Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

But this facile equation with India’s traditional values troubled me. And when a journalist — one of the very few, Ganapathi, who still thought this battle- scarred old dodderer a likely source of usable copy at this time — asked me, in an allusion to the great battle of the Mahabharata: ‘Don’t you think this election is a contemporary Kurukshetra?’, I erupted.

‘I hope not,’ I barked, ‘because there were no victors at Kurukshetra. Except in the childish popular versions of the epic. The story of the Mahabharata, young man, does not end on the field of battle. What happens afterwards is tragedy, suffering, futility, death. Which underlines the only moral of that battle, and that epic: that there are no real victors. Everyone loses at the end.’

‘But — but what about the great conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the battle between dharma and adharma, between good and evil?’

‘It was a battle between cousins,’ I snapped back. ‘They were killing each other’s flesh and blood, shooting arrows into their own gurus, lying and deceiving their elders in order to win. There was good and bad, dishonour and treachery, betrayal and death, on both sides. There was no glorious victory at Kurukshetra.’

I saw his bewildered expression and took pity on him.

‘Young man,’ I said, my severity relenting, ‘you must understand one thing. This election is not Kurukshetra; life is Kurukshetra. History is Kurukshetra. The struggle between dharma and adharma is a struggle our nation, and each of us in it, engages in on every single day of our existence. That struggle, that battle, took place before this election; it will continue after it.’

He stumbled away, and wrote no story. I do not know what he told his colleagues at the Press Club, but no other journalist sought to interview me during the campaign.

Just as well, Ganapathi, because in that particular election the issue was indeed an inconveniently non-traditional one: the rout or the restoration of democracy.

Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

Ah, what days they were, Ganapathi! Bliss was it in that spring to be alive, but to be old and wise was very heaven. I saw the great cause of Gangaji and Dhritarashtra and Pandu thrillingly reborn in the hearts and minds of young crowds at every street-corner. I saw the meaning of Independence come pulsating to life as unlettered peasants rose in the villages to pledge their votes for democracy. I saw journalists younger than the Constitution relearn the meaning of freedom by discovering what they had lost when the word was erased from their notebooks. I saw Draupadi’s face glowing in the open, the flame of her radiance burning more brightly than ever. And I knew that it had all been worthwhile.

Through the clamour and confusion of the election campaign Krishna moved with secure serenity. Both sides came to him at the start: the Kaurava Party of Priya Duryodhani, of which he had never ceased to be a member, and the Opposition, in its quest for illustrious defections from the ruling party’s ranks. To both, he reiterated his refusal to contest a seat in Parliament, insisting that his place was in his local legislative assembly, representing his neighbours. Since that was not, however, at stake in the coming election, he was available to campaign in the national contest, and both contenders came back to seek his active support and that of the dedicated party cadres he had so effectively trained. The need of the hour was too great: Krishna could not remain on the sidelines.

‘Both of you say that the other’s victory will be a disaster for the country,’ he mused aloud. ‘Perhaps you are both right. Disaster does not approach its victims wrapped in thunderclouds, dripping blood. Rather, it slips in quietly, unobtrusively, its face masked in ambiguity, making each of us see good in evil and evil in good. There is good and evil in both sides of this argument. Some say that under Priya Duryodhani India faces extinction: others point out that the majority of Indians have never been happier. I have my own views, but who is to say they are right for everyone?’ He turned calmly to the two party representatives before him. ‘It is not easy for me to take sides. I have been the Kaurava Party secretary here for too long to renounce it, but I have also stood for certain principles in my political life too long to renounce them. So let me propose this: one side can have me, alone, not as a candidate, with no party funds, but fully committed to their campaign; the other can have the massed ranks of my party workers, disciplined and dedicated men and women who will heed my instructions to work with undiminished vigour even if they see me on the other side. A fair division? Perhaps not, but I leave it to each of you to choose: which will it be? Me alone — or my cadres, with their experience, their vehicles, their skills?’

The Kaurava Party representative and the Opposition’s aged envoy looked uncomfortably at each other. It was Krishna himself who broke the silence.

‘In deference to your seniority, VVji, I must invite you to choose first,’ he said. ‘For the Opposition.’

I responded without hesitation. ‘I choose you,’ I said.

And so it was that both Duryodhani and Yudhishtir thought they had done the better out of the division, as the Kaurava Party workers remained true to their allegiances while Krishna went on to animate the Opposition’s national campaign. With his pearly white teeth shining between violet lips and his deep eyes smiling beatifically at the electorate, Krishna brought to the loudspeaker-led hurly-burly of the contest the spirit of an older India, an India where the lilt of the flute called the milkmaids to the river to wash away their innocence before the laughter of their Lord.

Krishna’s most difficult task undoubtedly came when Arjun, on the verge of filing his nomination papers for the Opposition, was assailed afresh by the doubts that had bedevilled his years in journalism. ‘Is it right — should I fight — or if I just write, won’t I cast more light?’ was the nature of his misgivings. ‘If you don’t fight now,’ his brother-in-law told him bluntly, ‘you won’t have anything to write about afterwards.’

I heard something of their exchange when they stopped for a reflective cup of tea at the Ashoka Hotel and failed to notice me at the next table. Ashoka, the great conqueror-turned-pacifist of the third century BC, is the one figure of our history who has most inspired independent India’s schizoid governmental ethos. His tolerance and humanitarianism, his devotion to peace and justice, infuse our declarations of policy; his military might, his imposition of a Pax Indica on his neighbours, inform our practice. Our national spokesmen inherited his missionary belief that what was good for India was good for the world, and in choosing a national symbol our government preferred his powerful trinity of lions to the spinning-wheel advocated by Gangaji. Typically, though, the only institution to which they saw fit to give his name was a five-star hotel. And appropriately enough, it was here that the dialogue took place that was to change Arjun’s life for good, if not for better.

Let us follow it, Ganapathi, in the form that seems most apt for these near- celestial sonnets of sophistry and sense. It is time for one last lapse from prose in this memoir; should we, too, not genuflect at the golden gate of contemporary taste, and pay iambic tribute to the tetrameter?