That she was free at all to lavish such scathing contempt on her conquerors was one more instance of the weakness of the Front’s combination of virtue and avarice in the face of so formidable an adversary. Just across the border, chaos following charges of intimidation, ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging in Karnistan’s show election had led to Zaleel Shah Jhoota’s being toppled and jailed by his generals; his military tormentors were now debating whether to have him publicly flogged for his misdeeds or hanged or both. In India, however, the Front had decided to take the former Prime Minister to court on the esoteric charge of détournement de pouvoir, which was a polite legalistic way of saying she had subverted the Constitution. Since everyone who had lived in India for the last three years with his eyes open knew she had subverted the Constitution, it did not seem to be a charge that required much proof. Yet the chosen means did not serve the choicest ends: the lawcourts, Ganapathi, with the solitary recent exception of post-Falklands Argentina, are not the place for a people to bring their former rulers to account. Priya Duryodhani and her skilled lawyers (minus Shakuni, who was now loudly asserting his democratic credentials and disavowing the Siege, the ex-Prime Minister and all her works) ran circles of subtlety around the Front’s witnesses.
It was all like an elaborate game between teams of unequal strength. Law, of course, rivals cricket as the major national sport of our urban élite. Both litigation and cricket are slow, complex and costly; both involve far more people than need to be active at any given point in the process; both call for skill, strength and guile in varying combinations at different times; both benefit from more breaks in the action than spectators consider necessary; both occur at the expense of, and often disrupt, more productive economic activity; and both frequently meander to conclusions, punctuated by appeals, that satisfy none of the participants. Yet both are dear to Indian hearts and absorb much of the country’s energies. The moment the law was chosen as the means to deal with the former Prime Minister, it was clear that the toss had gone Priya Duryodhani’s way.
As with cricket, the problem with law is one of popular participation. The lawcourts of India, Ganapathi, are open to the masses, like the doors of a five-star hotel. Priya Duryodhani could afford to command the best in the profession; ‘the people’, on the other hand, though she was being prosecuted in their name, could not always find a place in the courtroom where she was questioned about her crimes against them. Whatever purpose her trial served, it was not that of popular justice.
The case dragged on and, after the first few sensational revelations, lapsed into unreality. Duryodhani’s lawyers so effectively turned it into a showcase for their forensic skills that the issues behind their legalistic hair-splitting were soon forgotten. The fatal turn occurred: people became bored. Their ennui banalized her evil.
The trial was in its fourteenth meandering month when the crisis within the Front, hopelessly riven over conflicts of its own making, came to a head.
The issue that brought the simmering pot of mutual dislike to a boil was ostensibly the government’s attitude towards the Untouchables — Gangaji’s Harijans, or Children of God. It all started with a sage whom Yudhishtir went to see, an ochre-robed godman whose vocabulary was as out of date as his garments.
Godmen are India’s major export of the last two decades, offering manna and mysticism to an assortment of foreign seekers in need of them. Once in a while, however, they also acquire a domestic following, by appealing to the deep-seated reverence in all Indians for spiritual wisdom and inner peace, a reverence rooted in the conditions of Indian life, which make it so difficult for most of us to acquire either. These backyard godmen, unlike the made-for-export variety, are largely content to manifest their sanctity by sanctimoniousness, producing long and barely intelligible discourses into which their listeners can read whatever meaning they wish. (If religion is the opium of the Indian people, Ganapathi, then godmen are God’s little chillums.)
The godman whom Yudhishtir approached came into this category, advocating measures either so unexceptionable (regular prayer) or so exceptional (regular consumption of one’s own liquid wastes) that his following was confined to a small number of devoted devotees. Indeed, no one might have paid him any attention at all, were it not for the fact that the Prime Minister was discovered one day at one of his speeches. At a speech, in fact, in which the godman carelessly, or unimaginatively, or perversely — it really doesn’t matter which — referred to the nation’s traditional outcastes as ‘Untouchables’.
That was all, mind you. He didn’t suggest that they deserved to be where they were, didn’t imply they had to be barred from temples or from our daughters’ bedrooms; he simply called them ‘Untouchables’ instead of the euphemism Gangaji had invented in an effort to remove the stigma of that term. And Yudhishtir committed, in the eyes of his most radical critics, the unpardonable sin of neither correcting him nor walking out of his audience.
Now you know as well as I do, Ganapathi, that words are among India’s traditional palliatives — we love to conceal our problems by changing their names. It mattered little to the men and women at the bottom of the social heap whether they were referred to by the most notorious of their disabilities or by the fiction of a divine paternity they supposedly shared with everyone else (which was almost as bad, because if everyone was a Child of God, why were they the only ones branded as such?). But to the professional politicians anxious to score points against my insensitive grandson, Yudhishtir’s silence when the term was employed in his hearing meant acquiescence in a collective insult. The government, they declaimed to Priya Duryodhani’s enthusiastic endorsement, was anti-Harijan.
Ashwathaman, the Front’s radical leader, was foremost in his criticism of the Prime Minister. He could not, in all conscience, he announced, continue to support a government which had thus revealed its casteist cast. Yudhishtir’s rivals, scenting his blood on the trail of their own ascent to his throne, agreed.
Suddenly the fragile unity of the Front began to crumble. One legislator declared he would no longer accept the party whip; another demanded that the Front expel its ‘closet casteists’. There was open talk of forming a new Front, purged of ‘reactionary’ elements. A majority of the ruling party’s legislators were just waiting, it was said, for a signal to abandon Yudhishtir. The signal had to come from the man whose Uprising had first started them on their ascent to power — Drona.
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But the new Messiah lay on his sickbed, his liver devastated by the privations of Priya Duryodhani’s prisons. Ill, exhausted, bitterly disappointed by the way in which the popular tide of his dreams had dribbled wastefully into the arid sands of sterile conflict, Drona lay torn between loyalty to the government he had created and the son for whom he had, all those years ago, changed his life.