For all their access, political journalists in the capital are often the ultimate outsiders in Lutyens’ Delhi. Few of them have social intercourse with the stately homes and grand drawing rooms of the permanent power elite who live in the heart of the old imperial city. This is where the Indian establishment, as opposed to the itinerant and temporary member of Parliament, resides. For political journalists, there is an inherent and voyeuristic curiosity about what happens in these homes and what motivates those who live, party and network there to take and push decisions that end up deciding the fate of millions. Tavleen Singh likes to call this cosy ecosystem the “durbar”, and has used that word to title her book. To extend the imagery, the world she describes is the diwan-i-khas of the Republic of India. She knows this world well, having being born into it and lived there all her life. However, she also escaped the cocoon of Lutyens’ Delhi when she became a journalist and began to explore and travel to the rest of India, from small towns to far-off villages. This is what makes her book so riveting. It has the stories, the anecdotes and the sheer gossip that only a Lutyens’ Zone natural can provide. It has also the sharp opinions, the political insights and the assessments of India’s social and economic problems, and policy failures that it takes a watchful journalist to provide. These can only be experienced and understood if you leave the familiar and incestuous cocoon of south and central Delhi. Tavleen has been a journalist for some 35 years. Her memoir covers, however, only the first 15 odd years of her career — from 1975 and the Emergency, when she started off at the Statesman, to 1991 and Rajiv Gandhi’s death. While there are references to the years following that assassination, these are sparse. The meat of the book is in describing the decline, resilience and tragedy of Indira Gandhi, the star-crossed destinies of her sons — and the 1980s, a turbulent, forgettable decade that, to Tavleen’s mind, cost India so much. Tavleen and Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi had several common friends. They got to know each other well during the Emergency and just afterwards. Singh was very much part of the social ring when Rajiv became Prime Minister in 1984. Exactly two years later, in December 1986, she co-authored a profile of Sonia for India Today. It didn’t go down well with the family: “Some weeks later I wrote to her to offer condolences on her father’s death and got a polite handwritten reply in her neat, carefully formed handwriting. My New Year’s card in January 1987 was not written by hand and signed by both of them as it was the year before. It came from the Prime Minister’s Office and was formally signed by Rajiv Gandhi. I had been dropped.” It was hard and sudden. As the book tells us, Sonia’s relationship with Tavleen ran the gamut: from a caring and considerate friend who dropped in at Tavleen’s Golf Links flat, shared a laugh and brought gifts for her young son Aatish to a distant figure who looked past Tavleen when she visited her following the horrific night of May 21, 1991. Why did this happen Few in New Delhi, or even the Congress, know Sonia well enough to truly answer that question and to explain what makes her tick, her inner thoughts and closest fears and concerns. Those who do know her well rarely speak or write about it. Depending on how you see it, this maintains the secrecy or the mystique of 10 Janpath. Tavleen’s book helps us breach it somewhat. It offers a window not only to the life of a few individuals but also to a power matrix that seduces or seeks to seduce even the non-initiated and the unwilling. It converts a perfectly ordinary and everyday couple into practitioners of a siege mentality, of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, including a bizarre rogue operation to implicate Rajiv and Sonia’s social friends in the Indira Gandhi assassination case — and of an environment of thick and impenetrable sycophancy that cuts off reality from those at the centre of the durbar. Early in the book, Tavleen interviews Indira Gandhi and asks her what she regrets about the Emergency: “‘Censorship’, she said with a sweet smile, ‘if there had not been press censorship, I would have known from you people what my officials were doing.’” Yet a decade later, history repeats itself, as Rajiv and his so-called Camelot box themselves in. To Tavleen, this was not always innocent: “To those of us who still saw Rajiv and Sonia’s friends in the drawing rooms of Delhi it was instantly obvious that they suddenly had a lot of money. No longer did they travel economy when they went abroad and no longer did they stay with friends in London and New York I remember on a trip to Washington being astounded to discover that one of Rajiv’s poorest friends spent a month occupying two suites in the Watergate hotel. Friends of Rajiv who had lived on salaries that barely enabled them to afford a small Indian car now drove around in foreign cars and in their drawing rooms suddenly appeared expensive works of art and antiques.” Inevitably, those who benefit from this system only speak or hear (or do) what they choose to: “There were stories, spread by the Prime Minister’s security guards, that when one of them had tried to use a metal detector on Mrs Quattrocchi, during a routine security check, she had kicked him and thrown a tantrum.” One friend of the family called in prominent Sikhs of Delhi, including war veterans, in the first week of November 1984 and got into “a hysterical fit”. “Shaking with rage”, he said: “The Sikhs are on trial. They have to prove their loyalty to this country.” The most delicious anecdote comes from 1987, shortly after Rajiv impetuously sacked foreign secretary A.P. Venkateswaran. This earned him much criticism but a flunkey explained it away to Tavleen: “The Prime Minister is a man of some style and sophistication and Venkat had this habit of sitting with his leg crossed over his knee. This used to upset the Prime Minister.” Venkateswaran lost only his job. In another era and another durbar, he may have lost his head. Thank god for small mercies.
Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
