The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (5 page)

Zail Singh’s first few months as rashtrapati were roses-all-the-way. Wherever he went, he was welcomed by mammoth crowds. He regaled them with rustic anecdotes, Urdu couplets, Persian and Punjabi poetry, quotations from sacred Sanskrit texts, the Koran and the Granth Sahib. Here, at last, was a ‘people’s president’—earthy, able to talk on the same level to the peasant and the artisan; able to enter into dialogue with the pandit, the maulvi and the granthi. The only class with which he neither tried to nor was capable of making an equation with was the Westernized waggery. They cracked Sardarji jokes at his expense at their cocktail parties. He often exposed himself to their jibes, as he did when criticizing the Darwinian theory of man’s descent from apes: ‘How could the Buddha be a progeny of a monkey?’ he naively asked. But few wags dared to take him on in public because they knew they could not hope to match him in witty repartee. He ignored their existence.

The one thing that had irked the sophisticated sections of society was Zail Singh’s exaggerated deference to the ‘royal family’. He had said he would be willing to sweep the floor if Mrs Gandhi so desired and acknowledged the then heir-apparent Sanjay Gandhi as his rehnuma—his guide. Few people realized that durbardari—flattery—was deeply ingrained in his psyche as he was born and brought up in the courtly atmosphere of Faridkot, where only sycophancy and cunning ensured survival.

Within a few months of his presidency, however, things began to go awry. It was Zail Singh’s own community, which had earlier lauded his elevation as the first Sikh president, that began to deride him. The Akalis launched their Dharam Yudh Morcha against the government; Zail Singh mocked them saying ‘Akali, akal ke khali’—Akalis are empty-headed. They retaliated by describing him as a sarkari Sikh and the prime minister’s rubber stamp.

Akali demonstrations against the ninth Asiad gave Bhajan Lal’s Haryana constabulary freedom to harass all Sikhs coming to Delhi by rail and road. For the first time in the history of independent India, Sikhs came to be discriminated against. It was ironic that this should have started when a Sikh presided over the country. Zail Singh’s stock amongst the Sikh community began to decline. Then events overtook him with rapid succession—Operation Blue Star was followed by Operation Woodrose to comb the Punjab countryside for terrorists.

Zail Singh had been kept in the dark about Blue Star, but the Sikhs held him responsible for it. High priests of the Takhts summoned him to explain why he should not be declared a tankhaiya. In many gurdwaras, posters with his pictures were laid out on the floor at the entrance for worshippers to tread on. His TV appearance visiting the Harmandir Sahib after the carnage, wearing a rose in his sherwani, caused a wave of resentment. He was virtually written off by his community. Then came the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi, followed by the massacre of Sikhs in towns and cities of northern India. Being a Sikh, Zail Singh had to suffer the odium with which Hindus began to regard his community.

Hardly had the country returned to normalcy and Zail Singh regained his equipoise than the new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, began to exhibit boorishness unbecoming of his lineage towards an elder to whom he initially owed his position. Zail Singh felt isolated and unwanted. I was pretty certain that he would be looking for a suitable opportunity to resign and leave Rashtrapati Bhawan with the same kind of fanfare with which he had entered it. I was wrong. He stepped out of his mansion not with the proverbial bang—but not with a whimper either.

In the last six months of his presidency, Zail Singh gave Rajiv Gandhi and his advisors a taste of their own medicine and many sleepless nights. What is more, if they had any illusions of making up for lost sleep after Zail Singh quit Rashtrapati Bhawan, they were in for a nasty surprise. Unlike his predecessors, who disappeared into pastoral oblivion after their retirement, he became a retired president living in the capital and determined to level his score with the prime minister. I foresaw Zail Singh becoming the patron saint of those disenchanted with the regime. Although he did not fulfil my prophecy of being the most popular president of India, he went down in the pages of history as the most controversial.

What was there in this man of humble origin and little academic learning that helped him overcome one obstacle after another to reach the pinnacle of aspiration and become the head of state? I will let incidents in his life speak for him.

Zail Singh was an active worker of the Praja Mandai of the erstwhile Faridkot state. The raja had personally ordered him jailed and kept him in solitary confinement. When India became independent and Faridkot was merged into PEPSU, the Central Government was looking for suitable men to run the new state. Sardar Patel summoned Zail Singh. Zail Singh did not have the money to buy a third-class return ticket from Faridkot to Delhi and had to ask friends for a loan. In Delhi, he stayed at Gurdwara Sisganj. He did not have money to hire a tonga to take him to Sardar Patel’s residence at five in the morning. He walked the entire four miles and was late for his appointment. Sardar Patel’s daughter brusquely dismissed him. It was the kindly secretary V. Shankar who let him see the deputy prime minister. Zail Singh was told that he was being made minister of state in PEPSU. He walked back to the railway station to return to Faridkot.

He never looked back. The remarkable thing about this man was that he did not forget his humble origins, nor did he let power go to his head. Success was to him a gift given to him by the Great Guru, not something owed to him by virtue of his abilities. One of his favourite couplets warned of the dangers of hubris:

Jin mein ho jaata hai andaaz-e-khudai paida

Hum ne dekha hai voh butt toot jaate hai

Mortals who allow notions of divinity to germinate in them

We have seen those idols shatter and come to grief

There was not even a suspicion of arrogance in the man. Besides humility, his faith in religion taught him to be honest and truthful. He was one of the breed of politicians—now almost extinct—who, though handling vast sums of money, never feathered their own nests or those of their relatives. He owned no house, flat or tract of land except the little he inherited. Nobody ever accused him of telling a lie.

As a junior minister, Zail Singh set about assiduously cultivating the support of the lower and discriminated castes. He was a Ramgarhia (carpenter) in a Punjab always dominated by Jat and Sikh politics constipated by caste considerations. He broke the Jat hegemony over the state and successfully mocked Akali pretensions of being thekedars (monopolists) of the Khalsa Panth. He was able to convince the Sikhs that he was a better Sikh than all the Akali leaders put together. His speeches were always full of quotations from the Gurbani and episodes from Sikh history. No other politician, either from the Akali party or the Congress, could build the kind of Gursikh image for himself as Zail Singh did. By the time he made his presence felt in the state, a precedent had been established that the chief minister of Punjab should be a Sikh. There was no better Sikh than Giani Zail Singh to fill the role.

Zail Singh’s six-year tenure as chief minister was perhaps the most peaceful and prosperous the state had ever seen. They were the years of the Green Revolution. They were also the years without morchas, bandhs or strikes.

Zail Singh was able to rekindle pride in Punjabiyat. From England he acquired the mortal remains of Madan Lal Dhingra, who had been hanged for the murder of Curzon-Wylie, and of Udham Singh, hanged for the murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of Punjab at the time of Jallianwallah Bagh, and raised martyrs’ memorials over them. He sought out the long-forgotten and ailing mother of Bhagat Singh, gave her a handsome grant and had her honoured as ‘Punjab Mata’—Mother of Punjab. the road connecting Anandpur to Fatehgarh was named Guru Gobind Singh Marg; horses believed to be descendants of the Guru’s steed were taken along the marg for the populace to see and marvel at. A new township, Baba Ajit Singh Nagar, was named after the Guru’s eldest son. Massive kirtan durbars were organized all over the state. In his eagerness to wrest the Akali monopoly over the Khalsa Panth, he unwittingly set in motion a Sikh revivalism which turned into fundamentalism under Bhindranwale.

Zail Singh could not have foreseen this development, much less wished it, because his relations with Punjabi Hindus, including the somewhat anti-Sikh Mahasha press of Jalandhar, remained extremely cordial and, if gossip is to be believed, more than cordial with the smaller Muslim community. Zail Singh achieved the incredible: he had no enemies. Besides being the Punjabi paradigm of dostaan da dost—of friends the friendliest—he had the knack of winning over detractors. Even in the heyday of his power, as chief minister and home minister, he never tried to settle scores with people who had persecuted or humiliated him. He won them over by granting them favours and making them ashamed of themselves. If there was anything he could do for anyone, he never hesitated. He had an incredibly good memory for names and faces. He was able to gain friends by simply recognizing people he had met even briefly.

During the Emergency, while he had many people put in jail, he went to see them. He sent a wedding gift to Badal’s daughter when he was in prison and went to receive the baraat at the house of a friend’s daughter in Kalka when her father was locked up. If he heard a friend was sick, he would find time to visit him in hospital and quietly slip a bundle of currency notes under the pillow. Virtually the only man he was unable to win over was Darbara
Singh, who succeeded him as the chief minister
of Punjab.

To describe Zail Singh as a farsighted statesman
would be an exaggeration; to describe him as a
cunning politician would be grossly unfair because
the stock-in-trade of a cunning politician is the
ability to tell a blatant lie. And the one thing that
no one could accuse Zail Singh of was falsehood. He
was best as a shrewd judge of men and events. After
Mrs Gandhi’s murder, there were many claimants to
the prime ministership; one of the senior-most civil
servants of the time even suggested to Zail Singh
that he take over the position himself. Sensing the
anti-Sikh climate of the day, it was Zail Singh who
brushed aside this suggestion and decided to offer
the prime ministership to Rajiv Gandhi in the
belief that, as the descendant of Jawaharlal Nehru
and Indira Gandhi, he would be best suited to hold
the country together.

When the opposition tried to put him up for a
second term and Congress dissidents assured him
of a substantial vote from the party, Zail Singh
carefully weighed his prospects before turning it
down. He was not a gambler; he played to win. It was the same when pressure was brought on him to dismiss the prime minister or permit his prosecution on charges of corruption. Zail Singh had little to lose and could have made things very hot for Rajiv Gandhi. But he refused to succumb to temptation—teaching Rajiv a lesson for his bad behaviour—because he felt that the nation’s future was paramount and India was more important than Zail Singh or Rajiv Gandhi.

After Operation Blue Star, I requested a meeting with Giani Zail Singh in order to return my Padma Bhushan to register my protest. When the appointment was granted, I saw that he was in a state of acute depression. ‘I know how you feel,’ he said to me. ‘But don’t be hasty. Think about it for a few days and then decide what you should do.’ I held my ground: ‘No, Gianiji. I don’t want to give myself time to change my mind. I had sworn that if the army entered the temple I would renounce the honours bestowed on me by this government.’ Even after the citation was put aside, Zail Singh continued talking to me. ‘I don’t think my qaum’—community—‘will ever forgive me for this,’ he said, looking for some kind of assurance to the contrary. ‘No, Gianiji,’ I replied, ‘I don’t think the Sikhs will ever forgive you for Blue Star.’ He looked to be in the depths of despair. ‘Do you think it would serve any purpose if I resign now?’ he asked. I told him that it was too late: whether or not he resigned, the Sikhs would hold him responsible for the desecration of their holiest shrine.

Zail Singh often quoted a couplet to the effect that, while he put a rose in the palms of Rajiv Gandhi, Rajiv took a stone to hurt him. There is another equally apt couplet that perhaps best encapsulates Giani Zail Singh’s political career:

Zakhmi huey jo hont toh mehsoos yeh hua

Chooma tha maine phool ko deevangi ke sath

It was the bruises on my lips that made me comprehend

With what thoughtlessness I had kissed the rose

Inder Sain Johar was a few years younger than me. He was in Forman Christian College, Lahore, and was making some noise on the amateur stage as a comic actor. We had met, shaken hands, but did not get to know each other. One summer evening, when I was a practising lawyer living in a small flat opposite the high court, I heard a band playing raucous music coming down the road. I went to my balcony to see what was happening. It was a wedding procession. On a white horse sat I.S. Johar, decked up as a bridegroom. He was on his way to marry Rama Bans, a very pretty girl who also acted in college plays. The couple migrated to Bombay to try their fortune in the film industry. I lost track of them.

Johar and Rama had two children, a son and a daughter. I saw some films in which Johar had acted, including a couple of Hollywood productions in English. I did not rate him a great actor. When he turned from acting to directing films, in which he cast himself in the main role, I formed an even poorer opinion of his histrionic talents. When he ran out of ideas, he descended to shocking people. In one film (I think it was
Five Rifles
), he had his own daughter appear bare-breasted on screen. I don’t recall how he got around the censors. His wife, Rama, was disillusioned and divorced him to marry a cousin named Harbans and opened a health cum beauty parlour in Delhi. She was even more disillusioned with her second husband, sold her business and returned to Bombay. Her son had by then become a dope addict. Her daughter made a disastrous marriage with an Englishman who abducted their only child and smuggled him away to England. Johar had by then had many liaisons.