The first time Kanak had met Gill in Delhi was when she had been posted at Aliganj and had come to Delhi to leave Jaya with her parents. Gill knew about Puri and Kanta coming to Delhi, and about their going back unsuccessful after failing to persuade Kanak to return to Jalandhar. At that time Gill had taken her to Rajghat to be able to speak to her in peace and quiet. After hearing her story, he had asked, ‘Is your decision final?’
‘Absolutely final.’
Gill had said, ‘We cannot do things at our will or just because we believe that they can be done. It’s possible that family considerations and social pressures may make you think again about your decision.’
‘I’ve done all the thinking I could. It’s possible that I might just kill myself.’
‘It could happen that you will feel a sense of guilt or self-disgust in the aftermath of your decision.’
‘I don’t see why. I admit that I had made a mistake. Or maybe even committed a crime. I simply want to forget about it. Instead of suffering forever for having made the mistake, I’m willing to be punished for it once and for all.’
After that conversation, every time Kanak came to Delhi from Aliganj, she would meet Gill. They would go for long walks. There was always so much to say. In Jalandhar, Gill’s behaviour towards Kanak had always been proper. His behaviour changed with the new setting.
Kanak was faced with a painful situation. She had to control her own feelings before she could ask Gill to have control over his. And to be able
to gain a control over herself, she had to negate what every fibre in her body and her every breath wanted.
Gill said irritably, ‘You still run away from me? Why can’t we be husband and wife? You don’t want me the way I didn’t want Amaro.’
Kanak, in the throes of hiding her feelings, retorted, ‘You can be angry with me all you want. If you don’t want to see me, don’t. But don’t you realize my situation? What would you gain if you make me feel like some criminal and humiliate me? If I get too disgusted with myself, I’ll just drown myself in the Yamuna. But what’d people think of you? Doctor sahib, Chaddha bhai, Tara—they all have a high opinion of you. You want to shame both yourself and me before them?’
Kanak could not hold back her tears. Gill, whom everyone thought to be so serious, kind and sensible, lost his self-control and became so defenceless when he was with her. His vulnerability made Kanak feel helpless, and his anger at her made her cry on the quiet. But that crying gave her a thrill of satisfaction, which was the heart of the problem. The only solution Kanak could think of was not to be alone with him.
Kanak telephoned Gill and asked him to meet her at six o’clock in the Coffee House which she knew would be crowded at that time. Before Gill arrived, Mittal, a government journalist who knew both of them, joined Kanak at her table. Then came Mrs Raina, who was doing research on the theatre of India under a fellowship from a foreign government. These people showed no sign of leaving when they saw Gill arrive.
Kanak regretted the place she had chosen to meet Gill. How could they talk in peace in the Coffee House? On her table a discussion had begun about the Prime Minister’s activities. Does he spend any time working in his office? Every day the newspapers carry a statement given by him at some social event, every other day he lays down some foundation stone or inaugurates something—an art exhibition or a children’s function or a newly built bridge. Whether a conference on travel trade or a seminar on some philosophical problem, the Prime Minister seems ever willing to inaugurate it. There was no end to his travels, his official tours and the speeches he gave. Four to five hundred people were involved every time he undertook a journey. Was there any accounting for such gratuitous spending? The Prime Minister frequently preaches that one should work, not just give speeches, but the example he sets is of giving a speech every day.
Kanak did not find the opportunity to talk to Gill. They came out of the Coffee House and walked through Connaught Place. It was 7.30 and dusk was falling. Kanak wanted to get back home by eight o’clock. As soon as they left the crowded street and began to walk on Barakhamba Road, Kanak said, ‘I’ve something special to tell you. But first give me your word that you will do what I ask you.’
‘Have I ever refused to do anything that you asked me?’
‘Still, I want you word. It’s something special.’
‘What promise do you want me to make?’
‘First promise you’ll do what I say, and then I’ll tell you.’
‘What’s that important?’
‘Something is.’
‘Something very special?’
‘Yes, very.’
‘Is it right to put me under such constraint?’
‘Trust me. I won’t do anything …’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘I do. That’s why I want you to promise me.’
‘All right. I promise.’
‘Pitaji got another letter from Puri wanting to know how long he must wait and asking us to set a time limit for a decision. He also wrote that we should not blame him if he lost his patience and decided to take some drastic action. Pitaji said if a relationship has ceased to have a meaning or basis, there was no point in continuing it. That if a relationship existed only on paper, it’d be right to end it. He asked for my opinion and I said I agreed with him. Pitaji said that he’d write to jijaji to speak to Puri that this relationship may be ended legally and without bitterness and hassle.’
‘Divorce?’
‘What else?’
‘Pitaji suggested that himself?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Was I wrong when I suggested the same thing last year?’
‘How could I be the one to say it?’
Gill and Kanak were near the taxi stand at the Mandi House roundabout. Gill raised his hand and called, ‘Taxi!’
‘Hai, why?’ Kanak protested. ‘We’ll talk while we walk,’
‘We’ll talk in the taxi.’
When the taxi was on the road, Gill put his arm around Kanak and said in an assured tone, ‘You’ll have to give me a kiss to celebrate this occasion.’
Inspite of feeling muddled, Kanak reacted according to a decision made earlier and pushed Gill’s arm away. She said hastily, ‘Listen! You had promised to listen to me.’
‘What?’ Gill said in a hurt tone.
Tears seeped out in the corners of Kanak’s closed eyes. ‘Please excuse me.’ She said biting her lip, ‘Don’t touch me until this matter is decided. Just behave as you did in Jalandhar.’
Gill was silent.
Kanak implored him, ‘Gillu, everything depends on you now. You can control yourself. I trust you more than I trust myself. I touch your feet and beg you to help me. Only six more months.’
Gill remained silent.
‘Gillu, please don’t be cross with me,’ Kanak pleaded with a catch in her voice.
‘All right,’ said Gill.
THE GENERAL ELECTIONS FOR THE PARLIAMENT AND THE STATE LEGISLATURES
were to be held in the beginning of 1957. The Congress government wanted to launch the Second Five Year Plan in 1956, a year before the elections so as to win the support of the public.
Politicians are prone to short-sightedness, particularly when assessing the future. People are somewhat like the elephant in the fable of blind men, except that people as a whole are much bigger than an elephant. Politicians come into contact with one small section of people and represent a wide body of people. The same was true about the Second Five Year Plan.
The Prime Minister of the Congress government—who was also the president of the Congress party—and the political leaders who supported his policies were hopeful of winning the trust and approval of the people by carrying out the Plan for the country’s industrial development by nationalizing the resources to give a boost to the public sector. Several other influential Congress leaders feared that the implementation of the Plan through the public sector would antagonize a very large section of the public. The Prime Minister tried to reassure everyone, through public information campaigns, that the aim of the Congress government’s socialistic policy was not to bring about socialism as practised in the West, but to protect the private sector and free enterprise from the evils of the socialist totalitarianism. The leading newspapers of the country were under the control of big capitalists and most of them had declared the policy announced by the government as detrimental to the national interest.
A minor incident happened in the midst of the suspense about the Plan. In 1947 the British had transferred the power to the Congress government. At that time the Flag Staff House, a palace-like edifice serving as the residence of the commander-in-chief of the British imperialist armed forces, was designated as the living quarters of the Prime Minister of the Congress government.
The Prime Minister saw himself as a representative of the country’s poor. He considered living in the palace-like edifice an uncalled for ostentation. He wanted the residence of India’s Prime Minister to be ‘simple and ordinary’ like the residence of Britain’s prime minister.
The Central Public Works Department estimated that the construction of a ‘simple and ordinary’ residence suitable for the Prime Minister would cost four lakhs of rupees. The huge cost of the residence upset the Prime Minister. He said that he could have a house of that size built for a lakh or a lakh and a quarter. He gave up the idea of a new residence, and in order to save money, agreed to live in the palace-like residence. The opponents of industrial development in the public sector had been using the incident as an argument in their favour.
The Prime Minister and those responsible for drafting the Plan were not ready to accept that the incident was a proof that the development of large-scale and heavy industry in the public sector was bound to fail due to the inefficiency of the public sector. They thought the incident was rather an example of the crooked and dishonest administration they had inherited from the British government.
The news added fuel to the debate among the public about bribery and corruption. Tara’s neighbours and her friends knew that she was against taking bribes and that they could freely discuss and criticize the widespread practice of offering bribes to corrupt officials throughout the country. Tara was aware that such topics were not discussed with officials who accepted bribes, and that she was not regarded as a ‘good’ official both in government and business circles because of her intransigent attitude. Some business people were always on the lookout for the opportunity to slip Rs 500 or 1000 to some government official and reap the rewards. If there was an outcry about bribe-taking and corruption, it was only on the surface. Both givers and takers of bribes profited in this culture of corruption; what suffered harm was the credibility of the government and the public good. The worldly-wise lost no sleep over this state of affair; for them it was somebody else’s problem.
Ratan offered bribes to officials and also cursed those who took bribes. Tara didn’t like that. Ratan would frankly tell her, ‘I can’t operate my truck unless I pay the traffic police 500 rupees per truck every year and one rupee per month for every intersection the truck passes through. Otherwise the truck will be stopped for speeding or for overloading, or just to check the papers. All they have to do is to signal by hand. If I have to go to the police station, the whole day is wasted and I suffer a loss of forty or fifty rupees. Then the truck owner will have to appear in court repeatedly to answer
the charges. Who can afford to take such losses? We cough up the money because we can’t help it. What’s unfair in that?’
Tara had no sympathy for Ratan. She would say, ‘Of course it’s unfair. You park trucks in crowded bazaars, block the road needlessly and hassle everyone. You overload trucks and that causes accidents. Your fellow truck owners use footpaths for loading and unloading goods as if the footpath belonged to them. I have seen with my own eyes people trip and fall over and get hurt because of blocked footpaths. Have you no concern for them?’
Mathur was increasingly dissatisfied with the administration’s laxity and its policies. He would say, ‘People who do not take advantage of their position and opportunity to exploit the situation are exceptions. The public can see police constables, office peons and clerks taking bribes. I’d like to ask who in the government, from the very top to the very bottom, is not exploiting the system to their advantage? If people take bribes, they do it for the sake of their children and family. Name me one person in the government whose children and family are not profited by his job. Government employees and officials will only follow the example of their superiors. There are rules and regulations against government officials accepting gifts and freebies. The officials are not so stupid that they can’t find a loophole in the law. It’s the little people who suffer most from ever-increasing taxes and galloping inflation. The government reports show increase in productivity, but it’s the prices that go up instead. I don’t see any benefit of all this planning, except hundreds of millions of rupees of public money finding its way into the coffers of big capitalists and the pockets of government officials. Go and have a look around the Bhakra Nangal hydroelectric project. Cement purchased by the state for building the dam has been used to build private houses up to a 50–60 mile radius of the dam. The cement factories make a killing, the contractors clean up and the government officials line their pockets, the real loser is the taxpayer. Sand is supplied in the name of cement. The cost is estimated at one rupee for something that would cost four annas, and three-fourths of the allotted funds is skimmed off by racketeers. Who stands to lose when dams built with sand instead of cement will begin to crumble? Neither the contractors nor the government engineers will come forward to accept the responsibility.’
Narottam had been transferred to the Seetalpur Ordnance Factory as works manager. He came to meet Tara whenever he was in Delhi. He was constantly perturbed by the attempts to hide bad management and
inefficiency in the factory. He was beginning to realize that the refusal to join his father’s business so as to earn an honest living was nothing but chasing a mirage. Once, during the discussion on the sad state of affairs, he said, ‘Who can be called an honest person? Are the MLAs who make laws honest? Do you suppose that they spend twenty or twenty-five thousand rupees out of their pockets to contest elections only because they want to serve the country? My uncle tells a story about the MLA representing his village. The MLA had spent time in prison for taking part in the nationalist movement, no doubt about it. He owned forteen bighas of land and a small, dilapidated family house. He applied for and got a government loan from Lucknow for installing a cooperative tube well or you can say that the District Congress Committee got him the loan. He took another loan for Rs 5,000 from my uncle against his agricultural land. Then he contested the state assembly elections on Congress ticket, and won. In the next three years and a half, he built two new brick houses, and now owns sixty bighas of land. Whatever the
thanedar
, the local police chief is paid in bribes, the MLA takes 50 per cent of it. He operates as a self-appointed agent to get any work done in the government offices. He occasionally sends a message to my uncle, ‘Lala, send a can of desi ghee to my house.’ My uncle dare not ask for payment, so he consoles himself by saying
jai ramji
to the MLA and hopes that in troubled times the MLA may prove useful to him.’
Such grumblings about the system irritated Tara, but she could see that the space around the shops below her flat was in a state of chaos. Owners of the furniture store and the restaurant had encroached on the footpath in front of their shops. The owner of the general store had put two display cases outside the shop for a better ‘show’ of goods. The traffic police constables turned a blind eye to the encroachments upon receiving bribes of two or four rupees. The encroachments caused inconvenience to the residents of the flats. Talwar Sahib and Tara had problem in parking their vehicles. Everyone grumbled, but no one spoke out loud—why should one pick a quarrel with the neighbours? Tara too felt irritated, but kept quiet. She thought, ‘When the public is not prepared to raise their voice in protest, what can the government do?’
Tara told Mercy what she thought one day when Mercy began to complain about a lack of civic sense. Mercy snapped back, ‘Sure, why would you find fault with the government. You’ve changed your tune since you became a government official.’
Gill was also present. He had a different viewpoint, ‘People lacking the courage to raise their voice against corruption and disorder is certainly not an indicator of good governance and respect for the rule of law.’
Tara did not reply to Mercy, but said to Gill, ‘And whose fault it is if the public quietly accepts political corruption and profiteering so that they may also have the opportunity to take advantage of the system?’
Nath was well acquainted with the workings of market economy, free trade and the private sector. He knew that in the private sector, industrialists and businessmen inflated the cost of production and management to show a lower margin of profit in order to save on income tax. In his view there was no reason that industrial production in the public sector could not be profitable and successful and that it should be able to provide investment for economic growth.
In Lahore, Kalicharan Kaul had been among the students who held Nath in high regard. He had continued to meet Nath in Delhi. Although Kaul had an MA degree, he had not tried to find a job in Lahore and had lived off the rental income from his family property. After the Partition he had been forced to look for work. He had been selected for the IAS in 1948, and was posted in the Department of Income Tax. While working for the government, he had passed the exam to qualify as a chartered auditor. After a while he had left his job, opened his own office and had begun to work as a tax lawyer and consultant. His past experience as an official of the Department of Income Tax had proven to be very useful. He now had another accountant and five clerks on the staff. His job was to audit and verify business accounts, and the accounts verified by him as a licensed auditor were legally accepted to be correct.
Kaul was particularly enthusiastic about exposing the weaknesses of arguments against nationalization and state ownership of large industries. Without caring about what others thought, he would say, ‘Why would some rich industrialist pay me three or four thousand rupees if I didn’t save three or four lakhs for him? My profession is lawful and I have a licence to practise it.’ He would name names, ‘This person has hired several retired income tax commissioners as consultants and pays each one of them over 35,000 rupees per year. Imagine how much tax he must be saving if he can afford to pay three or four lakh every year to accountants to cook his books. All
this is done lawfully and with bravado. Such underhand practices won’t be possible in the state-owned industries.’
Mathur or Gill would answer even in the presence of Nath, ‘Then the public sector officials who regulate and control the industrial production will be prone to accepting kickbacks.’
‘How could they possibly accept kickbacks?’ Kaul would protest. ‘If the officials have to account for their wealth and if there are no ways they can use their ill-gotten gains, how would they hide their unlawfully earned money? If you work at a sweet maker’s shop, how many sweets can you eat on the sly?’
Gill said, ‘You are dreaming of a system based on socialism. The ministers of the Congress government are trying to reassure the public that their policy of a socialistic pattern of society will save the country from socialist totalitarianism.’
‘They can say what they want. Public ownership and nationalization of industries is a must if we want to increase industrial output by using our country’s assets and resources. Otherwise, all plans are bound to fail.’
After listening to such discussions Tara would think, ‘Why can’t people have faith in the future? Why do they think that everything is doomed to failure right from the start?’
Dr Solis and Nath, more than anyone else, realized that the policy of industrial production under the public sector would be more advantageous to the country. But their personal views and beliefs were not enough and a definite working plan and detailed data were needed to convince the government circles that such a policy was feasible. Nath’s section was working to prepare the plan and to collect the data. His office had not shifted to the hills in the summer that year because his staff had to work closely with other government departments. Moreover, the Prime Minister did not approve of the British custom of moving government offices and officials to the hills in summer.
Chaddha thought that the data researched and collected by him to show the efficacy of the public sector was more reliable. He had promised to give Nath all that data by the evening of 15 July. Chaddha had enlisted the help of many of his friends in compiling the data. Tara had also been asked because she was good at maths. She had worked until midnight several times sitting under the fan in muggy weather. She had also promised to drive Chaddha
and his comrades to meet Nath on the fifteenth. On that evening, Chaddha went with Narottam and Tara took Gill and Kanak with her. Nath was not home when they reached his place, but arrived after an hour.