Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  LIFE

  AMONG THE

  SCORPIONS

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2017

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Copyright © Jaya Jaitly, 2017

  All photographs in the book are courtesy the author, unless otherwise mentioned.

  Photograph on the back cover: Jaya Jaitly, George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar at a peace march in Patna, Bihar, 2000. Courtesy: AFP/Getty Images.

  The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-81-291-4909-1

  First impression 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2 3 1

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  For my children Akshay and Aditi, although they say they do not require a formal dedication from me.

  To my craftspeople, my larger family, who have unknowingly given me solace when I needed it the most, but are not likely to read this book.

  ~

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1.My Beginnings: Amidst Matriarchy and Bureaucracy

  2.Malabar Matriarchy: Experiencing My Roots

  3.Delhi and Gandhi: Points of Return

  4.Japan Days: Insight into Diplomacy

  5.Burma to Myanmar: Engaging in Transitions

  6.Belgium and England: Lessons in Loss

  7.Delhi Again: But a Different Life

  8.Smith College, USA: Savouring Literature and Freedom

  9.‘My’ State of Kashmir: Through War, Darkness and Light

  10.A Tryst with Crafts and the ‘Crafty’: Gurjari and Dilli Haat

  11.The Orwellian Year of 1984: The Beginning

  12.The Horrors of an Orwellian Year: Towards No Closure

  13.The Emotional Becomes Political: Towards a Bigger Public Platform

  14.Elections: The Highest University of Politics

  15.National Politics and Diplomacy: Instincts in Action

  16.Cherchez la Femme: A Typical Scorpion’s Agenda

  17.Good and Bad Match-fixing: Tehelka Sting I

  18.‘Why should the Taliban not shoot you?’: Tehelka Sting II

  19.Omissions in the Commission: From Operation West End to Operation Abort

  20.On the Sidelines: Provocation and Peace

  21.A Small Moment of Glory in Manipur: This Is Politics

  22.The Politics of Coalitions: George Fernandes, the Leader and Firefighter

  23.Why Jaya Didn’t Make It to the Rajya Sabha List: Negatives Make News

  24.Courts in India: A Slow Halal

  25.Limbo as a State of Being: Alzheimer’s Disease and the Under Toad

  26.Being Human: The Sadness of Caring in Public Life

  Epilogue: I Don’t Believe in Sad Endings

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Once, not too long ago in 2001, a twenty-four-year-old woman in Kota Baru, Malaysia, emerged from a two-by-six metre glass cage after living with 2,700 poisonous scorpions for thirty days. According to news reports that went around the world, she left the enclosure, which was positioned in the local museum, for just fifteen minutes every day to use the bathroom. She survived seven stings, two of them serious. Although she received a certificate from the museum’s chairman, acknowledging her as the ‘scorpion queen’, she said that one of her best rewards was making some new clawed friends. ‘I am particularly fond of two scorpions, and I named one of them Bob,’ she said.

  It would be difficult for me to understand why she performed the stunt.

  When I read this story, I felt I was like the woman in that glass cage, her every move being watched by everyone outside. There was nothing one could hide. There was nowhere to escape. It was a public act for some intangible reason that was hard to define. Like her, I too made a couple of good friends. One of them could be called George Fernandes. He was not really one of the scorpions but, being among them, he taught me to survive them.

  My storytelling does not lead to the conclusion that politics for a woman is a hellish choice and should be avoided. Quite to the contrary, it is cathartic, and teaches more about life in all its ramifications than anything else can. As in every other path one chooses to take in life, it is how we deal with what comes our way that forges the steel in us. It is best not to expect success or happiness in public life. At different times, survival itself is success enough, and happiness can be just the experience itself—at times tragic, and others, sublime.

  My story is therefore not about me, but just an example of what a woman in India amid politics and public life, and its many-facedness, experiences in trying to keep her integrity and humanity intact.

  A life is never a linear journey with a clear beginning and a perceptible end, unless you count the moments of birth and death. There is never total recall. When remembering what matters, one counts those incidents that left an impression on one’s mind for some inexplicable reason. We also recall an experience as meaningful only if it carries a thread into a later context. This happens when some situations repeat themselves in different forms, and, within it, ironies reinforce earlier incidents. Our mind absorbs and records everything but we often remember only parts as worthy of our attention. This interplay and replay of incidents and experiences cannot be kept smoothly chronological if one really wants to draw meaning out of them. Consequently, my book follows the same pattern-less pattern, going back and forth in time, and sometimes proceeding along a straight line.

  Memoirs are usually written when a feeling of retirement sets in. However, when there is no pause in the many aspects of one’s work that covers decades, and when some battles are yet to be fought and won, a memoir becomes just another layer of activism in the palimpsest of life.

  1

  MY BEGINNINGS

  Amidst Matriarchy and Bureaucracy

  IT WAS A TIME OF transitions. Great Britain was preoccupied with the war against Hitler. Indians were in the throes of the last years of colonial rule. Mahatma Gandhi’s voice had captured the hearts and minds of millions. And yet, the British in India continued moving the entire trappings of the governing bureaucracy from the colonial seat of Delhi up the hills to Simla to enjoy its cooler weather for six months of the year. My father, oddly named Krishna Krishna Chettur—one Krishna after his father and one for himself—was a part of that bureaucracy. That’s how we came to be in Simla in the summer months of 1942, and I, a girl of South Indian parents, came to be born in the northern part of India. I was born ten years late and a month too early when my mother, Meenakshi Chettur, went into labour following a fall down a slope. One wonders why she would have chosen to wear fashionable high heels to go for a walk along a hilly path while heavily pregnant. But there it was. The result: a fall, and the birth of a premature daughter.

  ~

  Our family belonged to the famous matrilineal society of Kerala which rejoiced when a girl was born. No frowns and tears or worrisome thoughts about dowries. No oppressive patriarchy silencing the woman’s voice. Social scientists unequivocally state about the Nairs of Kerala that in even a
s late as into the nineteenth century, ‘the absence of daughters meant a crisis’. The New York Times of 29 January 1988 described Kerala as a place ‘Where the Births Are Kept Down and Women Aren’t’.*

  At that time, the position of women in the Nair community was far ahead of that in other parts of the country. Even while the entire social structure was segmented into various groups and castes, Nair women were accorded access to personal choices, the right to property, respect, and a freedom that extended to even selecting one’s sexual partners. While the Brahmin Namboodris were the undisputed elite, the Nairs, who were initially Sudras, called themselves Kshatriyas; the Nairs were allowed a high caste status by the Namboodris who kept them as their warriors and retainers. Contrarily, the ‘untouchable’ lower castes were expected to cross over to the other side of the road if a Brahmin was walking along it. Even during the innocence of early childhood, I was aware of the derogatory tone in which some of the family elders referred to these castes. It was their way of feeling ‘Brahmin’, at the top of the caste ladder, when, in reality, they were not.

  ~

  Marumakkatayam, as matriliny is known in Malayalam, is believed to have begun in the eleventh century during, and as a result, of the hundred-year war between the Chola and Chera kingdoms. Since men were needed in the battlefield, the management of the household and family properties was exercised through the continuing presence of women in the house of their nativity. Inheritance passed through the women’s line, and their children remained the wards of their mothers, since their fathers often established new alliances with other Nair women available nearer the battlefields. The maternal uncles of these children became the heads of the household. The elderly males usually made decisions regarding war, trade or religious ceremonies, but women and men had equal freedom to acquire and discard as many partners as they wished during their lifetime. My mother once let slip that my great-grandmother, her father’s mother, who ruled the household like a true matriarchal tyrant, actually went through five husbands. The last was the cook with whom she chose to hold hands while taking a holy dip in the Ganga. Pati, as everyone called her, of course, made sure that all the men in her life were Brahmins, including the last one. However, since I was the grandchild of her son and not her daughter, I was not a Brahmin, and hence no meals at the high table.

  It is also believed by some that matriliny was devised by the Namboodris to enable them to have free access to Nair women while ensuring that their eldest sons alone married Namboodri women. This kept their lands and properties intact. The practice was first confined to the higher and land-controlling castes but was soon imitated by the Ezhavas who were part of the lower castes. In any event, this pattern of social functioning was well established when the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century.

  Women had a unique and confident place in the society of earlier Kerala which continues even today in the forms of high literacy rates and social recognition in the region. Into the twentieth century, women were able to continue their control of domestic management, take to careers, particularly in teaching and medicine, and even marry late. They always had an inalienable right to property. In fact, studies reveal how the position of women significantly contributed to the much touted ‘Kerala model of development’. However, this portrayal of the emancipated woman still seemed to always stop short of true equality with men. Examine the fate of Akkamma Cheriyan, who lived for the most part of the twentieth century. She led the biggest political demonstration ever seen in Kerala. However, soon after Independence, she was forced out of the Congress party because not only was there objection to her participation in electoral politics but there were some who felt threatened by her chances of winning. K.R. Gouri, although prominent in Kerala’s communist politics since 1947, was prevented from ever attaining the well-deserved position of chief minister of the state. She was repeatedly ridiculed by her male-dominated party and made to sit on the sidelines while men like E.K. Nayanar, known for his ribald public jokes about women, ruled the state in the name of communism and socialism.

  In 1934, the All India Women’s Conference held its tenth annual meeting in Kerala where topics such as family planning and birth control were avidly discussed. A resolution was moved by Anna Chandy, Kerala’s first woman advocate. She was supported by Lakshmi N. Menon, who happened to be my only college-going aunt’s professor. The Kerala Catholics condemned the very concept of an educated woman as sinister, anti-Christian, and an enemy of the home, but the resolution set the trend among women in the state to plan the size of their families. Lakshmi N. Menon, who was a highly popular, intelligent and respected woman, was appointed to be the Deputy Minister for External Affairs for a very short period in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet. She described the experience to me once when I was a teenager, while on a visit to my aunt’s for lunch. ‘A woman is put into the council of ministers like a curry leaf used to flavour a glass of sambaram. It is the last ingredient to be put in and the first to be taken out before it is consumed,’ she had said. An elegant woman who stood tall and had a soft, pleasing face, she didn’t shed her signature smile and twinkle in her eye as she gave me my first lesson about women in politics. I still remember the exact gesture of her hand as she enacted taking out an imaginary leaf from an imaginary glass of Kerala-style buttermilk and flicking it casually aside.

  The decline of matriliny in the nineteenth century, and the rise of nationalist politics and the communist movement in Kerala went hand in hand. European missionaries had been calling the practice of matriliny abhorrent, one that also devalued the sanctity of marriage. The Hindus in other parts of India described it as looseness of morals and thought that the state was all but indulging in disreputable activity. However, prominent ladies from the matrilineal families of the ruling elite in territories like Travancore, Cochin and Malabar went about freely in public, even impressing some missionaries who described them as educated, refined and pleasant in their ways.

  By the end of the Second World War, matrilineal taravads, as the joint family households of the Nairs are known, had considerably reduced in number. Several women followed their husbands into unitary family establishments. My aunts and uncles divided themselves up into both categories. The aunts followed their husbands if they were part of the established gentry of lawyers or public officials, and stayed home to conduct the affairs of the taravad as if their husbands were socially expendable.

  ~

  My mother’s father was among the nobility recognized by the British. They gave him the title of Rajah Sir Vasudeva Rajah of Kollengode (see photograph). Kollengode, 24 kilometres south of Palghat (locally called Palakkad), was administered by the Vengunad Nambidis, who claim descent from the ancient Kshatriya chief Vira Ravi Varma. It is said to have got its name from Kallakudil, meaning ‘blacksmith’s hut’, where the founder of the line was said to have had his early childhood. A Kollan is an ironsmith in Malayalam and confirms the connection with the trade of blacksmiths. My grandfather was a member of the Legislative Council in Delhi, and like many heads of small and big chiefdoms in Kerala, was keen on progress. Among other things, he established the Rajah’s High School in Kollengode and brought a railway station to nearby Shoranur. He had three sons and three daughters from his wife, Thottekat Jayalakshmi Amma, whose mother was the first female Sanskrit poet of Kerala.

  After my grandmother died during the birth of her seventh child, my mother, barely a year-and-a-half-old at the time, my grandfather married a woman who gave him another daughter; the second wife would die of tuberculosis soon after. My grandfather adored his brood of children but could not cope with their care. In fact, he did not really need to as they grew up under the watchful eye of Pati, with maidservants as wet nurses. A school area was set up in one of the wings of the large palace for the girls’ education. The boys went to a proper school. Everything was done for them collectively. All the children would go on outings in bullock carts and celebrate religious festivals together. Amidst it all, the servants, who had a mi
llion tasks to perform, would be at the mercy of their mischievous pranks.

  The programmes organized for ceremonial visitors from the British establishment were of particular interest since the students of Rajah’s High School were made to compose songs, often lacking in rhyme and melody to greet them. My mother particularly remembered the song they sang to welcome a certain Baron Pentland, which went, ‘Hail most noble BA (very loud)…(long pause)… ARON (softer) Penlen (as they pronounced it), hail to thee, all hail to thee!’ The greeting sounded like a cross between a hymn and a sergeant major’s order. We used to laugh every time my mother related this story, with mimicry and all thrown in.

  Every child in the family received only four sets of pavadas (ankle-length skirts), blouses or shirts and shorts to wear each year at Onam. Everyone had to learn to play the veena or sing, study Sanskrit, recite verses from religious texts and eat and sleep with almost military-like discipline. The Rajah was there only occasionally. Maids mostly brought up the motherless children of the royal household. Aunts looked after their own progeny. My mother occasionally snuggled up to her father in his large four-poster teakwood bed when he was at home. On other days, for comfort, she used to play with the large exposed breasts of the elderly maid who would lie beside her till she went to sleep. All the children slept beside each other on handwoven grass mats laid out on smooth red-oxide floors that shone from daily caring.

  While other communities could adapt to changing economic circumstances, the Nairs could not. That was because laws prevented their family assets from being used for individual enterprises. Many men within these families became layabouts, spending their time doing nothing except conversing with the managerial staff, dabbling in petty business ideas, visiting the lands under cultivation and reading the Gita or the Reader’s Digest. Some occasionally eyed the buxom maidservants with a touch of lust in their eyes. Some spent hours in their prayer rooms, reciting endless shlokas from the Gita to pass their time. Extreme religiosity absolved them of the responsibility to bother with much else.