Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  George Fernandes was the eternal peacemaker and persuader among miffed leaders with big egos and those expecting important party positions in what was hoped to be a new dispensation at last. He kept retreating from any designation he was assigned, to hand it over to Reoti Raman Singh and other colleagues of Mulayam Singh Yadav who needed to be mollified. Devi Lal, as Chairman of the Parliamentary Board, did not even allow George Fernandes to sit in their meetings and humiliated him by making him sit outside. During the same period, prominent women leaders like Pramila Dandavate were insulted by being told they couldn’t get tickets because they were city women with short hair. I often had to play chauffeur, driving people from one meeting to another while sitting outside uninvolved in the heavy but utterly ridiculous politicking, bickering and tussling that went on for people lobbying to have their cronies given tickets. Each thought if more of their people were elected they could pitch for the top spot. Since George Fernandes was totally sidelined because of the vaulting ambitions of others, he found it difficult to get his loyal stalwarts from the socialist movement tickets to fight the elections.

  George Fernandes joined forces with Ajit Singh and Mulayam Singh (the latter having common socialist associates) to accommodate in his people through the other two who were on the Parliamentary Board. I was living in a tiny flat with my daughter in Sarvapriya Vihar at that time. I was asked to host these confabulations so that they could carry out their discussions in utmost secrecy. For two long days, they negotiated and fought, cooped up in my living room, arguing for or against some name or the other. Mulayam Singh would get annoyed and often attempt to walk out, but each time he did that my faulty door handle would stick and he would struggle to open it. At these times, the other two would manage to persuade him to cool down and return to the negotiating table. The success of this strategy was that Devi Lal and Chandra Shekhar were none the wiser, and many deserving and impeccable socialists like Mohan Singh, Harshavardhan Singh, Bhabani Shankar Hota and Gopal Pacherwal entered Parliament through these other channels. Just to keep the negotiations going till they ended cordially, my daughter and I kept making tea and snacks for them, pretending not to notice whenever the door jammed.

  Fine politicians like the late Dinesh Goswami from Assam, and veteran socialists like Madhu Dandavate, Rabi Ray, who later became Speaker in the newly elected government, Surendra Mohan, the thinker and academician among the socialists, well-meaning persons from the labour movement and NGOs, and I, were assigned to work together to create a policy document for the National Front on issues like the right to work, reservations for the backward classes, and policies on agriculture and education among others. Someone in the group from the NGO sector once sarcastically asked whether politicians actually worked in order for us to have the right to demand the right to work. No one was amused. There always seemed to be a dividing line between political parties and NGOs who call themselves members of ‘civil’ society. Politicians grumbled, asking if that meant they were ‘uncivil’. The socialists, in particular, believed in the importance of the right to work and remembered the Antyodaya scheme, which had earlier provided food for work, and other such programmes initiated under the Janata government. Jobs and employment were always a major concern. It was later transformed into a national programme called the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). This caused another set of problems like leakage of funds under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime, and continues till today with major attempts at plugging the leaks now under the NDA-II government.

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  The mood in the country was building up against Rajiv Gandhi on the Bofors matter and V.P. Singh’s meetings were a star attraction. George Fernandes was successfully managing to get the BJP and the Left parties to support the National Front formation. He had regular talks with his friends in the BJP and RSS as well as with Indrajit Gupta and others from the Left in Delhi. He was bringing them around to support from the outside under certain well-defined conditions. The Election Commission announced it was introducing electronic voting machines in one hundred odd constituencies. I found it significant as these were where the Congress expected to lose but needed to win to reach a majority. I came across a lengthy, detailed, well-researched article on electronic voting fraud in the New Yorker and how it was possible to programme the chip to vote as instructed in a pre-determined pattern. I also found it odd that these were not being introduced in urban centres among educated voters for trial but in out-of-the-way places.

  I found an expert in digital matters who was also convinced it was possible and that for this very reason the system was not in use in many sophisticated democracies. The two of us worked hard and put together a convincing presentation on how electronic voting machines could be pre-programmed to produce a dishonest result, and how the number of machines and places where they planned to be introduced corresponded with the seats Congress needed to win. I requested the top Party leadership to allow us to show this to them and the press. A huge contingent of seventy journalists arrived at the press conference called by Devi Lal and V.P. Singh at Haryana Bhavan, where we were asked to make our presentation. Of course, it was all speculation, but backed with evidence and an actual demonstration of how a vote could be rigged.

  The publicity that followed was huge. The use of the machines was cancelled. They reappeared in a modified form only a couple of years later when all political parties were called to the Election Commission to satisfy themselves of the functions of its specially developed machines. The National Front leadership were mighty pleased with their achievement at discrediting the ruling Party and sowing suspicion at that stage. I faded quietly into the distance. The excitement over my efforts to save over a hundred seats from fraud was satisfaction enough. Also, it was a pre-election effort and not like the crybabies of the present day who blame the electronic voting machines (EVMs) when they lose badly. But I did wonder if my being a man would have afforded my efforts a more effective recognition within the Party.

  The ensuing 1989 general elections saw violence in Rajiv Gandhi’s constituency, Amethi. Even the Gandhi family’s old friend Pupul Jayakar protested and signed a letter to be sent to the President of India. We went to complain to the Chief Election Commissioner R. Peri Sastri. We were shocked to find him literally shaking with nervousness.

  Each involvement with elections till the Election Commission got strong from within as an autonomous body, was a struggle against booth capture, violence, polling agents being driven away, vote contractors promising to organize bulk votes and disappearing into the night, finding caches of home-made bombs, and the blocking of poorer castes from reaching polling booths. Thugs employed by candidates went in procession on motor cycles behind the upper-caste candidates swearing to anoint their foreheads with the blood of our candidates. Nobody stopped them. This was Bihar till a new Election Commissioner, T.N. Seshan, came along and created interminable, phased polling, calibrated movements of security forces, and teams of observers who were generally kept marooned in their guest houses, by a clever Lalu Prasad Yadav who was the Chief Minister. These were the bad lands of Bihar and as it appeared to me, here, election fraud was allowed in the name of social justice.

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  Lalu Prasad Yadav’s casteist leanings shown by the favouring of only his community, and information about his rampant corruption kept rising to the surface. V.P. Singh had given prime place to three leaders as faces of his Mandal movement: Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav. The latter had declared at a socialist conference in Madhya Pradesh that he had been a socialist all his life, but now he was a Yadav. This shocked many of the older clan who knew Lohia’s slogan was the abolition of caste through positive discrimination, inter-caste marriages and other means. He had also warned that beneficiaries of this process should not adopt the feudal, corrupt ways of the upper castes. The reverse seemed to be happening now. Most had invested in gold, properties, dynastic ways and an air of arrogance they had fought against earlier.
r />   After the fall of the V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar governments, in quick succession, Congress Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao had signed all the pacts leading to a globalized economy which to us seemed like the domination of corporate global rule. George Fernandes had taken on the fight against India signing the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement leading to globalization. He believed it would harm India for generations to come. He campaigned with leaders of state governments like J. Jayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu) and Biju Patnaik (Orissa) with a team of scientists, economic and agricultural experts to explain how federal structures and the country’s sovereignty would be eroded by global corporates. When he went to Patna, Lalu received them dressed in a lungi and vest, sans his underwear, and with his feet up on the coffee table. Considering he had been the humble youth leader who would bring tea and make loudspeaker announcements for stalwarts like George Fernandes and Madhu Limaye during the Janata Party movement, George Fernandes felt thoroughly humiliated. The team was evicted from the Patna state guest house the following morning. Meanwhile, Lalu went around campaigning on the platform of anti-WTO telling the public that under the new regime, large seedless tomatoes would be produced. When these were cut, cow dung would pour out. He made a mockery of the movement. Why? Because these Mandal icons felt that George Fernandes and his team, which comprised of naxalites, Marxists, socialists, the RSS and activists like Medha Patkar, were a deliberate anti-Mandal diversion in which economic sovereignty was being highlighted and the caste factor was being deliberately sidelined.

  In mid-1994, Nitish Kumar approached George Fernandes at a trade union conference in Dhanbad asking him to take steps to break away from Lalu’s grip and the Janata Dal. His Kurmi caste was being marginalized. Documents had surfaced proving corruption in the purchase and sale of fodder by Lalu Prasad’s Bihar government. George Fernandes went to V.P. Singh asking how we could fight the Bofors corruption if our own house was tainted. V.P. Singh refused to listen. Fourteen members of the Janata Dal headed by George Fernandes, including Rabi Ray, Nitish Kumar, Harikishore Singh and others, covering four states, as required to be declared a national party, broke away and formed the Janata Dal (G) and began a process that ended into the formation of the Samata Party in late 1994. Many of us second-rung Party activists were part of it. We filled the Talkatora Stadium at its formation conference. I was nominated general secretary of the Party on the suggestion of Harikishore Singh, a senior socialist Parliamentarian from Bihar.

  The Samata Party went into the 1995 Assembly elections in Bihar fighting all the seats on its own. While Nitish Kumar travelled in helicopters, George Fernandes, as president of the newly formed Party, travelled in an old Ambassador car on Bihar’s legendary roads which Lalu had promised to make as smooth as film actor Hema Malini’s cheeks, but forgot to do so. Meanwhile, a case was filed in the Supreme Court with clinching evidence of the fodder scam. I organized demonstrations everywhere including at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, dressing up two-wheeler scooters as cows. We were called ‘a small but feisty party’ by the media as these demonstrations always had something eye-catching about them.

  The 1995 Assembly election in Bihar against Lalu Yadav was a complete washout since the opposition was not united. It was hell for me handling the organizational end with the usual booth capturing, non-deployment of central forces and those pre-stamped ballot papers. When we asked the Left parties to become our ally in the fight against Lalu Yadav, their cynical reply was, ‘Win the elections, and then we will join you’.

  The Samata Party got an ignominious seven seats out of the 300 plus that it fought for. Nitish Kumar wanted to resign his MLA seat and keep his Parliamentary one despite strong advice and pleas from all of us immediately after. We sat in the fading evening light at 3, Krishna Menon Marg, discussing this and many other important issues for the future of the Party. George Sahib pleaded most strongly, refusing to permit Nitish Kumar to resign, saying he needed to be stationed in Bihar to fight and build the Party on the ground as its true leader and that being in Parliament was not good enough to capture the hearts of the people of Bihar. In the middle of the discussion, Nitish Kumar suddenly got up and went inside the house. We thought he had gone to the washroom. When he came back he said he had telephoned the press and announced he had resigned his Bihar Assembly seat. He presented our shocked group with a fait accompli. That was probably the first sign of his self-serving ways. I angrily asked how he could defy authority and well-meant advice in this underhand manner. He remained silent, smiling slightly, but he may not have ever forgiven me. After all, I guess, how could a woman speak to him like that? George Sahib was shocked and upset, and relapsed into an angry silence.

  In my office drawer, I still keep a wad of pre-stamped ballot papers from Bihar (see photo section). They had been obtained by one of our Party workers and reached me soon enough. They were stamped serially in exactly the same place, positioned just left of the wheel symbol of the Janata Dal (then headed by Lalu Yadav, the chief minister of Bihar). Section 144 was in place on Parliament Street near the Election Commission of India. We could not go in a procession to protest and bring this to the notice of the public. It was too important to keep to a closed door meeting. I made poster-sized cloth banners in protest against the Bihar government and distributed them to our Samata Party activists who kept them folded in their pockets. We walked in twos and threes till we reached the gates of the Election Commission where we whipped out the banners and raised slogans. The media loved it. We discussed the issue at length with the grave Election Commissioners and presented our evidence. They promised to enquire. The very next day news came that the printing press which had brought out these ballot papers had burned down in a mysterious fire which was ignored by the state fire department till a nearby army establishment saw it and raised an alarm. The evidence was thus destroyed and District Magistrate Raj Bala Varma, who was said to be a favourite of the chief minister, was not only promoted but was often seen in close attendance to Rabri Devi when she became the chief minister during the time her husband Lalu Yadav was convicted of corruption.

  All these incidents sank after minor short-term storms. ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Secularism’ were justifications for such atrocities to be condoned by the elite media and their aligned parties. These activities kept us busy and in the public eye in the capital of India but made no difference in Bihar which was in the grip of state and caste factors. Since I led all such agitations it did not make me popular among the ‘liberal’ brigade of the Left and Congress. It didn’t bother me in the least.

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  In the general elections of 1996, the Samata Party formed an alliance with the BJP. George Fernandes argued that the Samata Party needed to do so for its very survival. Secondly, post the Babri Masjid demolition*, George Fernandes did not believe in making the Party untouchable, even as we would fight extreme communal activities. He said joining hands would moderate any extremist thinking, Hindu or any other, since ‘Mandir’ as religious consolidation was merely a counter to ‘Mandal’ which was seen as caste dividing Hindu society. Also, had we not remained a strong separate entity, it was possible that votes from the Kurmi and other backward castes would shift to the BJP, decimating us in the process. There was also a rumour that Nitish Kumar was considering joining the BJP. George Fernandes was lying in Jaslok Hospital in Bombay; he had to be operated for the second time following a head injury he received from fainting in the bath while washing clothes, weakened as he was from a bout of viral fever. It was during this time that an invitation came for him to attend a major adiveshan (conference) the BJP was holding in Bombay; L.K. Advani, its topmost leader, was addressing it. George Fernandes asked Nitish Kumar to go in his place. I suggested accompanying him to dispel media speculation that Nitish Kumar was one step away from joining the BJP. George Fernandes too felt this was a good idea. Advani was very effective in dispelling notions that the BJP was a Hindu-only party. He told the huge crowd that everyone was free to follow any religion or
God they wished as long as they accepted they were Indian citizens from a common ancient civilization. We saw no problem with that.

  The alliance in the ensuing election saw no campaigning on the Ram Mandir, Article 370 or any other contentious issue. There were no slogans of Jai Sri Ram that had filled the air a few years earlier. It was purely about the condition of Bihar. As usual, I was active behind the scenes. The result of the Bihar alliance was that we succeeded in ensuring that Lalu Yadav had fewer seats than H.D. Deve Gowda in the Janata Dal combine enabling Gowda to be the prime minister. When he later stepped down in favour of I.K. Gujral, the latter telephoned me to seek George Fernandes’s and my support to be the prime minister. He had a good relationship with us, having attended our then-seen-as-maverick international conferences of Tibet and Burma when many others had stayed away.