Authors: Tavleen Singh
The election came less than two months after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and no sooner did the campaign begin than it became clear that the Sikh massacres were going to play an important part. There is little doubt that he must have been told this by the advisors he inherited from Mrs Gandhi because in that first election campaign he ran as prime minister Sikhs, as a community, were maligned as enemies of the country. In newspapers across India the Congress campaign was launched with black-and-white photographs of Sikhs, under which a line of copy asked questions like, ‘Can you trust your taxi driver?’ Since the campaign material could not have been put together overnight it made many Sikhs ask whether the attack on the Golden Temple had been deliberately planned by Mrs Gandhi in the hope of consolidating the Hindu vote.
There was a menacing note even in Rajiv’s campaign speeches, an attitude that implied that if you were not with the Congress Party then you were against India. He accused opposition leaders of being ‘traitors’ because of being electorally allied with the Akali Dal. But this campaign of hate and distrust was unnecessary. The reason why Indian voters were to give Rajiv the biggest mandate in Indian parliamentary history was because they saw him as a symbol of hope and change.
From the start of the campaign it was clear that Rajiv was undefeatable but one of the few people who either could not, or would not, see this was M.J. Akbar. He refused to accept that there was a ‘wave’ the likes of which I had personally never seen in any election. Not even in 1977 when there was that subterranean but massive wave against Mrs Gandhi and the Emergency.
When the election came Akbar was, for some reason, displeased with me and as punishment I was not allowed to cover any important constituencies or travel in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Those he was pleased with were sent to cover constituencies where big and glamorous battles were being fought, like Allahabad where Amitabh Bachchan had been enlisted to take on Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna. They duly reported what Akbar wanted to hear, that there was no Rajiv wave. I was restricted to Delhi and Haryana and reported that there was a wave in Rajiv’s favour of quite phenomenal proportions. Since Akbar was predicting a victory for Charan Singh’s Lok Dal, or some other equally bizarre result, this made him even more irritated with me.
I managed to persuade him to let me go to Madhya Pradesh, where Vasundhara Raje was contesting her first Lok Sabha election, against her better judgement, from the constituency of Bhind. She knew that there was a Rajiv wave and that as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate she had little chance of winning even from a constituency that had once been part of her father’s kingdom, the former princely state of Gwalior. She would have liked very much not to contest at all that year, but had been unable to defy her mother.
Bhind was a wild, primitive place in those days, full of dacoits and lawlessness. I had last been there when Phoolan Devi surrendered. She was by then the most famous woman dacoit in Indian history for having massacred twenty-two upper-caste men in a village in which she had been confined for close to three weeks and gangraped. I remembered from her surrender, two years before this election, that there was almost no place in the entire constituency where a woman candidate could safely spend the night. So it did not surprise me that Vasundhara had set up her campaign headquarters in the Rani Mahal in Gwalior, a few hours’ drive from Bhind.
The Rani Mahal was where the Rajmata had lived since her husband’s death more than twenty years ago when Vasu was only eight. The palace
was being used as the base camp for Rajmata Sahib’s campaign as well. She was not contesting in this election but was there to campaign for Atal Behari Vajpayee who was contesting from Gwalior against her son. In what was celebrated in the press as an astute political move on Rajiv’s part the Maharaja of Gwalior had been moved to this constituency, at the last minute, to defeat the BJP’s president and most popular leader. Madhav Rao usually contested from Guna, another seat that was once part of the Gwalior princely state, and had never contested from Gwalior before. So this became one of the most interesting constituencies in the 1984 election. Madhav Rao Scindia had set up his campaign headquarters in the main Gwalior palace. The family and political drama that was being played out in the various wings of this sprawling royal residence would have made most Bollywood fantasies seem insipid.
The journey to Gwalior on a night train from Delhi in freezing weather in December is one of the more memorable of my life and for the wrong reasons. The only good thing about the journey was that I had a coupé to myself. But I left in such a hurry that I had forgotten to bring any bedding. The shawl I used as a blanket was too thin and by midnight it was impossible to sleep so I spent the remaining hours of the journey counting the cockroaches that raced about the floor and wondering if I could work up the courage to use the filthy lavatory or risk bursting my bladder.
When the first hint of dawn came through the dirt-encrusted shutters of my coupé I noticed that we were at the edge of a town. Through the misty darkness I spotted men wrapped in blankets defecating by the side of the track. They sat beside kerosene lanterns. The air smelled of shit and coal dust. Small bits of coal grit drifted in through the window and settled on the sill. I looked at my watch. It was 5 a.m. This must be Gwalior, I thought, and wondered why it looked so much worse than I remembered it.
Had it looked so bad when Vasu’s ancestors ruled? I smiled to myself when I remembered asking her this once and her answer. ‘Don’t be stupid. Obviously not, because no maharaja would want a capital city that made him look bad. It’s after Independence that cities deteriorated because they started to be built by nameless officials.’ She had a point. The cities of my childhood were all beautiful and salubrious. And princely capital cities like Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Hyderabad particularly so. They had deteriorated under our ‘socialist’ rulers who thought of town planning as a luxury
India could not afford because we were always ‘a poor country’. Beyond the narrow streets of the half-village half-town, on a hill veiled by mist and the smoke of open fires I saw the dark shadow of a massive fort. This was Gwalior.
The train halted for no obvious reason under a tangle of cables in the middle of nowhere and I was convinced that if it did not move soon I would freeze to death. I longed for some tea and as if in answer to my prayers a small boy, no more than twelve years old, materialized bearing a basket filled with terracotta cups and tea in a battered aluminum kettle. I bought three cups and drank them with the extra pleasure I always felt when I drank Indian railway tea. It was the terracotta cups that gave it that special flavour.
‘Chai, garam chai,’ the young boy yelled as he jumped from the steps of one carriage to the next deftly pouring tea into the terracotta cups from his battered kettle and collecting the bits of small change he was handed. He wore a tattered sweater and had wrapped a thin scarf around his head to keep out the cold. He had no shoes on his feet. Nearly forty years of socialism and this is what Indian children looked like, I found myself thinking. Children in rags always made me curse the economic policies that had reduced India, which had every reason to be rich, to a state of destitution and degradation. I was convinced that this was the result of the controlled, centralized economy created in the name of Nehruvian socialism.
Would Rajiv be able to change things? Maybe, I thought, as I sipped the hot milky liquid with its faint scent of mud. Maybe. If he got enough of a majority in Parliament he could do pretty much what he wanted because the country was desperate for change. Wherever I had been during the campaign I had noticed that instead of there being a sympathy wave for Indira Gandhi she had almost been forgotten and what people seemed to be voting for was change. Whatever my personal disappointment with Rajiv I understood well that to the average Indian voter he represented this change.
The country he had inherited from his mother was defeated, impoverished and dismal. A place in which more than 90 per cent of the people lived without such bare necessities as clean water, electricity and rudimentary public services. Government schools and hospitals, especially in rural India, were so bad that they provided neither education nor
health care to those who were too poor to afford better private services. The economy was so tightly controlled by Mrs Gandhi’s licence raj that it created neither jobs nor prosperity. The ultimate dream of young Indians in the eighties was to get a ‘government job’. Rajiv had a real chance to sell India a bigger dream, I found myself thinking, as I watched the tea boy make his rounds.
After a mysteriously long halt the train finally began to move. When it pulled into Gwalior’s dilapidated, smelly shed of a railway station I wondered if I would be able to find a taxi so early in the morning and was relieved to see that Vasu had sent someone to fetch me. He greeted me with a courtly bow, picked up my bag and led me to the white Ambassador that was waiting close enough for me not to need to walk too far in the cold.
We drove through narrow, smoky streets. Teashops were beginning to open for the day and the smell of boiling milk drifted through the closed windows of the car. At the end of an empty bazaar we turned left down a small road that led to one of the palace’s ornate wrought-iron gates. The road tapered off as we drove past newly built houses that crowded together in rows on both sides. Vasu’s mother had sold part of the palace grounds to a builder when they needed money to repair the Rani Mahal.
We drove into a courtyard with high, white walls and a big neem tree in its centre. The driver parked under it and the man who came to receive me guided me towards an enclosed veranda. It was used as a sort of reception area, beyond which lay two vast drawing rooms, a dining room and terraces that went down to a large, formal garden over which in the distance towered the fort. It was some distance away but so enormous that it seemed closer than it was. I walked up the wide marble staircase that led to the bedrooms and was happy to spot Vasu’s maid standing outside her door as I was worried about stumbling into the wrong suite at so ungodly an hour. The Rani Mahal was small as palaces go but still large enough for visitors to get lost in.
Vasu’s lovely, high-ceilinged sitting room was blissfully warm. Electric heaters were everywhere and she sat in front of one of them drinking tea and reading a newspaper. Campaign material lay in heaps all over the room and there was a general atmosphere of warmth and good cheer except on the face of the candidate. She gave me a gloomy look and said, almost before saying hello, that she wished she had not allowed her mother to persuade her to stand from Bhind.
‘There is a Rajiv wave,’ she said sadly, ‘as a BJP candidate what chance do I have when they say that even Atalji might lose in Gwalior.’
‘There is a Rajiv wave,’ I agreed, ‘a huge Rajiv wave everywhere. But do you think it’s enough for your brother to be able to defeat Atalji?’
‘Possibly,’ she said, ‘I can’t see the Maharaja of Gwalior losing the first election he has ever fought from the constituency of Gwalior.’
‘Well, we have to admit it was pretty clever of Rajiv to move your brother from Guna after Atalji had already announced that he was contesting from Gwalior. Another similar move was getting Amitabh Bachchan to stand against Bahuguna in Allahabad…they say Bahuguna is going to lose badly. Anyway, I am planning to go with your brother this morning on the campaign trail so by this evening I should have a pretty clear idea of how things look. The first story I have to file from here is on the Vajpayee–Scindia battle.’
‘Right. You can come with me to Bhind tomorrow or the day after. But have some breakfast first.’ Even as she spoke a maid walked in carrying mugs of hot tea and a plate full of hot buttered toast. Vasu left for her constituency shortly after breakfast and I prepared myself for the campaign trail with a hot
balti
bath that involved pouring masses of water over myself from a large, old-fashioned brass bucket. Suitably refreshed I then wandered off towards Jai Mahal, the main palace. When I came to its massive gates sunlight was just beginning to gild its roofs making it look more beautiful than it usually did. Once a magnificent palace, its orderly collection of white-washed Indo-European buildings had for long been in a state of decay.
It was still early in the morning and there was nobody guarding the gates so I walked unchecked through a vast garden filled with weeds and untended flowerbeds to the main porch in which stood a convoy of white Ambassadors. I identified Scindia’s as the one covered in marigold garlands. It was my bad luck that the first person I met in the many-pillared veranda was one of Scindia’s courtiers who knew that I was a friend of Vasu. I was worried that the family divisions would make Scindia give me a less than cordial welcome. The courtier’s welcome was certainly less than friendly.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked with a cold smile and a puff of his cigarette.
‘Covering the election.’
‘From the Rani Mahal? ’
There was no point in lying. ‘Yes. And I’m hoping to go with your candidate today to see his campaign,’ I said with a cheerful smile.
He stared back coldly. ‘Wait here. I’ll speak to HH (His Highness) and see if we can accommodate you.’
‘I can bring my own car.’
‘Wait here,’ he said again and disappeared into the courtyard.
It was too cold to sit and wait so I walked up and down the veranda, rubbing my hands together to keep them from freezing. On the walls were sepia pictures from another time. Princes in full regalia from an event in the thirties, princes at tiger hunts and princes with formally dressed white people. More recent pictures showed Scindia in school uniform, playing cricket, in formal attire for some ceremony and being invested as maharaja when his father died. On one of my perambulations I peeped into the courtyard into which the courtier had disappeared and saw the white crystal Lalique fountain that I remembered from an earlier visit. Lalique made many things for the Gwalior palace in the thirties, when it was built, and most of them could still be found in closed rooms and hidden courtyards around the palace. Vasu and I had once spent a week in Gwalior before the family trouble began and had wandered for hours through rooms filled with magnificent Lalique furniture. Beds, trolleys, dressing tables, chairs, all piled up in dusty rooms that smelled of old carpets. Most of the rooms in the Jai Vilas Palace remained unused after Vasu’s father’s death. Her mother believed in austerity and simple living.