Durbar Read Free Page A

Except that perhaps Sonia, as the prime minister’s wife, probably wanted around her only people who totally supported her husband. My support for him had waned after the Bofors scandal. When fingers started being pointed at him for corruption in the Bofors arms deal Rajiv seemed to lose confidence. Much was lost because of his inability to do anything to rectify the damage done to Indian democracy and to the fabric of Indian politics during the two decades that his mother ruled India with the populism of a demagogue.
    By the time Mrs Gandhi was killed, a deep cynicism had infected not just Indian politics but the soul of India. People had lost faith that things would ever change for the better. One of the reasons why Rajiv won his first election with the largest majority in Indian parliamentary history was because he had become for one brief, shining moment the embodiment of hope.
    What had gone wrong?

2 BEGINNINGS
     
    I was born almost exactly three years after India became an independent country. My father’s family was landed aristocracy from that part of Punjab which is now Pakistan. They lost their estates and everything else in 1947 when India was divided. Believing that they would be able to continue living in Pakistan, they made no preparation to leave until they were forced to by the violence. My grandmother, a young widow at the time, explained that they had ‘opted’ for Pakistan because their home and their lands, in a village called Rajkot, near Gujranwala, went to Pakistan. She had never been to Delhi, she said, or worn a sari or spoken any language other than Punjabi. My uncle, only seventeen but already a cynic, said, ‘We thought that in Pakistan there would be Muslims ruling us but that was all right because before the British ruled us we were ruled by Muslims – so what difference would it make to us if they became rulers again?’ My father, two years older than his brother and a young army officer, said one of his considerations for wanting to stay in Pakistan was that his regiment, Probyn’s Horse, had been given to Pakistan when the Indian Army was divided.
    My mother’s family is from Delhi. Her father was one of the five Sikh contractors who helped Edwin Lutyens build the city of New Delhi. Among the buildings he built was South Block, which houses the Indian prime minister’s offices as well as the offices of the ministers of defence and foreign affairs. As children we used to be taken for walks from Jantar Mantar Road to South Block where our ayahs would read out our grandfather’s name imprinted in a sandstone wall of South Block.
    The Sikh contractors who worked with Lutyens stayed on in the new city. They built big houses for their families along the wide, tree-lined avenues, contributed to the building of Sikh temples and owned most ofConnaught Place. These contractors became rich enough to graduate from being nouveau riche to becoming part of the aristocracy of Delhi, replacing the prominent Muslim families that left for Pakistan. When millions of Punjabi refugees came to Delhi from Lahore and Rawalpindi, rich Sikhs like my grandfather helped many resurrect their destroyed businesses and broken lives.
    Among the lives my maternal grandfather helped revive was that of his future son-in-law, my father. My father had got engaged to my mother before Partition and the date for their wedding was set for 15 December 1947. After his family was driven out of Pakistan he became both penniless and homeless and it was in a house in Dehra Dun that belonged to my maternal grandfather that he married my mother.
    It is my maternal grandfather’s house, 5 Jantar Mantar Road in Delhi, that I remember as being the only permanent home in my childhood. That is where we came from boarding school every summer holiday. My father’s entire extended family were refugees from Pakistan who seemed always in the process of building their new homes. In Karnal, itself a broken down sort of half town, they lived