The Great Indian Novel (52 page)

‘I can’t take this much longer,’ he confided to me one monsoon day, as the rain stormed down on to the streets like liquid buckshot. ‘She treats me like a stranger, disdains to respond to my every suggestion. The most I can get out of her is one raised eyebrow, like this.’ He attempted to imitate the arched facial gesture for which Duryodhani was already famous, and succeeded only in giving himself a twitch. ‘I’m Deputy Prime Minister but I know less about what’s going on than my own
chaprassi.
Hardly any files reach me, and my annotations on the ones that do are never acted upon. What a wonderful “compromise” you got me to agree to, VVji.’

And then one day Yudhishtir found out a Cabinet meeting had been held without his even being aware of it. The Prime Minister’s Office said the usual notification had been sent; his staff swore they had never received one. He demanded an appointment with the Prime Minister to discuss the matter. When after three days she had still failed to grant him one, he did the only honourable thing open to him: he resigned.

‘You’re a fool,’ I told him, echoing Vidur’s advice to Dhritarashtra at the beginning of the global war, advice which if heeded then might have prevented the partition of the country. ‘An empty seat never benefits the one who has vacated it.’

‘It was a question of honour, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said stodgily. They say Priya Duryodhani opened a bottle of champagne at home that night. But these days, Ganapathi, you can never rely on the servants’ gossip as you could when their masters were British.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, running a fever, took to bed, complaining of alternating hot flushes and chills . . .

With her most visible rival out of the way, Duryodhani began openly to promote her own cause within the party. She made speeches about the immense sacrifices made by her father and family for the cause of national independence. She spoke of Dhritarashtra’s socialist ideals, and how they had been betrayed by the ‘reactionary’ elements among the Kauravas. The Kaurava Party, she averred, had to find itself again under her leadership. She appealed to all ‘progressive’ and ‘like-minded’ people outside the Kaurava Party to join her effort.

One of the first to heed her appeal was Jayaprakash Drona’s bearded and populist son, Ashwathaman.

Since their days in the countryside agitating for rural reform with the Pandavas, Drona and his son had disappeared from political prominence. The sage himself had retreated into the honourable obscurity that our country accords to those who have performed their good deeds and voluntarily retired from the fray. Whether it was disillusionment with the slow pace of change that demotivated him, or a simple reluctance to attempt to repeat his unhappy experience in government, Drona set himself up in an ashram with very few followers and devoted himself to detached reflection on the nation’s ills. Though he was still fit and well and his ‘special skills’ had not entirely rusted with disuse, his was a respectable and singularly unthreatening activity. So Drona was left in peace by everyone, surfacing occasionally - very occasionally - in the press with a pious utterance about peace, Gangaism (Drona was a post-Independence convert to the Mahaguru’s dogma of nonviolence) or land reform. Every year in May there would also be a small, three-line item buried on the inside pages of the newspapers, sometimes under the rubric ‘news in brief’ and sometimes, if space was available, under the heading ‘jd celebrates -th birthday’. It was a dutiful acknowledgement of the historical stature of a man who had not yet passed into history, precisely the sort of treatment, Ganapathi, that I am accorded today. And it served then, as it serves now, as an annual reminder to the politicians and the editorialists to brush up their elegies for the day when Yama’s inexorable countdown reaches its predictable end.

Ashwathaman, the inheritor of his father’s political mantle and equally, it seemed, of his distrust for power, grew a beard and joined a small splinter socialist grouping that was remarkable only for the energy with which it maintained its irrelevance. His decision to respond to Priya Duryodhani’s appeal and join the Kaurava Party put his rough, attractive face and sad eyes on the front pages of the newspapers. With his childhood poverty, his impeccable political pedigree and the idealism of his recent career on the socialist fringe (which distinguished him from the rampant opportunism of the office-seekers flocking round the Kaurava Party central office in New Delhi), Ashwathaman’s credentials could not have been better. Duryodhani welcomed him to the party and, while being careful not to find him a seat in government, nominated him to the Kaurava Working Committee.

There Drona’s son became a one-man ginger group, loudly advocating a more socialist direction to party policy. The more the party elders explained why his proposals could not immediately be adopted, the more Ashwathaman insisted upon them, the Prime Minister encouraging him with her silence, and sometimes with her support.

‘Why should we continue to give privy purses to our ex-maharajas?’ he asked. ‘Why should the likes of Vyabhichar Singh be subsidized to the tune of crores of rupees in taxes pressed from the sweat on the brow of the toiling peasant?’

‘The toiling peasant, Ashwathaman,’ Yudhishtir pointed out drily, ‘doesn’t pay any taxes.’ They had agitated together, all those years ago, for the abolition of agricultural taxation, and Shishu Pal had finally granted it in the last budget before his death.

‘But he could benefit from those taxes being spent on him, instead of being paid to these filthy rich oppressors of the people in exchange for their indolence.’

‘It was actually in exchange for their accessions, Ashwathaman.’

‘That was twenty years ago! They have been compensated more than enough. I say we should not pay them another paisa. As from now.’

‘Who is to decide when we have given them more than enough? They gave up their kingdoms to join a republican India. Their privy purses don’t even make up for the revenue they lost by doing so.’

‘Spoken like a true prince, Yudhishtir.’

Yudhishtir’s eyes flashed. ‘I don’t need to remind
you,
Ashwathaman, that since Hastinapur was annexed by the British
before
Independence, my family receives no privy purse.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you did. But it’s clear where your sympathies lie.’

‘It’s not a question of sympathies!’ Yudhishtir banged the table with a trembling fist. ‘It’s a question of promises. We made a solemn promise as a nation to the princes who joined us that we would pay them an agreed compensation, in perpetuity, for their sacrifice. It’s in our Constitution - a document, Ashwathaman, that I would urge you to read some day.’

‘How dare you suggest I don’t know the Constitution!’ Now it was Ashwathaman’s eyes that blazed. ‘The difference between us, Yudhishtir, is that you quote the letter of the Constitution while I cite its spirit. What about the Directive Principles of the Constitution, eh? What about equality and social justice for all?’

‘What about the credibility of a solemn national undertaking? Is it right to help the poor by breaking your promises to the rich?’

‘Breaking promises? This is not a moral exercise, Yudhishtir. The Kaurava Party is supposed to improve the lot of the common man, not strive for a collective place in Heaven.’

‘I think Ashwathaman is right.’ Priya Duryodhani intervened at last. ‘I am in favour of adding this clause to the party programme. We should introduce legislation to this effect at the next session of Parliament.’

The majority of the Working Committee went along with her. They took their stances with one ear to the ground, and they interpreted the rumblings correctly: it was better in the popular eye to be associated with a broken promise than with the defence of privilege. Ashwathaman’s resolution was passed overwhelmingly.

So what could Yudhishtir do? He resigned from the Working Committee as well.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, bolstered with vitamins and tonics, returned a little unsteadily to her household chores . . .

Matters came to a head over an issue which today, all these years later, seems almost too banal to have provoked such an earthquake. It was the issue of bank nationalization.

Do I hear you snort, Ganapathi? And well you might. Today we all realize what some of us realized even then, that nationalization only means transferring functioning and successful institutions from the hands of competent capitalists to those of bumbling bureaucrats. The. prevalence of nationalization in the face of widespread evidence of its shortcomings, inefficiencies and failures only affirms the characteristic Indian credo that public losses are preferable to private profits. But in those days our Ashwathamans did not speak of profit or loss: they spoke of service. Nationalized banks, they argued, would serve public purposes that private banks would not. Nationalized banks would go out into the rural areas and give loans to poor peasants, while private banks would ask for security they couldn’t provide. (If anyone suggested that that was why private banks were safer to deposit your hard- earned savings in, he was only being selfish, of course.) Today we know that the good nationalized banks are just as wary of unsecured loans as anyone else, but they have to function in an environment where success is judged by how many debt write-offs you can proudly attribute to the promotion of social uplift. (Again, should anyone suggest that if the bad loans had really served their social purpose they would have been paid back by the uplifted borrowers, he would be considered churlish. Especially by those bank managers into whose capacious pockets some of the irretrievable funds have been siphoned.)

But, yet again, I digress, Ganapathi. Bank nationalization was elevated by Ashwathaman and Duryodhani and others of their ilk alongside motherhood and
dal-bhaat
as an unquestionable national good. Before the rest of us knew it, Ashwathaman had introduced a private member’s bill on the floor of Parliament. Duryodhani - failing this time to carry a majority of the Working Committee with her - gave it her
personal
support and called for a free vote in the House. In the absence of a party whip (it had been impossible to agree on one) and with the support of the leftist Opposition parties, woolly-headed socialists and clear-thinking Communists alike, the Bank Nationalization bill was passed.

As the party and the nation erupted in debate on the issue, all eyes turned to the President of the country, the gentle Muslim academic who now occupied the palace where Lord Drewpad’s investiture had taken place. His role was now that of the monarch his predecessors in residence had represented: as the country’s constitutional head, his signature would make the bill an Act. What would he do? The media, politicians, friends, fellow academics and Priya Duryodhani all gave him their advice. All - especially the Prime Minister - did so in the strongest possible terms.

Beset by conflict and controversy, heated by the fieriness of his interlocutors’ convictions and sizzled in the unaccustomed glare of publicity, poor Dr Mehrban Imandar did - as usual - the only decent and dignified thing possible. He died.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi felt her head swim as one spell of dizziness succeeded another . . .