Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  George Fernandes was instrumental in Zail Singh’s allowance being raised. Also, the contentious Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill (1986), subsequently prepared by the Rajiv Gandhi government, was finally withdrawn by V.P. Singh in 1990. The bill, which would have authorized the government to censor personal mails, had earlier been returned unsigned by both Zail Singh and R. Venkataraman. Zail Singh remained a loyal friend to us. He defied the Rajiv Gandhi government in August 1989 by attending the inauguration of our International Convention on Tibet and Peace in South Asia. He had not replied to our invitation, but on the day of the event all the newspapers had headlines that the former President had been advised by the government not to attend it. ‘Ha! What wonderful publicity we have today! Now our programme is already a success,’ I remember exclaiming to George Sahib when I reached his place early and showed him the newspapers.

  Giani Zail Singh arrived at the venue just fifteen minutes after a call came from his office informing us that he was on his way. He stated significantly in his opening speech that democracy is kept alive in countries by its people and not by its governments. It was a big day for me as the secretary and main organizer of the convention. It was also a big ‘coming out’ occasion for me to be part of an internationally publicized event, annoying our own Congress government and the Chinese, and befriending well-known figures like Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian of the Greens movement in Germany and others from the USA, Russia, Australia, Nepal and other countries. I got busy arranging for safety pins for the paper name badges (names handwritten by my daughter in calligraphy-style sitting in bed early morning), to mobilizing student-volunteers from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), coordinating speakers with Professor Mantosh Sondhi, a great Tibet supporter, making all the arrangements at Constitution Club, and organizing accommodation and transport for everybody. It was a superhuman effort which made me ready to take on the organization of any function after that, be it weddings, handloom conventions, huge crafts bazaars and, of course, elections. The Tibetans, who have always relied on the support from socialists from the time of Dr Rajendra Prasad and Jayaprakash Narayan, were overjoyed at the sudden boost of voices supporting their cause, as India had remained silent on their problems even while being courteous and hospitable to the Dalai Lama. The wide publicity that our convention received, carried across the world by Petra Kelly and others, had motivated many other countries to hold conferences. Since many socialists managed to enter Parliament through that secret meeting between George Fernandes, Mulayam Singh and Ajit Singh to counter Devi Lal at my tiny apartment, a Parliamentarians’ Committee on Tibet consisting of these socialist members and MPs from other parties was initiated with a conference at the Hamdard Auditorium in Delhi. Till then, it had been an uphill struggle for His Holiness. Three months later, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

  My children had learned to take all these activities—certainly unusual among IAS wives belonging to upper-class families, and with two children—in their stride. But I never stopped to think whether I was doing anything out of the way. When Aditi and I travelled to Ladakh with photographer Kamal Sahai for my book on the crafts of the state, the airport at Leh became a trouble spot. Flights had been cancelled every day, hotels were overbooked as a result, and there was pandemonium with passengers shouting about missed connections and no place to stay. The airstrip was being repaired and pilots were refusing to fly outside a very short time slot. The Governor had ordered a special flight earlier to evacuate some people but the logjam began again. The Indian Airlines offered no seating place, food, solace or solution. I was agitated and demanded the airport manager arrange lunch and request the Governor for another flight. When he prevaricated, I booked a call to the Governor and made the request myself, also leading the passengers to a gherao of the airport manager so that he could not leave his room. Lo and behold, in an hour another flight had been arranged, we all got packed lunches, a heart patient got a stretcher and medical attention, and as we climbed up the steps to the aircraft, I got a cheer from all the passengers. Aditi stood amazed at her mother, although I am sure it must have been a little embarrassing for a fourteen-year-old.

  The latter part of the eighties and most of the nineties were full of agitations of one kind or another. There were big demonstrations at Parliament Street and Jantar Mantar. I appeared on the cover of The Week holding up a placard against signing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accord. I wrote fierce articles in The Economic Times hammering Arthur Dunkel, who led the GATT campaign, for suggesting the paisley design on his tie could be patented, bringing benefit to the craftsperson who designed it. Economics, politics and India’s community culture all seem to come together in my argument against patenting designs individually.

  ~

  In February 1986, George Fernandes was the convener of countrywide demonstrations against Rajiv Gandhi in which all opposition parties and senior leaders including H.N. Bahuguna, Madhu Dandavate, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Samar Mukerjee and V.K. Malhotra in Delhi participated. The turnout of the better organized, cadre-based parties like the BJP and CPM (Communist Party of India [Marxist]) were the largest even though the Janata Party was the convening entity. We were all taken to the Mandir Marg police station where we were kept for three hours. The leaders used the time to make fiery speeches. It was one of the few demonstrations of a genuinely joint opposition that went far beyond everyone’s expectations.

  At the last moment, the trade unions pressed George Fernandes to be in Bombay for their show, so I reported all that happened to him in detail, ending with:

  The newspapers said 8000 to 9000 persons were arrested, but the police station announced the exact number as 13,800 persons, including 750 women, which included all of us. As Aditi says, ‘Mummy, if you hadn’t gone would they have said 749 women?’ She obviously believes the police ensures accuracy.

  Outside of these united efforts which gave some feeling of joy, inside the Janata Party—as Rajiv Gandhi’s popularity could be seen evaporating because of the failure of the Rajiv-Longowal Accord and the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord*—a sense of discord and murkiness reigned. Biju Patnaik did not let the socialists in Orissa raise their heads, and was frustrated with Chandra Shekhar ‘over everything and nothing’ as George Fernandes wrote. Pramila Dandavate did not want Maneka Gandhi taken into the Party as the Emergency had not been forgotten. However, Ramakrishna Hegde firmly insisted upon it, leading to Surendra Mohan being furious with everyone. H.D. Deve Gowda and Abdul Nazir Sab in Karnataka had their own list of complaints about each other. All big ex-Congress style leaders wanted a big ‘wave’ to appear to win rather than use their diminishing strength of money and muscle. George Fernandes spent his time rushing between workers’ meetings, strikes and bandhs all over the country, handling the politics in Bihar with Karpoori Thakur, and mollifying sulking colleagues in different states. Often, I became the messenger back and forth as everyone believed that I had no vested interests of my own. I was too junior and harmless.

  Occasionally, after a rough afternoon with an angry Chandra Shekhar who repeatedly referred to him as the ‘militant socialist neta’, George Fernandes would grumble and mutter under his breath about the pointlessness of doing all this. All these manipulations and manoeuvres pointed to the forthcoming meet at Parandwadi in Maharashtra in the mid-nineties where Chandra Shekhar, Biju Patnaik and Ramakrishna Hegde were all wanting to be elected president but not really coming out and saying so. Dummies and distractions were put up along the way. Generally, George Fernandes became the scapegoat and I complained about why he always had to play the midwife to nurse someone else’s ambitions. His biggest and constant frustration was one that was common to most socialist groups and parties with weak organizational structures: Leaders were so consumed with their own importance that everything revolved around their egos and whoever hung around them. There was no commitment to a solid ideology or long-term loyalty to the organization. Everyone wanted to be a leader. Nobody was con
tent as a worker. His colleagues also complained that George Fernandes ran around too much to assuage other people’s anxieties. Of course, many of them didn’t add that he was not nursing theirs, although they expressed it to me till my very last day in active party politics! It wasn’t the best environment to encourage a newly converted political worker like me but hope and idealism were the occasionally elusive props to lean on.

  Meanwhile, Chandra Shekhar liked the leather shoulder bag I carried to a meeting with him. I told him it was handmade by rural artisans in Rajasthan. He asked me to get a thousand bags made for the main delegates for the Parandwadi Party Convention where he was hoping to be Party president. I was thrilled that my involvement with politics was benefitting our rural people and got them made in record time at a hundred rupees each, while being bedridden in the midst of a bad bout of jaundice. The bill came to one hundred thousand rupees apart from packing and transportation, which was a big amount in the nineties. Imagine my shock when I realized he expected me to gift these to the Party. No one was going to pay me. Greatly annoyed and realizing my financial plight, George Fernandes persuaded the Bombay trade unions to make the contribution on my behalf to pay the artisans. I learnt a lesson on how parties function. There always has to be a donor for public work no matter how much personal money may have been available.

  ~

  The Bofors scandal exploded out of Sweden during the late eighties. George Fernandes made two trips to Sweden to meet officials and journalists closely connected with the Bofors revelations by the Swedish newspaper Expressen like Per Wendel, and Indian journalist Chitra Subramaniam, and socialist colleagues in Europe who facilitated many inroads into the system. Swedish social democratic politician Olof Palme had supported him during the Emergency, and Bernt Carlsson, who was appointed the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia in 1987, had been an old friend. At one time, he shared an apartment with Ram Jethmalani who was on the same Bofors trail, and shared many funny stories of how the landlady/hostess tried to seduce them both!

  Meanwhile, I would lecture George Sahib by telling him he should not hobnob with people like Arun Nehru, who was by now out of the Congress party and by V.P. Singh’s side on the Bofors bandwagon, but take to the streets and build a people’s movement instead. V.P. Singh joined hands with Chaudhary Devi Lal, and as more big names came on their cavalcade, Rajiv Gandhi struggled, giving speeches in his lawns about destabilizing forces in the country. Then I would laugh at my temerity to lecture George Sahib because there was no way his political instincts would keep him away from a situation developing in a way that would displace the Congress leadership.

  There was more heartburning and agitation in the minds of leaders composing the different groups that were attempting to merge against the Congress. Deals, disgruntlements and celebrations happened simultaneously when the Janata Party, Charan Singh’s Lok Dal, Sharad Pawar’s Congress (Socialist) and V.P. Singh’s Jan Morcha merged after a million tussles and confabulations. When the Janata Party came into being after the Emergency, Jayaprakash Narayan committed the mistake of not insisting on an election for its leader. He nominated Morarji Desai instead of creating a situation where the legitimate concerns of Jagjivan Ram, Chaudhury Charan Singh and others could have been addressed democratically. When the Janata Dal finally came into being, the seeds of its fall were also clearly built in. The worst was the very first formal occasion of electing the prime minister. The rest, as they say, is history.

  In 1989, V.P. Singh needed the support of several parties that merged to form the Janata Dal but never formed a team of close, trusted colleagues. Files were locked in a cupboard in his bedroom. If something required urgent signature, the key to the cupboard was in the pocket of the loose white pyjamas he was wearing. On the day V.P. Singh was expected to be elected as leader of the Party in the Central Hall of Parliament, Chandra Shekhar had almost come to terms with the fact that he may not be the contender but that he could win the position in a fair election. However, V.P. Singh proposed the name of Devi Lal to divert Chandra Shekhar. Devi Lal, in turn, as part of what seemed like a deal between them, passed the crown back to V.P. Singh who then declared Devi Lal the deputy prime minister. George Fernandes had worked hard and long to prime V.P. Singh to lead the combine that would defeat Rajiv Gandhi after the Bofors scandal with ideological material, and getting others in place and taking a back seat in every power-packed situation. He constantly said, reworking an old phrase, ‘If there wasn’t a V.P. Singh, we would have had to invent one’. He knew his flaws well, and believed anyone, including himself, was more deserving, but he was always the loyal soldier, formulating strategies by reading the tea leaves realistically for a larger political goal.

  I was sitting with George Fernandes in his office awaiting the commonly expected developments to be announced when the Devi Lal-V.P. Singh manoeuvre took place. He was stunned, as was everyone else. Without a second thought he telephoned Chandra Shekhar, sharing his shock and disgust at the way things had unfolded. We knew this was a thoroughly miserable start to a new ‘clean’ era. The end came soon enough through the tumultuous events that led to the announcement of the Mandal Commission recommendations. This too was decided surreptitiously without the prime minister consulting or confiding in the BJP and the communist parties, who were the main outside support to his minority government. Ironically, he had done this not because of firmly held ideological beliefs about the upliftment of the backward classes, but to checkmate Devi Lal’s own soaring ambitions.

  *The nurses ‘irrigated’ his inner passages as part of the healing treatment.

  *The Khalistan movement was a Sikh movement that called for a separate country for Sikhs.

  *President of the Akali Dal during Punjab insurgency in the 1980s, Harchand Singh Longowal was assassinated in 1985 at a Sherpur village gurdwara.

  *The Shah Bano case involved a sixty-two-year-old woman from Indore asking that her husband, who had divorced her, pay her a monthly maintenance sum. While the Supreme Court ruled in her favour, the ruling was perceived to be against Islam. The Congress, owing to the pressures of an election year, sided with the Muslim orthodoxy’s dismissal of the woman’s right to have access to the maintenance amount and responsibility of the spouse, and came up with the Muslim Women Act of 1986 which gave Muslim women the right to a maintenance sum for only three months after divorce.

  *The Rajiv-Longowal Accord also known as the Punjab Accord was signed between Rajiv Gandhi and Harcharan Singh Longowal in 1985, wherein against the acceptance of the Akali Dal’s demands, the Akali Dal had agreed to stop their agitation. This drew the wrath of several Sikh leaders and politicians. Some of the clauses in the agreement weren’t fulfilled eventually. In 1987, Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene signed the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord in Colombo. With the aim of resolving the Sri Lankan Civil War, Colombo was to relinquish power to the provinces, the Sri Lankan troops were to withdraw and the Tamil rebels were to surrender their arms to the Indian Peace-Keeping Force or IPKF. However, the Tamil groups, especially the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) did not keep to their word. Violence ensued.

  14

  ELECTIONS

  The Highest University of Politics

  MY HOME FRONT IN THE early eighties was not all that pleasant. Some of my in-laws thought anyone going into politics in those days was bound to join the crooks and criminals. Close friends from childhood were all from upper-class backgrounds; they thought I was going down the drain for hobnobbing with a rabble-rousing trade unionist, who never combed his hair, washed his clothes and was rumoured to drink half a bottle of rum every evening just because his name was ‘Fernandes’. Some independent journalists wrote that when George Fernandes was Minister for Industries in the Janata government he took a flight to Mumbai every weekend to be with different women. It was hinted through rumours that he had sunk so low in politics that he had only Sampa Das* and Jaya Jaitly as advisers. Sampa was a Bengali friend who worked in the Indi
an Airlines and was devoted to George Sahib. She faithfully cooked hilsa (fish) curry for him to carry when he was passing through Calcutta. The thing is, no one understood the logic or reality of men and women being equally devoted to him. Men would jump off a cliff or be ready to go to jail if he so ordered. Eventually, even my set of friends and acquaintances began to be wary of me and often took a dig at politics, politicians and political parties just to get under my skin or maybe to feel superior. I was so pathetic at asserting myself that I would ‘hmm-ha’, smile vaguely and pretend I hadn’t noticed the pinpricks.

  Stupidly, I would feel miserable and cry when I recounted these unpleasant incidents to George Sahib, who barely had time to listen or comment except once, after he had gone to a dinner at Arun Shourie’s place where many socialites were present. I must have become the subject of some conversation there in my absence, because his next note to me said:

  They are getting jealous of you, that you are carving something out of your own. But more than that, it seems to me they are worried that one of their crowd is moving away from them. The Establishment, all over the world, gets upset when one of theirs turns ‘traitor’. So don’t worry over the effete elite and their views about you or your work.

  Despite my own well-pedigreed background, I did always have an aversion to elitism, and that snobbish intellectualism that substituted action. People who wrote feature articles analysing and opining always seemed to believe they had a better grip on reality than those in the trenches lining the dusty, bumpy road of politics.

  I used to suffer from sharp sneezing attacks and headaches from the piercing smell of beedi smoke or perspiring armpits from polyester shirting in public buses. It happened with ladies’ perfumes as well. I saw this as a metaphor for my crossing over from a comparatively genteel life and refined background to all things that came from the street. Doing this in the company of the most radical anti-establishment person around was unusual for everyone, including myself. My mother used to remind me that her grandmother, the grand Dhatri Maharani of Kollengode, was just as perverse. She fought the British while wearing her large golden globe-shaped earrings and multiple necklaces, arranged for martial arts classes secretly and grew medicinal plants, both against British regulations, and ‘never wore a blouse, except when Englishmen came to visit’. It was a disappointment to my diamond-earring-loving mother that I only wore cheap, thirty-rupee, silver earrings picked up in the Bhuj bazaar, with a tribal hansli, a necklace, worth fifteen rupees bought from a roadside haat by a forest in Orissa. From someone she hoped would play the piano, wear her hair short and speak immaculate French, she was now worried whether my participation in trade union and political demonstrations would land me in jail. Being a mother, her concern was only for my safety. Hence she was happy with my argument that if I didn’t wear a gold chain no one would snatch it. As for my anti-establishment activities, she’d say: ‘Well, if you are in the company of George, I know you will be safe’. Little did she know how he loved to court trouble, had survived many attacks on his life, enjoyed sojourns in jail and was always ready for the next political fight.