by Mark Tully
Digvijay's family and supporters were enraged. When he returned to Muzaffarpur, hundreds of people gathered outside his house shouting ‘L. P. Shahi murdabad!’ – ‘Death to L. P. Shahi!’ – ‘Congress are cheats!’ and ‘Digvijay Babu zindabad!’ – ‘Long live Digvijay Babu!’ They tried to lift up his chair and carry him to the returning officer so that he could file his nomination as an independent, but Digvijay refused to cooperate. He realized that it would not look good, and he was not going to lose another battle with his conscience – rather the reverse. He felt that, having committed himself to the Congress, he must now campaign for L. P. Shahi, which he did. Shahi won and, what is more, became a minister in Rajiv Gandhi's government.
During the afternoon I was given assessments of Digvijay by many people who came to call on him after the news got out that he was making one of his now rare visits to Muzaffarpur. There was the man who had been elected to represent Muzaffarpur during the Janata government, and there was the sitting member, a Congressman. There were academics, there were businessmen, and of course there were political workers. All – even the Congress member of the state assembly – agreed that Digvijay had been cheated out of the seat. All also agreed that Digvijay was a ‘good man’ who had given away a fortune. The former member of the assembly waxed lyrical about him. ‘Because of his personal honesty and his helping attitude he has himself become needy, but the people still pine for him to be in parliament. The perfume of his popularity is still being carried by the wind to every house in north Bihar.’
When they had gone, we moved inside – Digvijay, myself, his two faithful followers Mahesh Prasad Sahi and Mohan, and a young bhumihar man who had set himself up in the sweet-making business. Digvijay sat with his feet up on his chair, entirely enveloped in a shawl to keep out the cold and the mosquitoes – Muzaffarpur is known as ‘Machcharpur’ or ‘Mosquitopur’. I too was given a chair. The others sat at Digvijay's feet. A bottle of Indian whisky appeared. There was an electricity cut, but by the light of the candles I could see that the whisky was a brand I had never come across, called Dynasty. Mohan unscrewed the top.
‘It's a good brand,’ Digvijay said – ‘you won't be harmed by it. In Bihar they have to keep on bringing out new brands because the bootleggers buy up the bottles and fill them with spurious whisky.’
This was the time to get Digvijay to talk about his last battle. First I asked Mohan what he had thought about Digvijay's refusal to pick up the gauntlet.
‘We all wanted Digvijay to fight against Shahi. He had been cheated. All the other parties opposed to the Congress said they would withdraw if Digvijay stood, but he's an obstinate man. Once he makes up his mind, you can't change it. In the election against George, he wouldn't allow us to use those bombs although George was capturing booths like anything. Officials offered to help us if we would give them a list of the booths we thought George would capture, but he would not cooperate.’
‘I do not think I am as honest as people think I am,’ Digvijay said grumpily. ‘I also crossed the legal limit for expenditure in that election. That was why I could not file an election petition against George's excess expenditure. My people also captured booths. I reckon that my caste men captured sixty or seventy, while George's captured 104.’
‘But you refused to use the bombs,’ Mohan said.
‘Am I a democrat because of that?’ Digvijay asked. ‘I didn't use bombs possibly because of timidity or because of my family background. It would not have looked nice. I live here, but George was an outsider. I personally feel that it's not right to blame George. He wanted to win, so did I. He used a technique to win.’
‘Do you sometimes regret that you didn't fight as an independent after Shahi took your seat away?’ I asked.
‘No, that would have been wrong. I had made that one great mistake of rejoining the Congress Party. Let's be honest: whatever I wrote in that letter to Indira Gandhi, the truth of the matter is that I rejoined the Congress because I wanted to get back into parliament and that was the easiest way. There comes a time when your metal is tested, and if you are not of good metal you melt. I melted.’
The next morning Mohan took me to the bazaar which was part of the property that Digvijay had sold to pay for his politics. It was prime property in Suraiyya Ganj, the commercial centre of Muzaffarpur. Wholesale cloth merchants sat cross-legged on white sheets covering the floors. Bolts of their brightly coloured merchandise surrounded them as they pored over handwritten ledgers bound in red cloth. Their assistants unrolled the cloth for the customers. The shops were old-fashioned, a foot or two above the level of the street. The whole of the front was open – there were no plate-glass windows or any other form of security except the metal shutters which clattered down only when the merchant was sure there would be no more business that day. Mohan told me that Digvijay had not invested one paisa of the proceeds from the sale of those shops: they had all been spent on politics and on helping his constituents. We saw the college Digvijay's grandfather had founded, and a school too. They were now run by the government, but the original benefactor was remembered by a bust in front of the college. There would be no such memorial to Digvijay's charity.
Digvijay had reluctantly agreed to visit the family mansion at Dharhara on the way back to Patna. ‘I hate going there,’ he said. ‘It makes me so depressed.’ About an hour out of Muzaffarpur we turned off the main highway and took the narrow road to Dharhara. As we bounced in and out of potholes, Digvijay said, ‘I never believed in using my influence to have the road to my own village done up. It would not look good.’ Mahesh muttered sarcastically, ‘It might have been better for you if you had.’
Young boys riding on the back of sleek, black buffaloes were bringing the herds home for the night. The cows wore blankets made from sacking, to keep out the winter cold. We passed a derelict building which Digvijay said had been a hospital donated by his father, and the school where Digvijay had studied. In the dusk, that looked derelict too. Then we drove through the high ceremonial arch built for Doctor Sahib's wedding. It had a sloping Palladian roof supported by the small arches under which Ustad Bismillah Khan, the celebrated shehnai player, had sat. The gardens were unkempt. There was a tall, unpruned ashoka tree in front of the house, and in one corner a sad 1949 Packard Skipper which would never move again.
The main house was a two-storeyed building with a balustrade around the flat roof. There was a verandah at the front. Across a lawn was another building where the women of the family had lived. In one courtyard there was a dead tulsi bush. Every orthodox Hindu house has its tulsi plant: it is considered sacred, and it is the duty of the women of the house to water and care for it. There were no women left at Dharhara mansion to perform that sacred duty. The stone platform on which the wedding ceremony had been performed was in another courtyard. Bushes were growing out of its walls. Dharhara House had 100 rooms, and 300 people used to live there. Now there were only a few former servants. One room was maintained for Digvijay's doctor son, who still spent some time amid the ruins of his family's fortune.
Digvijay sat on a verandah, smoking and staring out into the night. It was a new moon but there were no clouds, so the stars cast their light on the unkempt lawn. The servants showed me round the mansion, their hurricane-lamps flickering over broken furniture and dusty floors. A large, bare wooden bedstead stood in one corner of the room which had belonged to Digvijay's father. The temple in which he had worshipped was still alive, however. It was a small room in one corner of the main building. Outside, a candle flickered; inside, an elderly Brahmin was tending the family deities. He still came twice every day to offer them worship and food.
When we returned to the verandah, rickety chairs and hot sweet tea were produced. I said to Digvijay, ‘I can understand how sad you must feel.’
‘When I go to bed at night, I get disturbed and think what I did for petty gains – for a ribbon to tie on my breast. I have wasted my fortune and put travails on my sons, and my political achievements
are nothing.’
‘But the people are very fond of you. They think that you are a truly great man.’
‘Public memory’, said Digvijay, ‘is very short.’
Ram Chander's daughter, Rani, in her bridal dress on the morning of her wedding. (Chapter 1)
Ram Chander (Chapter 1)
Paul Paneereselvan of the Dalit Liberation Educational Trust talking to Dalit children in the village of Arasankuppam in Tamil Nadu. (Chapter 2)
Pilgrims at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna at Allahabad on the morning of the most auspicious bathing day of the 1989 Kumbh Mela. (Chapter 3)
The author with the artist Jangan Singh Shyam in the shade of a mahua tree on the outskirts of Jangan's village. (Chapter 9)
The author in conversation with Digvijay Narain Singh in the garden of his house in Muzaffarpur, northern Bihar. (Chapter 10)
Roop Kanwar's in-laws lead local people through the streets of Deorala during a ceremony following the young woman's death. (Chapter 7)
Ramanand Sagar's Ram and Sita returning in triumph to their kingdom of Ayodhya. In the chariot with them ride Ram's brothers Bharat (to the rear) and Lakshman (right). (Chapter 4)
The communist chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, at a party rally in Calcutta. (Chapter 6)
Sikh militants surrendering in the Golden Temple complex. (Chapter 5)
K. P. S. Gill, director-general of the Punjab police, briefing reporters outside the Golden Temple after the surrender of the Sikh militants. (Chapter 5)
Operation Black Thunder. Sikh militants firing at the police from the Golden Temple on the morning that deputy inspector of police S. S. Virk was shot. (Chapter 5)
A naked sadhu on a horse leads his akhara's procession through the crowds to the sacred confluence. (Chapter 3 )
Sadhus bathing at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna on the most auspicious bathing day. (Chapter 3)
Epilogue: 21 May 1991
Early in the morning of 20 May 1991, I was standing outside an ugly modern government office block in Delhi, waiting for Rajiv Gandhi to cast his vote in the general election which he hoped would bring him back to power. I thought back over the previous eighteen months, which had seen Rajiv Gandhi's first term in office ending in defeat by what can only be described as a motley crew – so motley that within eleven months the government it had cobbled together had collapsed. That collapse had led to this general election. Rajiv Gandhi himself had told me that his biggest mistake had been his failure to communicate with the people. Seeing a prominent member of the coterie which still surrounded Rajiv Gandhi also waiting for him to vote, I was reminded that his isolation had if anything increased after his defeat. But during this election campaign there had been a major change. He had left his coterie at home, had abandoned the strict security which had separated him from the public and had gone out to meet the public personally. The people of India had responded enthusiastically, mobbing him wherever he went. He had been pushed and pinched so much that his body was black and blue with bruises. His fingers were so swollen by the hands he had shaken that he had been forced to take off his wedding ring. He had at last felt the exhilaration of the love and affection of the people of India, and he was a happy man.
When Rajiv arrived to cast his vote, he leapt out of his car and walked straight up to the press, grinning from ear to ear. He greeted many of us by name, and said to me, ‘I hear the BBC thinks we are winning this time, Mark.’
I replied, ‘I'm not quite sure we've stuck our neck out that far.’
He laughed, ‘Well, you think it's better than last time.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said.
Afterwards I reminded some of my colleagues of the previous time Rajiv Gandhi had voted. Then he had been tense and ill at ease. He had looked a sick and defeated man, which was unusual for him – no matter what strain he was under, normally he managed to put on a brave face. I said, ‘I know we're not meant to take sides, but seeing Rajiv like this I can't help hoping he's not too disappointed.’
The next evening, 21 May, Gilly met me as I came back from taking our dog for a walk round the block. ‘Forget going to sleep tonight,’ she told me – ‘Rajiv Gandhi's been killed.’
The flash on the United News of India wire gave no details. ‘They might just be wrong,’ I said.
‘I hope to God they are,’ she replied.
But, all too soon, details of the assassination started to come in on United News of India and later on the phone from my colleague in Madras, Sam Rajappa. The man whom only the day before I had seen looking confident that he would be given a chance to restore his reputation and revive the fortunes of the Nehru dynasty had been blown to pieces by an explosion just as he was about to address a meeting in a small town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It was a meeting he needn't really have attended, because Tamil Nadu, which would not go to the polls until the last day of the election, was one state which he had sewn up. It was a meeting he nearly didn't attend, because the aeroplane in which he was to fly to Tamil Nadu had developed a fault just before dusk, and night flying was not allowed from the airfield where it had landed. He had actually abandoned his flight to Tamil Nadu and was driving into the town where he had decided to spend the night when a police motorcyclist rode past his cavalcade and flagged him down. The policeman said that the fault had been rectified and if Rajiv hurried back he could still take off.
That night I took part in several BBC radio discussions. Time and again I found myself disagreeing with those experts in London who saw Rajiv's death as the death of Indian democracy. Some of them saw it as the death of India as we know it too. I argued that India had overcome much graver crises in the past; that the administration was still very much intact; that the army remained apolitical; that the separatist movements in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam had no hope of succeeding; and that democracy had struck deep roots. I believed all that to be true, but I have to admit that I wanted it to be true too and so I feared that the wish might have fathered the belief.
The events of the next few days allayed my immediate fears. In almost all places, the anger of Rajiv Gandhi's followers was contained by the police and the army. India mourned, but in peace, and India conducted the funeral rites of its most important politician with dignity and a ceremonial which reminded me of its unresolved dilemma. The soldiers, sailors and airmen marching in the funeral procession; the buglers blowing the last post after the pyre had been lit; the band playing ‘Abide with me’ when the ashes were scattered at that holy place in Allahabad where the Kumbh Mela was held – these all belonged to the British past. The pandits sprinkling Ganges water on Rajiv's body as it lay on the pyre, the instructions whispered into the ear of his 20-year-old son Rahul as he performed the last rites before lighting the pyre, the mantras which were chanted and that sacred confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna where the ashes were scattered all belonged to India.
Rajiv's political career can be seen as a parable of India's failure to shake off its colonial past and build a nation on the foundations of its own culture. Indira Gandhi never gave her eldest son a chance to be an Indian. He was educated at an Indian public school, but it was more British than the British. He did not even learn Hindi properly. Once, when I was interviewing him, he heard me speak to a cameraman in Hindi and said, ‘You speak Hindi very well.’ I replied, ‘Not really – I wish I spoke it better.’ He laughed and said, ‘I wish I did too.’
After public school, his mother sent him first to Cambridge and then to Imperial College, London, without following the usual practice of wealthy Indian parents who make their children get Indian degrees before sending them to foreign universities. That is why Rajiv failed to get a degree from Cambridge or London. When he returned to India with his Italian bride, he became an airline pilot – surely one of the most antiseptic professions there is. He didn't even have to meet the élite Indians who are the only people who can fly by Indian Airlines. He lived a very private life in his mother's house. She didn't encour
age him to take part in politics, which would have brought him in touch with India – that was left to his younger brother, Sanjay. It was only after Sanjay killed himself doing aeronautical stunts over the centre of Delhi that Indira Gandhi turned to Rajiv.
His political apprenticeship lasted only three years. Then, on 31 October 1984, his mother was assassinated and he found himself prime minister of India.
The goodwill with which he started his premiership was demonstrated by the record majority he won in the general election two months later. But that was not goodwill he had won for himself. He had gained it because of sympathy for his mother and because he had played on Indians’ fear that their country might break up – a fear he had aroused by exploiting hostility towards Sikhs after the assassination of his mother by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Five years later, a humiliating electoral defeat showed that Rajiv Gandhi had dissipated his stock of goodwill.