. V.P, then only ten, fought back. He clung to his chair and refused to leave the Mathur household. He had to be forcibly lifted and taken to Daiya. It was ten years later when the Mathurs, then settled in Delhi, invited him to their daughter’s wedding that he was able to resume communication with the family that had been closest to him. The scars these traumatic childhood experiences left on V.P.’s mind remained unhealed for many years.
Even back amongst his family, V.P. had to be constantly guarded by gunmen because of threats to his life by rival claimants to the gaddi of Manda. During these years of his childhood and adolescence he lived apart from other boys under the watchful eye of a guardian-cum-tutor. The little outdoor life he had was with his brothers whom he visited periodically and like others of the landed gentry, when he went for an occasional shoot. Having bagged his quota of a tiger, a few panthers and other game which was noblesse oblige for his class, he sickened of blood sport and gave it up.
After the death of his adoptive father, V.N. (the initials by which he was known before the press changed them to V.P.) was sent to Colonel Brown’s School in Dehra Dun. It was a prestigious preparatory school from which boys went onto the Royal Indian Military Academy, the Doon or other upper-class schools. After some years at Colonel Brown’s he shifted to the Boys’ High School, Allahabad, and then to Uday Pratap College in Varanasi. The institution had been set up by the Raja of Bhinga for the education of Thakur Rajputs with the specific condition that the principal would always be an Englishman. When V.N. moved from Dehra Dun to Varanasi, his Hindi was somewhat halting. That was taken care of by his tutor-guardian, Pandit Vijay Shankar Mishra. He was also somewhat weak in mathematics and took special coaching from Rajwant Singh, whose son being a classmate became a lifelong friend. V.N. was a slogger and always managed to be among the better half of his class. He was a good debater and always walked away with first prizes both in Hindi and English.
V.N. stood out in school as a quiet loner who took life more seriously than schoolboys of his age. He was a shy, fair boy with curly hair, always dressed in a spotless white shirt and shorts. The boys referred to him as Ajoriya ka bachcha—child of moonlight. Though an adolescent, he was serious-minded and did well enough to get merits in most subjects. While still himself a student, he opened a school in his native Daiya and spent his vacations teaching village schoolchildren. He forbade students from addressing him as “Raja Saab” or “Hakim” and preferred being known simply as “Masterjee”. He and his brother Sant Bux also began to address meetings in favour of the abolition of zamindari, which upset many zamindars.
After doing his matriculation in 1946 and securing a first class and distinction in mathematics, he joined college from where two years later he took his intermediate examination in arts subjects securing a position in the merit list of UP and distinction in mathematics. He went on to Allahabad University, from where he graduated in 1950 and got his LL.B. Throughout his academic life he was under the surveillance of his bodyguards and lived in “Aish Mahal”, Allahabad, residence of Manda Raja. He was driven to college in a state Chevrolet or a phaeton; his guards waited for him outside his school classrooms and drove back with him. Loneliness forced him to cultivate hobbies like photography and painting. He also took guitar lessons from Mazumdar, a staff artist of All India Radio.
Though qualified as a lawyer, V.P. never practised law. “He was temperamentally unsuited to making money out of other people’s troubles,” says his friend.
V.P. Singh’s father arranged a marriage for him, with Sita Kumari, daughter of the Raja of Peogarh-Madaria in Rajasthan. Those that jibe at V.P.’s ancestry being a descendant of Raja Jai Chand should know that Sita Kumari is a Sisodia Rajput descended from Rana Pratap of Udaipur. Sita had studied up to higher secondary at Sofia College, Ajmer. Though both were educated, neither groom nor bride was consulted nor had a glimpse of each other till after the nuptials on 25 June 1955. Sita Kumari was then eighteen, V.P. Singh twenty-four.
Sita Kumari is a remarkably vivacious and attractive lady in her early fifties and far too outspoken for a wife of a politician. “Family life?” she exclaimed in answer to my question, “very little of that. When I married him he was already neck deep in social work and politics. From dawn to dusk he was receiving visitors or attending meetings. We hardly ever ate together. His meals were left on the dining table for him to eat whenever he had the time.” V.P. and Sita Kumari have two sons, Ajay Singh (b. 1957), a chartered accountant now living in New York, and Abhai Singh (b. 1958), currently a doctor in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences of New Delhi.
Sita Kumari talks nostalgically of the months the family spent in Poona with a family friend. “The two families lived in two rooms. My husband attended Physics classes at the Fergusson College—he was always keen on Science subjects (he got a first class in B.Sc.)—we women ran the house, looked after the children and went out together to the pictures in the evenings.”
“Surely, with your princely backgrounds, you must have had a horde of servants to do the household chores!” I said.
“Believe me, from the day I married V.P. I have done all the buying of vegetables and stores and cooked every meal myself. He gave away all his land in bhoodan. There has never been anything princely in our style of living.”
There is certainly nothing aristocratic or upper
class about the ministerial bungalow No. l Teen Murti Marg which has been V.P. Singh’s home for the last two years. Cane chairs on the veranda with only a stuffed turtle on the ground. A perky little snow-white Pomeranian named Fifi who barks a welcome at every visitor and then insists he pet her all the time. The sitting room is as the CPWD furnished it with the bare minimum of sofas, chairs, and a large table. Dominating the room is a colour-print of Indira Gandhi. On the side-walls a couple of oil paintings made by V.P. Singh (one of a girl’s head only showing her thick black hair). A few gewgaws on the side tables of no artistic or material value. Sita Kumari brings in the tea tray herself and discreetly retires to another room to let visitors talk to her husband. She re-enters as people are about to take their leave.
I remarked on her lack of jewellery: she wears no rings, necklaces, bracelets or earrings—only a mangalsutra. “You must have been given a lot of jewellery on your marriage. What have you done with it?”
Her eyes sparkled and she laughed as if she were telling me of a great windfall in her fortunes. “Yes, I had some jewellery when I came as a bride. I hardly ever wore it. I was taking it in a box to wear at a wedding. The box was stolen at night on the railway station. I lost everything.”
“You seem remarkably cheerful about it.”
“What to do? What’s gone is gone. Why cry over it? I don’t miss it one bit.”
She told me of his daily routine. “He gets up around seven and reads the English and Hindi papers. Prayers? No, no prayers. Some exercise. He used to do weight-lifting; now it is only a few yoga asanas. Then it is just people and more people. Meetings and more meetings. He never sees TV or listens to the radio.”
I asked her if she knew of any books that had influenced her husband’s outlook. She paused for a while before replying. “He reads books on psychology. But the only book he has read over and over again is How to be Happy Though Human.
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