Durbar (51 page)

From tidbits of information I gleaned from these friends, it was easy to work out that her only reason for staying away from public life for a year was that she needed that much time to prepare. When she refused to become Congress president on the night Rajiv died, it was probably because she knew that if she took the job, she would be quickly exposed. In her year of semi-retirement she learned to speak Hindi well enough to read out a speech written in the Roman script, and studied carefully the politics of her mother-in-law. There were rumours that she watched videos of the late prime minister Indira Gandhi so she could learn to imitate her mannerisms.

At some point, she appeared to have noticed that left in the hands of its senior leaders, the Congress Party would, before long, disintegrate completely. Rajiv had continued his mother’s practice of filling the party with courtiers and sycophants whose political future depended on the dynasty’s vaunted charisma, so its roots had weakened as had its organizational structure. It was no longer the party’s leftist ideology that was its glue but the Gandhi family. Years later, the ultimate subscriber to the idea of democratic feudalism, Mani Shankar Aiyar, admitted in a television interview with Karan Thapar that the party was not just proud of its dynasty but knew that it was the ‘adhesive’ that held things together.

Narasimha Rao ran a corrupt but efficient government that lasted its full term despite not having a full majority in Parliament. It was under him that India made the changes that moved the country away from stagnant socialism towards a more open economy. It was under him that the licence-quota-permit raj, which had held India back for decades, began to be slowly dismantled and it is this that resulted eventually in India transiting from being an economic basket case to becoming an ‘emerging economic superpower’. But by the time of the 1996 election Narasimha Rao had made the Congress Party unpopular enough for it to be in no position to win.

The Babri Masjid was torn down by Hindu fanatics on 6 December 1992 and this lost the Congress Party its crucial Muslim vote bank. Another reason was that small caste-based parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party became powerful enough to steal away the Dalit vote. And from the casteist churning created by V.P. Singh’s Mandal politics were born leaders like Mulayam Singh and Laloo Yadav who began to build their own vote banks out of castes that fell in an intermediate category. The upper castes were lured away by the Bharatiya Janata Party for whom the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a boon, whatever its leaders may say.

The Congress Party lost the 1996 general election but nobody else won. So a shabby, leftist, ‘secular’ government was put together with Congress Party support. This support was withdrawn in two years by Sonia Gandhi. The reason she gave was that the investigation into her husband’s assassination was not being taken seriously. She wanted the fragile coalition government, that existed only because of support from the Congress, to take action against the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) which happened to be part of the coalition government. The DMK, led by M. Karunanidhi, had never concealed its support for the LTTE but Sonia’s demand for action against it was baseless and this got exposed when the DMK later became her staunchest ally. When she made her speech in Amethi, asking people to understand her ‘
vedna
’ (pain) at action not being taken against her husband’s killers, she was really only indicating that she was ready to become a real politician.

By the time of the 1998 general election, Sonia was ready to claim her political inheritance. She agreed to campaign for her party and addressed her first public rally in Sriperumbudur on 11 January 1998. I was there.

Giant cardboard cut-outs of Sonia in a sari with her hands joined together in a namaste were erected all over Sriperumbudur. The sycophancy she inspired was stunning and for me, as an Indian, shaming because it was inspired not by her political achievements (she had none at this time) but by her white skin. The songs of praise the people sang compared her to god, and a little less generously to Mother Teresa. When she finally appeared on stage in a green Tamil sari, with her daughter beside her in an orange sari, the crowd went wild. It was as degrading a display of servility as I have ever seen. More songs about ‘white-skinned goddesses’ were sung. ‘You are god, you have white skin,’ they sang, ‘we worship you.’

Sonia Gandhi did not succeed in winning that election for the Congress, but in 2004 she did. Although she refused to take the prime minister’s job, everyone in India knew she was the real prime minister. After 2009, when her government won a second term in office, she has worked tirelessly to ensure that nothing stops her son, Rahul, from claiming his inheritance whenever he wants.

So the dynasty continues, and its example is emulated by almost every political party in India with dangerous consequences for Indian democracy. In 1997, when Laloo Prasad Yadav as chief minister of Bihar was jailed on corruption charges, he appointed his semi-literate wife, Rabri Devi, as his proxy. Rabri Devi had never stepped beyond the boundaries of her home, nor did she claim to be anything more than a housewife and mother of Laloo’s nine children, when she was quite suddenly appointed chief minister of one of India’s largest and poorest states.

At the time Rabri Devi became chief minister of Bihar, I used to do a weekly television programme called
Ek Din Ek Jeevan
for Star Plus. The programme was popular and I had interviewed for it prime ministers like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Inder Gujral as well as movie stars like Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan, so my request to spend a day with Rabri Devi was eagerly received by the officials handling her public relations, and I was invited to Patna to interview Bihar’s new chief minister.

When I arrived, I rang the chief minister’s home and asked if I could come over with my crew for a casual chat with her to plan the interview that was set for the following morning. The official I talked to said there would be no problem at all and to the surprise of all of us, we found Rabri Devi waiting for us and ready to be interviewed. My producer whispered that we should seize the opportunity so that we had more material to play around with when we were editing.

I interviewed Rabri Devi in her little sitting room filled with bric-a-brac that consisted mostly of trophies and mementoes that had been collected by her husband in the course of his chief ministerial duties. Rabri Devi told me how she had burst into tears when Laloo informed her that she was going to be chief minister instead of him. She said she had been in the kitchen when she got the news and had been terrified because all she had ever done was look after her home and children. When I asked if it had been difficult for her to adjust to her new role as the leader of Bihar,
she admitted that it had not been easy and that she would not have been able to manage without her husband’s help.

Laloo was out on bail. When I met him that day he was holding court in an outhouse behind the main residence. He was dressed in a white dhoti and vest, and a small army of officials and politicians had come to call on him. He chatted to me in a friendly way about this and that and allowed himself to be photographed. The programme needed visuals of Rabri Devi going about her daily activities and she happily agreed that evening to show us the pond in which she was breeding fish and the cattle shed in which she kept her cows. So imagine my shock the next morning when she refused to see me at all.

We arrived early to get shots of her while she did her morning puja, but were told by a servant that she was busy and that we should wait outside. We waited for more than four hours before she agreed to meet us in her office and, to my surprise, she was not just cold but rude. When I asked her why she seemed so upset with me she said that she had heard that I had described her in my Hindi column in
India Today
as illiterate. I told her, truthfully, that what I had written was that she was the Sonia Gandhi of Bihar. This pleased her and the interview began on a pleasant note, but at some point I made the mistake of asking if she did not think that people who entered politics should be literate and she had a fit. She saw this as a reference to her own limitations with the written word. Could people who were not literate not see and hear, she asked me angrily and on camera. Could they not understand things? Was my cameraman literate? When I said that literacy helped a great deal when it came to governance, she said ‘officials run governments’ and brought the interview to an end.

Rabri Devi was such an obvious example of the dangers of dynastic democracy that she came in for more public approbation than others but she still managed to rule Bihar for more than one term. I admit to being delighted when, in the 2010 assembly elections, Rabri Devi and other members of her family were resoundingly defeated.

I have often puzzled over why India’s fiercely independent television channels and newspapers have not been more incensed by something that has caused such severe damage to the political fabric. Is it because
journalists have become part of the game? Journalists who do not speak out against parliamentary constituencies being treated like private estates, and hereditary succession becoming the norm rather than the exception, usually get treated very well by governments. In an insidious form of bribery they are offered not just access to leaders and foreign junkets when such leaders travel abroad, but nominated seats in the Rajya Sabha, subsidized housing and all sorts of other perks that are usually available only to politicians and high-ranking government officials.

The price for such media complicity has been paid by India. Political dynasties now flourish across the country and because of this, legislatures are increasingly becoming private clubs in which the unworthy heirs of political leaders, with little knowledge of governance and even less political acumen, have privileged access. Like feudal potentates they surround themselves with sycophants and courtiers. The sort of Indians who entered public life during the freedom movement out of a desire to serve India no longer exists. With a handful of rare exceptions, most Indian politicians enter politics today not for reasons of ideology or public service but because they believe that their own interests and the interests of their family are best served this way. All of this has happened because of the example set by the dynasty in Delhi. In almost every Indian state chief ministers use their power to send their wives or sisters to the Lok Sabha from constituencies that are not pocket boroughs but private estates. There are almost no political parties left that do not practise dynastic politics, and increasingly there is evidence of a collusion to keep this diminished form of democracy alive.

Would this have happened if Indira Gandhi had not led by example? I believe not, which is why the story of Rajiv Gandhi is so important. It was with him that it all began.

Tavleen Singh is the author of three books,
Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors
,
Lollipop Street: Why India Will Survive Her Politicians
and
Political and Incorrect
. She spends her time between Delhi and Mumbai and writes four weekly political columns, in Hindi for
Amar Ujala
and
Jansatta
, and in English for syndication and an exclusive column for the
Indian Express
.

In the summer of 1975 Tavleen Singh, not yet twenty-five, started working as a junior reporter in the
Statesman
in New Delhi. Within five weeks, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, suspending fundamental rights and imposing press censorship, and soon reckless policies said to be authored by the prime minister’s younger son were unleashed on India’s citizens. As the country suffered under the iron fist of an elected icon and her chosen heir, Tavleen observed that a small, influential section of Delhi’s society – people she knew well – remained strangely unaffected by the perilous state of the nation. Before long, members of this circle were entrenched in key positions in the Indian government.

In 1984, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, fortified by a huge mandate from a nation desperate for change. But, belying its hopes, the young leader chose for himself a group of advisors, friends and acolytes from the drawing rooms of Delhi, as inexperienced as him and just as unaware of the ground realities of a complex nation. It was the beginning of a political culture of favouritism and ineptitude that would take hold at the highest levels of government, stunting India’s ambitions and frustrating its people well into the next century.

Seasoned reporter and distinguished newspaper columnist Tavleen Singh’s
Durbar
is a sharp account of these turbulent years. Describing the Nehruvian era of her childhood, the Emergency of her youth and the political shifts that followed, Tavleen writes of the birth and evolution of insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir, the blood spilt in assassinations and massacres, of crises internal and external and the clumsy attempts to set things right. A remarkable memoir, vivid with the colour of election campaigns and society dinners, low conspiracies and high corruption,
Durbar
rewards us with this truth: that if India is to achieve a better future the past can no longer be ignored or forgotten.