The Great Indian Novel (55 page)

‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, ‘ask me for a boon, and you shall have it.’

It was Arjun who spoke, but Krishna, I believe, who inspired the thought.

‘Give us, Agni, the power to create as we have the strength to destroy,’ he said.

‘You shall have it,’ Agni responded, ‘but not yet.’

And then the shining figure of the Fire God shimmered away from them, and my dream was over.

The Seventeenth Book:
The Drop of Honey - A Parable

A
t last the people rose. Or, as always in India, some of the people rose, led by an unlikely figure who had stepped from the pages - so it almost seemed - of the history books. Jayaprakash Drona emerged from his retreat and called for a People’s Uprising against Priya Duryodhani.

It was a shock, not least because JD’s son Ashwathaman was still in the Kaurava camp, though increasingly on the margin of it. And for the Prime Minister it was a particularly rude shock, since Priya Duryodhani had done nothing to prevent Drona’s name and image from being kept quietly alive, like a musty heirloom on a darkened mantelpiece. Drona had even been allowed a brief recent return to the headlines when he was pressed into service by the government to persuade the fiercely moustachioed dacoits of the wild Chambal ravines to give up their violent ways, just as he had renounced his. Drona’s sincerity was so transparent, his own example so transcendent, that many of the dacoits, men with twenty and thirty murders, rapes and abductions each to their name, had actually listened and been converted. Drona had brought them out from their underground hideouts in mind-boggling ceremonies where they had dropped their rifles and gun-belts at his feet before an applauding audience of their victims’ families - and in exchange for nothing more than the promise of a fair trial.

This, then, was the Drona who rose one day, bathed his feet in the sacred Ganga, and proclaimed that he could not take it any more. He had converted the petty criminals, but the biggest were the ones running the country - and they would not listen to him. The dishonesty and cynicism of the government of Priya Duryodhani was an affront to his conscience that Drona could no longer abide. It was time, he declared, for a People’s Uprising which would restore India’s ancient values to its governance.

Where were all our protagonists at this time? You may well ask, and you would be right, Ganapathi, to do so. The trouble with telling a tale on an epic scale is that sometimes you neglect the characters in the foreground as you admire the broad sweep of the landscape you are painting, just as the overall picture fades occasionally from sight when you focus closely on the smudgy details of individual impressions. Let me, Ganapathi, make amends.

Shall we begin at the top of the ladder of righteousness, with the son of Dharma? Yudhishtir was now a respected leader of the Opposition, sternly adopting the mantle of elder statesman which I was now too inactive to hold (yes, Ganapathi, you can be too old even to be an elder statesman). His earlier criticisms of Duryodhani, his principled resignations, gave him the saintly aura of one who has been right before his time - even though many would have preferred him to be more preoccupied with political, rather than urinary, tracts.

Bhim was still in the army, which he had served so well in the war that destroyed Jarasandha and broke up Karnistan. He had his limitations, but below the neck there was still no one in India or its environs who could stand up to him.

Arjun, perfect Arjun, had at last revealed a major imperfection: in-decisiveness. When the Kaurava Party split he could not find it within himself either to support his increasingly priggish elder brother or to endorse the view of the idealistic, bearded Ashwathaman. On this his self-contented brother-in-law gave him no advice except to do what he thought best. ‘If I knew what was the best thing to do,’ Arjun expostulated to the untroubled Krishna, ‘I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?’ But Subhadra’s brother smilingly declined to go any further in his counsel.

Krishna himself seemed to find in the national convulsions a vindication of his preference for local politics. ‘Your national mainstream,’ he said to Arjun, ‘isn’t clean enough to swim in.’ He remained with the Kaurava Old Guard, one of our few supporters who did not need the blessings of Dhritarashtra’s daughter to retain his seat and who could therefore afford to keep his distance from her both geographically and politically. But Krishna’s opposition to Priya Duryodhani was not active enough to prompt Arjun to emulate him. Nor could Ashwathaman’s increasing irrelevance in the Kaurava ranks inspire Arjun to endorse his friend’s radical idealism. Priya Duryodhani seemed happy enough to keep Drona’s son on her Working Committee to let off occasional bursts of socialist steam, which she continued to ignore in practice as she fuelled her political gas-flames under blacker kettles. So Arjun ignored politics altogether and devoted himself - with great competence, but no greater consequence - to Subhadra, Draupadi and non-political freelance journalism.

Our supporting cast did not benefit from any larger unity of purpose than the principals. Kunti, her hair now almost as white as the widow’s saris she had at last begun to wear, presided over the joint Pandava ménage like a dignified Mother Hubbard. She had given up the Turkish cigarettes of her insecure loneliness and now chewed Banarsi pan with as much red-stained confidence as any other Indian matriarch. Nakul, with his gift for speaking in the plural, had entered the national civil service from which Vidur had at last retired (while retaining enough governmental consultancies not to notice the difference). Sahadev, his silent twin, took his reserve and his gift for allowing himself to be told what to say into the foreign service. And I, Ganapathi, chomping reflectively on the new reality with my toothless gums, watching the few wisps of white on my scalp curl in dismayed betrayal, I sat, and aged, and saw, and dreamt.

Drona’s uprising was, of course, a peaceful one, so it was not really an uprising but a mass movement. It was, however, a movement that rapidly caught the imagination of the people and ignited that of the Opposition. Drona preached not only against Duryodhani but against all the evils she had failed to eradicate and therefore, in his eyes; had herself come to represent: venality and corruption, police brutality and bureaucratic inefficiency, rising prices and falling stocks in the shops, adulteration and black-marketing, shortages of everything from cereals to jobs, caste discrimination and communal hatred, neglected births and dowry debts - the whole panoply of national evils, including the very ones against which the Prime Minister had campaigned in the elections. Priya Duryodhani was being held accountable for the pledges she had failed to redeem, the hopes she had betrayed and the miracles she could not possibly have wrought. The sharpest focus of the movement was on herself: she was finally paying the price for her party’s complete identification with its Leader.

Within months the movement had rocked the government to its unstable foundations. It did so by making the country ungovernable. In villages and towns, Drona preached a new civil disobedience, urging students to boycott classes, clerks to withhold their taxes, workers to strike at government-owned plants, legislators to resign from the assemblies to which they had been elected and the police to disobey orders to arrest the disobedient. It became clear that, for all their jingoistic hubris at the breaking in two of Karnistan, the people were judging the Prime Minister by the domestic goods she had failed to deliver rather than the strategic international stature she had diverted the government’s energies to attain.

The Opposition parties quickly jumped on the Drona bandwagon. They gave it some of its lung-power, much of its muscle, and a great deal of its political thrust. With the Kaurava (O) and other parties in its ranks, the People’s Uprising soon turned its attention to specific targets, the most vulnerable of which were the Kaurava (R) state governments. These were led largely by inept minions hand-picked by Duryodhani solely for their loyalty; they were thus easily attacked. In Drona’s home state, the government was so completely paralysed by the need to contain his movement that its police spending reached the colossal sum of 100,000 rupees a day - yes, Ganapathi, one lakh of rupees, or enough to feed 20,000 Indian families and have something left over for dessert. In Hastinapur, after weeks of popular agitation culminating in a highly popular march by housewives banging empty pots and pans outside his residence, Duryodhani’s Chief Minister resigned. When New Delhi showed no inclination to hold elections for a new state assembly - preferring to control Hastinapur directly under ‘President’s Rule’ - Yudhishtir, the state’s most famous political leader, undertook a fast unto death. He hadn’t even lost a kilo before Duryodhani caved in and called new state elections - which her party comprehensively lost. The political tide seemed to be turning decisively away from the Prime Minister.

I watched all this, Ganapathi, in increasing gloom. I was no admirer of Priya Duryodhani or what she stood for, but I was equally distraught about Drona’s Popular Uprising and where it was leading the government. For the independent India that I had spent my life trying to achieve to be wasting itself in demonstration and counter-demonstration, mass rallies and mass arrests, was pitiable. For the government to be devoting all its attention to policing opposition rather than developing the country was tragic. For our precious independence to be reduced to anarchy, betrayal and chaos was downright criminal.

If only they had waited, Ganapathi! The next elections were not so far away; Drona and Yudhishtir could have rallied the Opposition around them, consolidated their organization and swept Duryodhani from power at the hustings. Instead they clamoured for her removal, and that of her party’s state governments, now; and they did so not in the assemblies, where the post- Gelabi Desh electoral wave had left them clinging to the jetsam of just a few seats, but in the streets.