India (31 page)

That was his answer: there was no role model. Every society, every government, was bad; only the Maoists could improve things. “To create a new democratic state,” said Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, “one has to destroy the old one.”
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Bangladesh crisis, the later part of the Vietnam war and the eruption of Maoism, a generation of students was attracted by the idea of reinventing the world. In India they were responding, although they would not have seen it in this way at the time, to an economy stripped bare by ideology. In a society with innumerable problems, in which the opportunities to pursue a rewarding career were limited, they reacted, ironically, by turning further to the left. Most well-off Naxalites returned home after spending a few months in the jungle, turned off by the bad food and the bloody reality of killing moneylenders, and in some cases they were sent abroad by their parents, usually to the United States, at the instigation of police officials who did not wish to prosecute the children of the rich.

The origin of this political feeling lay in earlier times, in a more practical but still idealistic attempt at social and land reform in the immediate aftermath of independence. The parliamentary constituency of Vadakara in Kerala passes along a palm-filled coast and is home to a mix of communities: Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Haphazard roads run past paddy fields and fertile forests, and up through rubber and coffee plantations. All along the way, there are rivers, and even glimpses of the sea. Kerala has
the highest literacy rate in the world, hovering close to 100 percent, which is in part the result of educational campaigns carried out by communist volunteers. For many years, K. P. Unnikrishnan was MP for Vadakara. In his thinking and outlook when he was a teenager, Unni was typical of a generation of educated Indians. The age of imperialism was over, and he believed something modern and politically exciting was happening that was going to cure old ills—socialism.

“In June 1957 I was invited to Moscow by the Communist Youth Movement,” Unni remembered. “I was only nineteen. We took a train to Delhi and a special flight to Kabul, and on to Moscow. I was impressed by Moscow. There were maybe 30,000 or even 50,000 of us, young people from Iceland, Tahiti, South America, the United States. It was difficult in those days to travel outside of India. In Moscow, we had a cultural programme, theatre, science and technology, lectures about flights into space. Khrushchev inaugurated it. The idea was to influence young people, and it was a big gain for Moscow to get us at that impressionable age. It was the pinnacle of Soviet glory, and I was quite impressed by what I saw.

“I had been to Presidency College in Madras and my father was a lawyer in Calicut, although my mother had given away her jewellery to the freedom movement. I was in the Socialist Party, which was critical of the communists both in India and abroad. A lot of people were on the left, but the communists were unpopular here because they were calling Nehru ‘a running dog of Anglo-American imperialism’ and that sort of thing.

“After Moscow, some of us were invited to continue on to China, though the Americans were not allowed to go. We did a ten-day rail journey to Beijing, going past Lake Baikal. China seemed much more familiar than Russia. About twelve Indians were in our group, and I was the youngest. We met all the leaders. Mao looked quite impressive, but he didn’t say much. We met Deng Xiaoping, and he took us to his house. I had four conversations with Chou Enlai. He would ask us to drink a toast—GAN BEI!—in rice wine and we were given fantastic food. I remember thinking he was a great host. He asked me what I thought of his country. I answered, ‘It’s a bit drab because everyone is wearing a blue tunic.’ He laughed and said, ‘But did you see anyone naked? In some countries—in your country—people go naked.’ I had to agree. He was speaking through an interpreter, though I think he understood French and English.”

While food and wine were being served to impressionable foreign students, Mao was preparing to launch the Great Leap Forward, in which nearly every Chinese family would be herded into a commune—by 1961,
approximately 30 million people would have died in China in an engineered famine.

“Some American students were with us too who had resisted the State Department’s ban on coming to China. Chou Enlai was very interested by them: ‘They are the future. If you want world peace, there is no alternative to world peace, but the Americans want to have war.’ He criticized Britain and France. Then we went on tours of Xian, Shanghai, Canton. I was impressed by the idea of getting rid of poverty, and that everyone had clothes. I made a second trip to China in 1959. The student officials didn’t talk: they just gave us two pamphlets attacking Nehru. It was said Mao had written them. The atmosphere was completely different, because Nehru had welcomed the Dalai Lama to India. By the time the war came with China in 1962, I had joined the Congress party and Indira Gandhi had put me in charge of the youth section to organize anti-China rallies and seminars.”

Unni went on to have a long career as an MP, first as a Congress loyalist and later with the IC(S), or Indian Congress (Socialist) party, a breakaway faction formed when Mrs. Gandhi fell from grace after the Emergency. He continued to be elected from the same constituency, Vadakara. By the time of the first Gulf War he was a senior minister in New Delhi with responsibility for transport and shipping. By now in his fifties, he had to go to Iraq to see Saddam Hussein. One hundred fifty thousand migrant workers, many of them originally from Kerala, were stuck in Kuwait. Unni was brought to a palace on the edge of Baghdad by helicopter. “Saddam Hussein was in military uniform. The future of all these stranded people depended on what he said to me. He talked about friendship, about India, about how strong his claim was over Kuwait. I told him our problem plainly: we had our people stuck between Kuwait and Jordan. We couldn’t send ships to collect them because the Americans had mined the harbours. Well—he said they could leave. He acted like quite a reasonable person.”
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A massive airlift was arranged out of Amman.

Half a century after K. P. Unnikrishnan’s extraordinary teenaged journey to China and Russia, intellectual fashions had changed, but pragmatic communism remained an important component in Indian life, most notably in Kerala and West Bengal. His children were not members of any socialist party. One of his daughters was a Bollywood lawyer, and I observed that the other, who worked in finance in London, wore a red T-shirt featuring a crossed hammer and sickle and the slogan: “The Party’s Over.”

•   •   •

In 2009, Kobad Ghandy was arrested in Delhi, where he was said to have gone to seek medical treatment for prostate cancer. He was a throwback to earlier times, a man from a Westernized, prosperous Parsi background who had gone underground to stir up armed revolution. The police had been after him for years as the head of “party publications” for the Maoists. Born in the year of independence, he had been sent to the Doon School at the same time as Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandsons, and studied chartered accountancy in London. His family had lived in a sprawling apartment in Worli Sea Face, an expensive part of the city then still called Bombay, and his father was a senior executive with Glaxo who also had an ice cream business called Kentucky’s, making the first ice cream in town to contain chunks of real strawberry.

Kobad Ghandy and his wife, Anuradha, a former college lecturer who used to drive a TVS moped and according to one contemporary was “a petite bundle of energy, bright eyes sparkling behind square glasses … who introduced us to that feminist bible, Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
,” were unusual in that they stayed the course, devoting themselves exclusively to the Maoist cause and living on the run for decades, using numerous different aliases and identity documents.
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Much of the time, the demands of the revolution kept them apart; when united, Kobad would cook for her. Anuradha died from cerebral malaria a little over a year before her husband was arrested.

I went to see him in Tihar jail, on the edge of Delhi. Since he was in judicial custody and had not been convicted, I was only permitted to make a social call rather than do an interview; my guide to the prison was S. A. R. Geelani, who visited the inmates regularly. Geelani was a Kashmiri academic who had himself spent two years in Tihar, charged with involvement in the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, before being acquitted. He had nearly died in an assassination attempt in 2004—everyone had theories about who did it, but no one knew for sure—and since the shootout he had been under the obligatory protection of the Central Industrial Security Force.

We set off from Delhi University, Geelani a composed figure in a long, dark-green kurta driving his vehicle, a policeman with an automatic weapon beside him in the front, myself in the back seat and a more junior policeman riding in the boot. Along the way we stopped at a traffic intersection,
and a man with a ponytail and a big grin ran out to us carrying two bags. He approached and handed over the bags: cooked, packed food. At the jail, Geelani told the junior policeman to carry the bags of packed food to the entrance; it seemed that he regarded his paramilitary escort with resigned exasperation.

Before we entered the jail, the food had to be checked. A policeman and a policewoman, both huge-bellied, sat behind a table inspecting. Only plain vegetarian food was allowed, and only rotis, no rice. There was no definite reason for this, but it was written in the prison regulations. Geelani put the polystyrene cartons of food on the table, one at a time, opening each lid. The policewoman stirred interminably with a plastic spatula, the sort you might use for stirring sugar into coffee or tea. All went well until she found a mushroom, and extracted it.

“Mushroom nahin. Mushroom allowed nahin hai.”

“Mushrooms kyu nahin allowed hain?” said Geelani.

Were mushrooms allowed? A more senior policewoman came out, debated, disappeared, returned; mushrooms were allowed.

In the reception, we were photographed (“London friend,” said Geelani, explaining why I was visiting the prisoner) and given the kind of pass you get when you go to an office, a piece of paper slipped into a small, clip-on transparent wallet. Beside our photographs were our names and next to Geelani’s name the words “HIGH RISK.” Perhaps this was because he had previously been a high-security prisoner, and was considered a returning danger. We waited, looked inside the shop, which sold items made by prisoners, including TJ Chips—Tihar jail potato chips—and went through security scanners.

Now we walked some way to the restricted part of the compound. Geelani said he came to visit here once a week. Having been inside, facing execution at one stage and enduring repeated attacks by other prisoners, he knew it was a lifeline for the inmates; he made no distinction between those he thought guilty or not guilty. In the next staging room, the prison guards repeated the rigmarole with the food, which was smelling quite oily by now. They prodded and stirred the curries, mainly because they were bored and had nothing else to do. Finally we were in the anteroom to the high security unit, which held India’s most dangerous and politically sensitive prisoners, many of them Sikhs and Kashmiris. After another security check, we were allowed to go in, a parade of about a dozen; the wives, the mothers, the fathers.

It was like visiting a bank. The prisoners were behind bleary windows and we had to speak through a malfunctioning sound system. After thirty minutes, the system would be turned off. Kobad Ghandy had a sad, engaging face; behind him through the window I could see two men dressed like hip-hoppers, a pair of young Kashmiris who according to Geelani had been framed years before. Ghandy spoke to me about the “lumpen” behaviour of his Doon School contemporary Sanjay Gandhi, his own time in London and how he did well in his chartered accountancy exams but became increasingly involved in politics. At a rally in north London attended by rival outfits he had been caught in a skirmish, and he and others had been sent to prison, he believed for racial reasons, although they were not responsible for the trouble. His moment of full awakening, when he reached some sort of idealistic plateau from which he had never come down, was at this time. He had returned to Bombay in the early 1970s and devoted himself to dismantling what he saw as India’s feudal, colonial state. Kobad Ghandy was earnest and likeable; he reminded me of the armchair communists who lived in greater style in Delhi and Kolkata.

He was having some problems with his legal case and had to speak to Geelani. Only one person could fit at the window, so I went to the neighbouring counter and who should be behind it but Mohammad Afzal, the most feared man in India.

He was smiling from ear to ear. Afzal had a bushy black beard, round glasses and a white skullcap.

“Hello, sir,” he said in English, “what do you know about me?”

“You’re Afzal,” I said. What did I know about him? That he had been convicted of organizing the attack on Parliament in 2001 which brought India and Pakistan close to war; that he had been sentenced to death; that at present his case was pending—and that many people in India wished to see him hanged.

I asked whether he talked to Kobad Ghandy much in prison. He said he did, and was fascinated to have learned about the problems facing the people in the jungle, which he thought were similar to those facing his fellow Kashmiris. Afzal was Indian enough to be obsessed by books; we discussed French novelists, and he said he had recently finished Samuel Huntington’s
The Clash of Civilizations
and agreed with much of its thesis. Through all of this, Afzal kept smiling. He seemed to have some sort of joyfulness, and it was hard to know if this was religious fervour or some other instinct. Like many Kashmiri militants, he had been gruesomely tortured, and it seemed
almost as if he had arrived in some new mental place where he had known everything and nothing could get worse. During the last few minutes of the visit, I switched back to Kobad Ghandy’s window. When I mentioned that Afzal thought they shared many political insights, he looked sceptical and said he had been surprised by how little interest most inmates had in politics.