The Great Indian Novel (53 page)

The presidential election that immediately followed now became crucial for India’s political future. The Kaurava Working Committee quickly met to choose the party’s candidate for the post. Since the President was elected by the members of the national Parliament and the state Legislative Assemblies - an electoral college in which the Kaurava Party still enjoyed, despite its recent setbacks, a safe majority - the choice of the Kaurava candidate should normally have settled the matter. But it was clear that would no longer necessarily be the case.

For one thing, the Kaurava Old Guard - they had even begun calling themselves that, so used were they to the term of abuse - were determined to use this opportunity to regroup. In Priya Duryodhani they had a Frankenstein’s monster who was suddenly growing out of control. If they could impose a President on her who would not stand too much of her nonsense - who would, for instance, refuse to sign her Bank Nationalization bill - they could rein her in a bit. If, on the other hand, she succeeded in getting herself a sympathetic Kaurava candidate, the Old Guard could bid farewell to their last chance of control, and reconcile themselves to the complete loss of the authority that was already slipping away from their loosening grasp.

That Working Committee meeting was the stormiest I have ever attended, and believe me, I have attended a few. Priya Duryodhani put forward the name of one of her ministers - a son of God with a long record of serving the interests of the downtrodden, especially if they were related to him. The Old Guard balked and proposed me instead. Duryodhani lost.

My adoption as the official Kaurava candidate for President gave me my last chance to play a direct role in the nation’s history. For about twenty-four hours I thought I would be able to end my career as a symbol of national reconciliation and Kaurava unity. Duryodhani appeared to have accepted my nomination with good grace.

Then, on the last day that nominations were to be filed, a young man, a member of our own party barely past the minimum age limit for the presidency, filed his papers as an Independent candidate. There were normally at least a dozen such Independent candidacies, ranging from the local butcher to the surviving flag-bearer of the Society for the Restoration (as it was now renamed) of the Imperial Connection, candidacies which gave journalists amusing copy to submit before a predictable ballot. I idly scanned the list for a laugh and stopped short at the last name.

It was not the name of just another irrelevant Independent. It was the name of Ekalavya.

And his candidacy had been proposed by the incumbent Kaurava Prime Minister.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, blinking her eyes, did not know why she felt faint. . .

Duryodhani’s strategy began smoothly, almost predictably, to unfold. When the horrified party elders asked her to explain her sponsorship of a candidate who was intending to oppose the official party nominee, she said it was only an act of personal loyalty to an old friend. It did not necessarily mean that she would vote for him. In fact she was hoping, she said, to come to an understanding with the official Kaurava candidate about his perception of his role.

Oh? asked the Old Guard. What sort of understanding?

A general sort of understanding, she replied vaguely. About the ceremonial nature of his functions. About his commitment to upholding the will of the people, as expressed through Parliament.

You mean, I asked, you want him to agree in advance to sign every bill you submit to him?

Not really, she said. Not exactly. Well, yes.

You can’t seriously expect me to give you this kind of undertaking, I said.

I do, she replied. What a pity.

The next day the papers carried two simultaneous announcements: the Kaurava Party had issued an official notice to Shri Ekalavya asking him to show cause why he should not be expelled for breach of party discipline, and the Prime Minister had stated that the time had come in India, too, for the torch to be passed to a new generation.

Ekalavya, cocky as ever, replied to the ‘show-cause notice’ with a letter he released simultaneously to the press. ‘When the Kaurava Party, at this hour of national crisis, confronted with the responsibility of naming a helmsman to stand at the bridge of the ship of state to assist its captain, our dynamic young Prime Minister, to steer it through the muddy waters of communalism, capitalism and casteism, takes refuge behind the nomination of its oldest member for this arduous task, one wonders toward which century the party intends the ship to be steered,’ he read aloud, to appreciative laughter from the whisky-plied hacks at the press conference. Mind you, what I’m quoting is only part of one sentence of his letter, and the other sentences were even longer, but I think you can get the drift of his ship of state from that specimen.

That warning shot across our bows indicated very clearly what their ammunition was made of. The reference to the three c’s that constituted the pet aversions of the Ashwathaman left, the attack on my age and presumed conservatism, the interpretation of the role of the President as one who was supposed to ‘assist’ the Prime Minister, all pointed very clearly to the nature of their electoral message. The point was, how many in the Kaurava Party would listen?

The Working Committee of the Kaurava Party expelled Ekalavya from its primary membership and called upon all its members to desist from lending support to any other than the party’s official candidate for the presidency.

The Prime Minister then called for a ‘conscience vote’ in the presidential election. The issues at stake, she declared, were far too serious to be brushed under the carpet of party discipline.

The Working Committee took strong exception to her statement and asked her to explain herself.

The Prime Minister said it was not exactly unconstitutional to uphold the sanctity of the secret ballot.

The Working Committee met for six hours and was unable to come up with an agreed statement in response.

The Prime Minister urged all ‘modern and progressive forces’ in politics to vote for Shri Ekalavya for President. The Communist and socialist parties endorsed her call, and pledged their votes to him.

The Kaurava Party asked Priya Duryodhani to show cause why she should not be expelled for breach of party discipline.

Priya Duryodhani did not reply.

The Kaurava Party repeated its question, and gave her forty-eight hours in which to reply.

Priya Duryodhani ignored them.

At the end of the forty-eight-hour deadline, the Working Committee met to discuss her reply, found there was none to discuss, and scheduled a meeting for the following week to discuss the issues arising from the lack of a reply.

The day before this meeting was to take place, the presidential election was held. It resulted in a narrow victory - half a percentage point - for Shri Ekalavya, who thus became the youngest President in independent India’s brief history, and the first one not to have been the official nominee of the Kaurava Party.

The next day, the Working Committee of the Kaurava Party, meeting with several empty chairs, voted to expel Prime Minister Priya Duryodhani from the primary membership of the party.

An hour later, a group of people calling themselves the ‘real Working Committee of the Kaurava Party’, meeting at Priya Duryodhani’s house and under her chairmanship, voted to expel all those who had attended the first meeting from the primary membership of the ‘real’ Kaurava Party - all, that is, except the three or four who had changed their minds in time and gone from the first meeting to the second.

And thus, over the essentially trivial issue of the election of a national figurehead, the political equivalent of the dragon on the bowsprit of a Viking ship, and ostensibly provoked by the even more trivial question of whether the fattest bankers in the country should draw government salaries or private ones, the great Kaurava Party, the world’s oldest anti-colonial political organization, sixteen years away from its centenary, split.

The majority called themselves the Kaurava (R), the R standing for Real, or Ruling, or Rewarded by Priya Duryodhani, depending on your degree of cynicism. The rest of us, at first a not insubstantial rump, were dubbed the Kaurava (O), the O standing for Official, or Old Guard, or Obsolete, depending on the same thing. For the first time, the Prime Minister of the country represented a party which did not have an overall majority in Parliament. But the short-sighted ideologues of the Opposition Left supported her in the House, thinking this would give them some influence over her. It did - in her rhetoric: the very rhetoric which would then enable her to capture their seats at the next general election.

The poor idiots. It was, I declared with feeling, the first time I had seen goats opting for an early Bakr-Id. When they were no longer useful to Priya Duryodhani, there would be no one to hear their bleats as they were led off to the electoral slaughterhouse.

What more is there to say, Ganapathi, about this phase of my eclipse into irrelevance? Let us draw a discreet veil over the gradual but steady haemorrhage from the Kaurava (O) to the Kaurava (R), the self-serving prime- ministerial attacks on big business and ‘monopoly capital’, the increasing unproductive frustration of the Old Guard, the brilliant manoeuvre of calling a snap general election that caught all of us at our unready worst, the even more brilliant campaign slogan ‘Remove Poverty’ (as if she hadn’t had the power to do anything about poverty so far) to which we were stupid enough to retort ‘Remove Duryodhani’ (as if we cared less about poverty than power). At the end of it all, Priya Duryodhani stood alone amongst the ruins of her old party, having smashed to pieces all the pillars and foundations that had supported her in the past. Alone, but surrounded by the recumbent forms of newly elected supplicants prostrating themselves amidst the rubble, the ciphers whose empty heads collectively gave Duryodhani a bigger parliamentary majority than even Dhritarashtra had ever enjoyed.

How had she done it? We were all too much in a state of shock to answer the question coherently, but there was no lack of random theorizing. It was her father’s magic, some said; but then to anyone who knew the family it was obvious she took not after Dhritarashtra, but after the undeservingly unknown Gandhari the Grim. It was the privy-purse question and bank nationalization, others suggested; but then how many of the country’s electorate understood what was involved in these issues, or cared? No, Ganapathi, I think it was innocence. Not hers, for what little she had been born with had dried with the sweat on Gandhari’s satin blindfold, but ours, India’s innocence. She had tapped the deep lode of it that still ran through our people, the innocence which had led 320 million voters to cast their ballots for a slogan (‘Remove Poverty’) devoid of sincerity, merely because for the first time a Prime Minister had bothered to imply that their votes served a purpose and, even better, that they could actually make a difference to the fulfilment of that purpose. ‘Remove Poverty’ indeed! Priya Duryodhani could as well have declaimed ‘Invade Mars’ for all the difference it made to her real intentions; but she did not, and in ‘Remove Poverty’ she found the two words that innocent India took to its heart and into its polling-booths.

So India had a new Queen-Empress, anointed a hundred years after the last one. And for a year, maybe two, the Empress’s new clothes shone so brightly, so dazzled the eyes of her observers, that it was impossible to tell what they were made of or whether they were made of anything at all. But then, Ganapathi, they began to unravel.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi was diagnosed as asthmatic, her breath coming sometimes in short gasps, the dead air trapped in her bronchia struggling to expel itself, her chest heaving with the effort to breathe freely . . .

But before then, before Duryodhani’s raiment, and the nation’s hopes, began to come apart at the seams, there was the brief moment of national glory that came to be known as the Gelabi Desh War.

When Karnistan was hacked off India’s stooped shoulders by the departing Raj’s pencil-wielding butchers, it was carved like two pieces of prime human meat from the country’s two Muslim-majority areas, choice Islamic cuts for the carnivorous Mohammed Ali Karna. But even if the appropriate Koranic verses were chanted during the operation and the resultant bleeding mess was undoubtedly halal, in the matter of economic and political development - the seasoning, as it were, of Karna’s consecrated cuisine - the two halves were not treated the same way on the national cooking-range. They may both have had their steaks in the Islamic roast, but as far as development went, one was well-done and the other decidedly rare.