Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. The Indian capital, once the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage, was slowly filling with lovers: whispering, blushing, occasionally holding hands, they loitered beneath flowering trees like figures from a miniature. Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight, the sari was beginning to slip.
Other changes in the city were less promising. The roads were becoming clogged; pollution was terrible. Every day the sluggish waters of the Jumna were spiced with some 350 million gallons of raw sewage.
Alongside the rapidly growing wealth of the middle class, there was also a great increase in poverty. Every week, it was said, six thousand penniless migrants poured into Delhi looking for work. You could see them at the traffic lights along Lodhi Road, hands outreached for alms. The jhuggis— the vast sackcloth cities in which these people lived—had quadrupled in size since 1984. New jhuggi outposts were spreading along the dry drainage ditches, filling the flyovers, sending tentacles up the pavements and the hard shoulders. At night, cooking fires could be seen flickering inside the old Lodhi tombs.
Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them.
Strangely, in these drawing-rooms, you never heard anyone complain about the Sikhs. But of course it was they and not the Muslims who had most recently suffered the backlash of this hardening, this new intolerance which, like an unstable lump of phosphorus, could quite suddenly burst into flames.
AS WAS HER HABIT, Indira Gandhi had toast and fruit for breakfast. It was 31 October 1984 and the bougainvillaea was in flower.
At 9.15 she stepped out of the portico of her white bungalow, crossed the lawns by the lotus pond, then passed into the dim green shade of the peepul avenue. There she smiled at her Sikh security guard, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh. Singh did not smile back. Instead he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the stomach. His friend, Constable Satwant Singh, then emptied the clip of his sten gun into her.
Today, Mrs Gandhi’s house is a shrine dedicated to the former Prime Minister’s memory. Busloads of school children trail through, licking ice creams and staring at Mrs Gandhi’s rooms, now permanently frozen as they were on the day she died. Her Scrabble set, a signed photograph from Ho Chi Minh (‘loving greetings to Indira’), a pair of her knitting needles and her books—an unlikely selection, including Marx, Malraux and The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh— all lie behind glass, numbered and catalogued. Outside, in the middle of the avenue, a strangely tasteless memorial stands on the spot where she fell: a bouquet of red glass roses on a frosted crystal plinth, a gift from the people of Czechoslovakia. It is as if it marked the place of her death. But in fact as she lay there, pouring with blood from some twenty bullet wounds, Indira Gandhi was still alive.
An ambulance was waiting outside the gate of her house, as regulations demanded, but, this being Delhi, the driver had disappeared for a tea break. So Indira’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, bundled the Prime Minister into the back of a decrepit Hindustan Ambassador, and together they drove the three miles to the All-India Medical Institute.
Indira was probably dead on arrival, but it was not until one o’clock that the news was broken to the waiting world. The effect was immediate. When the crowds learned that their leader had been assassinated, and that a Sikh was responsible, the thin ice of Delhi’s tenuous peace was shattered. The mourners wanted blood. Grabbing sticks and stones and whatever else came to hand, they set off looking for Sikhs.
In those days Mr and Mrs Puri had a house beside the Medical Institute. They were thus the very first Sikh family to receive the attentions of the mob. Mrs Puri had just finished her lunch—as usual, dal, two vegetables and one hot aloo paratha—and was deep in her customary post-prandial knit, when she looked up from her woollies, peered out of her window and noticed three hundred emotional thugs massing around her garden gate and chanting: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’- blood for blood, blood for blood, blood for blood.
‘They were very jungli peoples—not from good castes. So I told Ladoo to lock the door and stop them from coming in,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘We could hear them talking about us. They said: "These people are Sikhs. Let us kill them." Then they began to throw some stones and broke all the glasses. We switched off the lights and pretended no one was at home. We thought we would be killed. But first we wanted to kill some of them. You see actually we are kshatriyas, from the warrior caste. My blood was boiling and I very much wanted to give them good. But they were standing outside only. What could I do?’
The mob smashed every window in the house, burned the Puris’ car and incinerated their son’s motorbike. Then they attacked the front door. Luckily, Mr Puri was on the other side, leaning forward on his zimmer frame, armed to the teeth. He fired three times through the door with his old revolver and the mob fled. As they did so, old Mr Puri got Ladoo to kick open the door, then fired the rest of the round after them.
Three hours later, cruising in his taxi, Balvinder Singh passed Green Park, an area not far from the Medical Institute, when he encountered another mob. They surrounded the taxi and pelted it with stones. Balvinder was unhurt, but his front windscreen was shattered. He swore a few choice Punjabi obscenities, then returned quickly to his taxi stand. The next day, despite growing unrest, Balvinder and his brothers decided to return to work. For an hour they sat on their charpoys looking nervously out on to the empty streets before agreeing the moment had come to hide the cars and shut up the stand. At five past eleven they received a phone call. It warned them that the nearby Sujan Singh Park gurdwara was burning and that a large lynch mob was closing in on them. Leaving everything, they hastily set off to their house across the Jumna, twelve cousins in a convoy of three taxis.
They were nearing one of the bridges over the river when they were flagged down by a police patrol. The policemen told them that there were riots on the far side and that it was not safe to proceed. Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s father, said that there were riots on the near side too, and that it was impossible to go back. Moreover, they could not leave their wives and children without protection. The police let them through. For five minutes they drove without difficulty. Then, as they neared Laxmi Nagar, they ran into a road block. A crowd had placed a burning truck across part of the road and were massing behind it with an armoury of clubs and iron bars. The first two cars, containing Punjab, Balvinder and two of his brothers, swerved around the truck and made it through. The third taxi, containing three of Punjab’s young nephews, was attacked and stopped. The boys were pulled out of the cars, beaten with the rods, doused with kerosene and set alight.
That night, from their roof, Balvinder and his family could see fires burning all over Delhi. To save themselves from the fate of their cousins the brothers decided to cut their hair and shave off their beards; the first time they had ever done so. Punjab reminded them of their religion and tried to stop them; afterwards, in atonement, he refused to eat for a whole week.
In the meantime, the Singhs also took more concrete steps to protect themselves. The family lived in an entirely Sikh area—a taxi drivers’ colony—and the residents quickly armed themselves with kirpans (Sikh ceremonial swords) and formed makeshift vigilante forces to defend their narrow alleys. Preferring to concentrate on less resolutely guarded areas, the mobs left them in peace. For four days they lived under siege. Then the army was deployed; and as quickly as they had appeared, the rioters vanished.
Balvinder had lost three cousins