‘Janata Front!’ somebody shouted. ‘Zindabad!’ Came the answering roar: ‘Janata Front, Zindabad!’ The chant picked up variety, and rhythm. ‘Drona, Zindabad! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Janata Front, Zindabad!’
‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Sahadev found himself squeezing Nakul’s shoulders in triumph. ‘Oh, I’m so glad I took my home-leave now, Nakul. This is great! It’s simply great!’
Nakul still seemed to be absorbing the news. Around them, the chant was vociferous; some energetic youths had begun dancing an impromptu bhangra. Members of the crowd were flinging coins and rupee notes at the peon who had put up the headline. The little man in the khaki skirt was catching them in dexterous ecstasy.
‘I was wrong,’ Nakul said slowly, abandoning the plural for perhaps the first time. ‘It’s all over.’
‘No it isn’t, brother,’ his twin contradicted him with uncharacteristic confidence. ‘It’s only just begun.’
120
They were both wrong. Something had passed whose shadow would always remain, and something had begun that would not endure. For it is my fate, Ganapathi, to have to record not a climactic triumph but a moment of bathos. The Indian people gave themselves the privilege of replacing a determined, collected tyrant with an indeterminate collection of tyros.
I was partially responsible, but only partially. When the elections were over there was a general desire to avoid a contest among the victorious constituents of the Janata Front. It was resolved that Drona and I, the Messiah and the Methuselah, would jointly designate the nation’s new Prime Minister, who would then be ‘elected’ unanimously by the Janata legislators. At the time this seemed a sensible way of avoiding unseemly conflict at the start of the new regime. Only later did I realize the irony of beginning the era of the restoration of democracy with so undemocratic a procedure.
And it was not just ironic. In our ageless wisdom Drona and I had failed to realize what most college students know: that if you begin an examination by avoiding the most difficult question it raises, it is that very question that will eventually guarantee your failure.
The two of us spoke individually with the leaders of each of the political parties that made up the Front. There were several of them, each with his claims to overall leadership: political parties, after all, Ganapathi, grow in our nation like mushrooms, split like amoeba, and are as original and productive as mules. Most of these leaders had at one time or another been in the Kaurava Party, but had left — or been pushed out — at various stages of the party’s takeover by Priya Duryodhani. Drona and I surveyed the unprepossessing alternatives and decided to go for the only one among them whose honesty and sincerity was as unquestionable as his seniority: Yudhishtir.
I made the suggestion knowing only too well how little these very qualities suited my grandson for kingship. Drona agreed because, typically, he was more anxious to make a moral choice than a political one. Yet we were political enough to make a gesture of appeasement to the many who disagreed with the conservatism of the new Prime Minister: almost immediately after announcing our view that Yudhishtir would be the Front’s consensual choice for the nation’s leadership, we asked the populist Ashwathaman to preside over the Front’s party organization
There was, Ganapathi, one brief shining moment of hope, when the Front’s leaders, the euphoria of their unprecedented victory still mollifying their egos, gathered together before that symbol of the nation’s enduring greatness, the Taj Mahal, and swore a collective oath to Uphold India’s glory and its traditional values. Draupadi was present that day, as an honoured guest, and her skin glowed with a health and inner beauty that it had lacked for many years. She smiled then, dazzling onlookers with the strength and whiteness of her teeth. Even I could not guess how weak the roots were under that sparkling display of oral confidence.
It seemed strangely appropriate, Ganapathi, that the Front had chosen the Taj for this public reaffirmation of their democratic purpose. The Taj Mahal is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. Yet how easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered thirteen times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the fourteenth attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the worthier a symbol of our India — this land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.
I stayed on after the ceremony, after the shamianas had been dismantled and the shamas, their songs over, had flown away I sat before the marble whiteness of the monument, already yellowing with the sulphur dioxide from the fumes of a near-by oil refinery, and watched the darkness drape itself round the familiar dome like an old shawl. Night had fallen many times upon the Taj; many times had dawn broken the promises of the last sunrise. But it had endured; chipped and vandalized and looted and trampled upon and scrubbed and admired and loved and envied and exploited, it had endured. And so would India.
The hopes raised by that moving ceremony were soon betrayed. Krishna went back to his southern district and it was almost as if he had taken with him Agni’s boon of creative accomplishment. The Front began rapidly to dissipate its energies in mutual competition and recrimination. Yudhishtir was as stiff and straight-backed and humourless as his critics had always portrayed him, and his colossal self-righteousness was not helped by his complete inability to judge the impression he made on others. As the ‘strongmen’ of his Cabinet — a term they assiduously encouraged the media to employ — quarrelled querulously at every meeting, the Prime Minister remained tightly self-obsessed, seemingly unaware that half of those who sat on the executive branch with him were busily engaged in sawing it off.
Yudhishtir suffered particularly from the failing of expecting everyone to take him as seriously as he took himself. When, in response to a question from an American television interviewer, the first journalist indiscreet enough to ask in public what her peers had cheerfully confirmed in private — ‘Mr Prime Minister, is it true that you drink your own urine every day?’ — when, Ganapathi, before a prime-time audience of 80 million incredulous Americans, quintupled by satellite newsfeeds to every television channel in the world with the money and the lack of taste to broadcast it, when, with the same lack of reflection he had shown in accepting Shakuni’s challenge, Yudhishtir launched into a sanctimonious homily on the miraculous properties of auto- urine therapy, he dropped the dice of government back at the Kauravas’ feet.
His positive response was quoted in every one of India’s resurgent newspapers. Cartoonists and cocktail-party wags combined Yudhishtir’s confession with his well-known stance in favour of Prohibition (‘If I drank what he drinks, I’d be for Prohibition too’; ‘Would you ever invite the Prime Minister to a Bring-a-bottle party?’). Graffiti appeared on public lavatories across the country, more than one entrance signboard being repainted to read ‘Yudhishtir Juice Centre’. As the Prime Minister unsmilingly continued to make himself the laughing-stock of the nation, his coalition gradually unravelled beneath his feet. Write it on his epitaph, Ganapathi: our Hero piddled while home burned.
Not that the unravelling Front had ever been very tightly knit. Within weeks of its assumption of office it had become the vehicle for the personal ambitions of at least three veteran politicians besides the Prime Minister. With their adeptness at camouflaging petty self-interest under wordy speeches on the uplift of (depending on the precise nuances of their electoral bases) the ‘backward classes’, the ‘backward castes’ or the ‘backward strata of society’, they rapidly acquired for their party the sobriquet ‘the Backward Front’. As they stumbled from argument to argument, lawlessness erupted, prices spiralled upwards, government offices sank beneath dusty cobwebs of red tape, and every policy decision was hamstrung by factional disagreement. Their ineptness helped Priya Duryodhani rapidly to recover from the shock of her ouster. ‘The Backward Front government can move the nation neither backward nor forward,’ she was able to declare to uneasy applause at surprisingly well-attended public meetings. ‘It is merely awkward.’