The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  ‘I’ll attend to it,’ responded Vidur, the guardian of conventions, disappearing indoors. He emerged with two new cubes, large-sided, their markings highly visible. They looked as if they had been made with paper, the material of ballots, but when Vidur tossed them in a trial spin they exuded an air of solidity - and landed with a highly promising thud. ‘Let me throw them first,’ Duryodhani said.

  She picked up the dice, then looked at them, at Arjun, and at the silent faces around the room. And as she prepared to throw them, Ganapathi, I realized, even in my sleep, that I didn’t need to dream any more. Her strained face, her staring eyes, the trembling of her hands as she picked up the instruments of her fate, told their own story. She was going to lose.

  115

  When I woke up my ambivalence had gone.

  Sometimes, Ganapathi, dreams enable you to see reality more clearly. I looked around me and found the evidence everywhere I had failed to search. I sent Arjun to speak to Krishna. I summoned Nakul from the Home Ministry to give me the information he was paid to conceal; I wrote to Sahadev in Washington for the information he was paid to rebut. Even lying in my Brahminical bed, I realized how Duryodhani and her minions had been stripping the nation of the values and institutions we had been right to cherish.

  The picture that emerged, Ganapathi, was sickening. The Siege had become a licence for the police to do much as they pleased, settling scores, locking up suspects, enemies and sometimes creditors without due process, and above all, picking up young men at the village tea-shops to have their vasa cut off in fulfilment of the arbitrary sterilization quotas that Shakuni had persuaded the Prime Minister to decree. As it wore on, it became painfully apparent, even sitting in my room as I was, that the reason for which I had been willing to suspend my criticism was simply not tenable. The poor were not getting a better deal as a result of the suspension of the freedoms of the relatively privileged; if anything, they were worse off than before. They were now subject to random police harassment, to forced displacement from their homes in the interests of slum-clearance and urban renewal, to compulsory vasectomies in pursuance of population-control campaigns on which they had never voted. Even the abolition of bonded labour had simply added to the pool of the floating unemployed. The slave who had toiled for no reward but a roof over his head and two square meals a day found he was free to sleep in the streets and starve.

  And throughout it all there was no outlet for the frustration and humiliation of the disinherited. They could not seek redress for injustice in the courts (which had even declared that habeas corpus was not a fundamental right) and they had no recourse to the polling-booths. Nor could the silenced media reflect their grievances. By the time Arjun and Krishna turned decisively against it, when it had lasted a year, it was clear beyond all doubt that the Siege could no longer be justified in their name.

  Duryodhani had made Parliament supreme because she could control it, and claimed that this was in the British political tradition we had inherited. She did not realize that the concept of the primacy of Parliament came from a very superficial reading of British constitutional history. It is not Parliament that is supreme, but the people: the importance of Parliament arises simply from the fact that it embodies the supremacy of the people. Duryodhani did not understand that there is no magic about Parliament in and of itself, and that it only matters as an institution so long as it represents the popular will. The moment that connection is removed, Parliament has no significance as a democratic institution. A Parliament placed above the people who elected it is no more democratic than an army that turns its guns upon the very citizens it is supposed to protect. That is why Priya Duryodhani’s parliamentary tyranny was no better than the military dictatorships of neighbouring Karnistan.

  It took me some time to realize this, but ironically, Ganapathi, Indians like myself were changing our Brahminical minds at just about the time that the Western, and specifically the American, media were beginning to change theirs - in the opposite direction. When we were willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt the American analysts had no doubt at all; they condemned the abrogation of constitutional rights, the arrest of opponents, the end of press freedom. These were concepts they understood and on which there could be no compromise. But as they got used to the Siege regime they began to see virtues in it: industrial discipline, more openings for US business, decisive action on the population front, no more of the stultifying slowness of the ‘soft state’ that developing India had been. And when the jailed opponents were gradually released, the press allowed to censor itself and the Constitution reconciled to the new situation, American reporters came to see India as no different from other autocratic non-Communist regimes which they had covered without outrage. Vital though I had found the American news sources about India that came to me through Sahadev, this was a pointed lesson in the limitations of the neutral and objective foreign correspondent.

  No, Ganapathi, Draupadi was Indian; she was ours, and she had to wear a sari. We could not place her in universal beauty contests to be judged as her Occidental sisters were, by the shape of her legs or the cut of her costume. If she had been like the others, if she had been wearing the skirts or dresses or even the trousers of Western democratic women, she might have been far more easily disrobed.

  Krishna rose against what Duryodhani was doing, and his firm and decisive opposition at last converted the irresolute Arjun. When a chastened Yudhishtir and a mortally ill Drona were released from jail, Krishna counselled against rash conduct, urging them to bide their time. Bhim spoke of leaving the army with enough explosives in his kit-bag to send Duryodhani back to her ancestors. Both Arjun and Krishna had to calm him down.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ Krishna said, ‘our time will come.’

  The Eighteenth Book:

  The Path to Salvation

  116

  It came sooner rather than later. At the peak of her regime of repression, with the press tamed, the sterilizations mounting, the workers terrified and the poor terrorized - and the trains still running on time - Priya Duryodhani surprised the world, if not Krishna, by suspending the Siege and calling free general elections.

  No one knew what had prompted this change of heart. Throughout the country, imaginative theories were woven with enough material to make Draupadi a new sari. It was said that Priya Duryodhani had received the visit of a political sage, a dark man from the south. Another suggested she had consulted an astrologer named Krishna, who had prophesied great success if the polls were held on a certain date. (You know, Ganapathi, how in our country marriages are not arranged, flights not planned, projects not inaugurated until astrological charts are drawn up and consulted. An Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit-card, and he is subject to many of the same disadvantages in life. Few politicians make their major career decisions without checking on what the stars foretell, so it was not such an improbable theory after all.) Somebody else gave the credit (and later the blame) to the Intelligence agencies: they had told her what she wanted to hear, which was that she was so popular she could sweep the polls. (A lesson to our future rulers, Ganapathi: if your spies only give you good news, something’s terribly wrong.) And then there was the mischievous theory that what really got Priya Duryodhani to turn to the Indian people was the announcement by Zaleel Shah Jhoota across the border in Karnistan of elections in his little tyranny. That Karnistan, whose only political institutions were the coup and the mob, and where Zaleel had ruled since Jarasandha’s death with the liberal use of black handcuffs and white lies, could put on an electoral show for the rest of the world while the ‘world’s largest democracy’ transformed itself into the world’s largest banana republic, was unbearably galling for Dhritarashtra’s daughter. Karnistan was a country whose rulers usually overwhelmed the popular will with their unpopular won’t, but Jhoota would still get international credit for holding an election. And international credit was beginning to matter now to Priya Duryodhani, who didn�
�t like what foreign cartoonists were doing to her fine Hastinapuri features in their more-black-than-white caricatures of Siege rule.

  So elections were called, the stragglers in prison released, the fetters taken off the press. Indians breathed the now unaccustomed air of freedom, and it tickled their lungs sufficiently to provoke them to shout. It was then that they realized they would not be able to shout again after five weeks, if Duryodhani, as she clearly expected to, retained power. That was when a large number of Indians who had not taken the slightest interest in politics - the readers of the newspapers Arjun and I had spoken about - decided there was too much at stake for them to stay on the sidelines. The most participative election campaign in Indian history began.

  Elections, as you well know, Ganapathi, are a great Indian tamasha, conducted at irregular intervals and various levels amid much fanfare. It takes the felling of a sizeable forest to furnish enough paper for 320 million ballots, and every election has at least one story of returning officers battling through snow or jungle to ensure that the democratic wishes of remote constituents are duly recorded. No election coverage is complete, either, without at least one picture of a female voter whose enthusiasm for the suffrage is undimmed by the fact that she is old, blind, unlettered, toothless or purdah-clad, or any combination of the above. Ballot-boxes are stuffed, booths are ‘captured’, the occasional election worker/candidate/voter is assaulted/kidnapped/shot, but nothing stops the franchise. And for all its flaws, universal suffrage has worked in India, providing an invaluable instrument for the expression of the public will. India’s voters, scorned by cynics as illiterate and ignorant, have adapted superbly to the election system, unseating candidates and governments, drawing distinctions between local and national elections. Sure, at every election someone discovers a new chemical that will remove the indelible stain on your fingernail and permit you to vote twice (as if this convenience made any great difference in constituencies the size of ours); at every election some distinguished voter claims his name is missing from the rolls, or that someone has already cast his vote (but usually not both). At every election some ingenious accountant produces a set of figures to show that only a tenth of what was actually spent was spent; somebody makes a speech urging that the legal limit for expenditure be raised, so that less ingenuity might be required to cook the books; and everyone goes home happy.

  But these elections were somehow different. The high spirits were there - Yudhishtir’s campaign workers made it a point to ask Duryodhani’s candidates to produce their own vasectomy certificates before asking for votes, which raised a few laughs and not a few hackles in the Kaurava (R) camp - but there was a deadly earnestness beneath, as if everyone realized that they were being given a chance no other nation had ever enjoyed. A chance to choose, in a free election, between democracy and dictatorship. Indeed, some even said, between dharma and adharma.

  But this facile equation with India’s traditional values troubled me. And when a journalist - one of the very few, Ganapathi, who still thought this battle- scarred old dodderer a likely source of usable copy at this time - asked me, in an allusion to the great battle of the Mahabharata: ‘Don’t you think this election is a contemporary Kurukshetra?’, I erupted.

  ‘I hope not,’ I barked, ‘because there were no victors at Kurukshetra. Except in the childish popular versions of the epic. The story of the Mahabharata, young man, does not end on the field of battle. What happens afterwards is tragedy, suffering, futility, death. Which underlines the only moral of that battle, and that epic: that there are no real victors. Everyone loses at the end.’

  ‘But - but what about the great conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the battle between dharma and adharma, between good and evil?’

  ‘It was a battle between cousins,’ I snapped back. ‘They were killing each other’s flesh and blood, shooting arrows into their own gurus, lying and deceiving their elders in order to win. There was good and bad, dishonour and treachery, betrayal and death, on both sides. There was no glorious victory at Kurukshetra.’

  I saw his bewildered expression and took pity on him.

  ‘Young man,’ I said, my severity relenting, ‘you must understand one thing. This election is not Kurukshetra; life is Kurukshetra. History is Kurukshetra. The struggle between dharma and adharma is a struggle our nation, and each of us in it, engages in on every single day of our existence. That struggle, that battle, took place before this election; it will continue after it.’

  He stumbled away, and wrote no story. I do not know what he told his colleagues at the Press Club, but no other journalist sought to interview me during the campaign.

  Just as well, Ganapathi, because in that particular election the issue was indeed an inconveniently non-traditional one: the rout or the restoration of democracy.

  Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

  Ah, what days they were, Ganapathi! Bliss was it in that spring to be alive, but to be old and wise was very heaven. I saw the great cause of Gangaji and Dhritarashtra and Pandu thrillingly reborn in the hearts and minds of young crowds at every street-corner. I saw the meaning of Independence come pulsating to life as unlettered peasants rose in the villages to pledge their votes for democracy. I saw journalists younger than the Constitution relearn the meaning of freedom by discovering what they had lost when the word was erased from their notebooks. I saw Draupadi’s face glowing in the open, the flame of her radiance burning more brightly than ever. And I knew that it had all been worthwhile.

  Through the clamour and confusion of the election campaign Krishna moved with secure serenity. Both sides came to him at the start: the Kaurava Party of Priya Duryodhani, of which he had never ceased to be a member, and the Opposition, in its quest for illustrious defections from the ruling party’s ranks. To both, he reiterated his refusal to contest a seat in Parliament, insisting that his place was in his local legislative assembly, representing his neighbours. Since that was not, however, at stake in the coming election, he was available to campaign in the national contest, and both contenders came back to seek his active support and that of the dedicated party cadres he had so effectively trained. The need of the hour was too great: Krishna could not remain on the sidelines.

  ‘Both of you say that the other’s victory will be a disaster for the country,’ he mused aloud. ‘Perhaps you are both right. Disaster does not approach its victims wrapped in thunderclouds, dripping blood. Rather, it slips in quietly, unobtrusively, its face masked in ambiguity, making each of us see good in evil and evil in good. There is good and evil in both sides of this argument. Some say that under Priya Duryodhani India faces extinction: others point out that the majority of Indians have never been happier. I have my own views, but who is to say they are right for everyone?’ He turned calmly to the two party representatives before him. ‘It is not easy for me to take sides. I have been the Kaurava Party secretary here for too long to renounce it, but I have also stood for certain principles in my political life too long to renounce them. So let me propose this: one side can have me, alone, not as a candidate, with no party funds, but fully committed to their campaign; the other can have the massed ranks of my party workers, disciplined and dedicated men and women who will heed my instructions to work with undiminished vigour even if they see me on the other side. A fair division? Perhaps not, but I leave it to each of you to choose: which will it be? Me alone - or my cadres, with their experience, their vehicles, their skills?’

  The Kaurava Party representative and the Opposition’s aged envoy looked uncomfortably at each other. It was Krishna himself who broke the silence.

&
nbsp; ‘In deference to your seniority, VVji, I must invite you to choose first,’ he said. ‘For the Opposition.’

  I responded without hesitation. ‘I choose you,’ I said.

  And so it was that both Duryodhani and Yudhishtir thought they had done the better out of the division, as the Kaurava Party workers remained true to their allegiances while Krishna went on to animate the Opposition’s national campaign. With his pearly white teeth shining between violet lips and his deep eyes smiling beatifically at the electorate, Krishna brought to the loudspeaker-led hurly-burly of the contest the spirit of an older India, an India where the lilt of the flute called the milkmaids to the river to wash away their innocence before the laughter of their Lord.

  Krishna’s most difficult task undoubtedly came when Arjun, on the verge of filing his nomination papers for the Opposition, was assailed afresh by the doubts that had bedevilled his years in journalism. ‘Is it right - should I fight - or if I just write, won’t I cast more light?’ was the nature of his misgivings. ‘If you don’t fight now,’ his brother-in-law told him bluntly, ‘you won’t have anything to write about afterwards.’

  I heard something of their exchange when they stopped for a reflective cup of tea at the Ashoka Hotel and failed to notice me at the next table. Ashoka, the great conqueror-turned-pacifist of the third century BC, is the one figure of our history who has most inspired independent India’s schizoid governmental ethos. His tolerance and humanitarianism, his devotion to peace and justice, infuse our declarations of policy; his military might, his imposition of a Pax Indica on his neighbours, inform our practice. Our national spokesmen inherited his missionary belief that what was good for India was good for the world, and in choosing a national symbol our government preferred his powerful trinity of lions to the spinning-wheel advocated by Gangaji. Typically, though, the only institution to which they saw fit to give his name was a five-star hotel. And appropriately enough, it was here that the dialogue took place that was to change Arjun’s life for good, if not for better.