GAYATRI DEVI'S DAYS IN MRS GANDHI'S EMERGENCY: MARRIAGE PROPOSALS AND SEWER RATS IN TIHAR
"Once the news of my imprisonment got around, I was flooded with presents from my friends... People whom I did not know were sympathetic and astounded by my imprisonment. I even received letters from strangers proposing marriage from abroad, presumably calculated to get me out of India beyond the clutches of this dictatorial regime," recounted Gayatri Devi, the Princess of Cooch Behar and Rajmata of Jaipur, in her autobiography,A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur. It was end-July 1975.
Gayatri Devi was 56. She, the Jaipur MP, was at her Delhi home to attend Parliament when she found police officers at her door. She was arrested under COFEPOSA (Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities) Act and thrown into Tihar, the place of incarceration of prisoners of the Emergency, political and otherwise. Nineteen British pounds in loose change, and a few gold coins did Gayatri Devi in. It was the Emergency and rules were flying out of the window faster than you can complete reading this sentence.
'She brought the worst out in Indira Gandhi'
For Indira Gandhi, contempt for Gayatri Devi ran deeper than skin-deep but skin did have a role to play.
"Indira could not stomach a woman more good-looking than herself and insulted her in Parliament, calling her a bitch and a glass doll. Devi brought the worst out in Indira Gandhi: her petty, vindictive side," wrote Khushwant Singh.
Indira and Ayesha, as Gayatri Devi was known to her friends and family, go back to their early years in Shantiniketan. They were both students at Patha Bhavan.
"Gayatri Devi and Indira had crossed paths in life quite a bit, when they were studying in Shantiniketan. Apparently, Indira had been jealous of Gayatri Devi, who used to smoke cigarettes and talk about going on panther hunts... this glamorous young princess, you know, obviously, socially, popular in school. Like Khushwant Singh said, Indira's hatred was quite personal, quite visceral," author-historian Tripurdaman Singh tells India Today.
Indira held on to her grudge all those years. The years of latent hate bubbled over when Gandhi sent the cops to arrest Bubbles, Gayatri Devi's stepson, and the Rajmata herself on July 30, 1975.
India was settling in to the first month of Indira's twenty-one-month Emergency. Opposition leaders were all rounded up and put in various jails; from people who gave speeches at protests, like Srilata Swaminathan, who shared a room with Gayatri Devi in Tihar; to the Rajmata of Gwalior, Vijaya Raje Scindia, who was brought in later. Royals, protesters, pickpockets and prostitutes were all in the same jail; the true leveller in the democracy of that day.
"It was a scary time to contemplate that much of their family jewellery or silver and gold could be seized; or even worse, they could be locked up on a whim. They felt particularly under pressure because much of the rhetoric and a lot of the invective over the preceding years had been directed towards them," Singh tells India Today.
School for children and aloo-dal in Tihar
In Tihar, Gayatri Devi got her friends to send her textbooks and slates to teach the children. A cricket set, a football, and a threadbare badminton court followed, where she played with the younger women.
"There were rumours that I was being ill-treated in jail, but this was not true," she wrote. But she ate the same 'aloo ki sabji and arhar dal as the other prisoners', wrote John Zubrzycki in his 2020 book,House of Jaipur, even though her sarees remained chiffon and the sillage of perfume never left her.
Every night in Tihar, the Rajmata of Jaipur and the Rajmata of Gwalior would sit and listen to the BBC on a transistor that the Jaipurs had smuggled into the jail. The news that made it to India on that radio never had anything about India; such was Gandhi's censorship. The country didn't know which all Opposition leaders had been arrested. They did not know who were languishing in jails around the country, nor did they know that the Opposition benches in Parliament were all empty.
Vijaya Raje Scindia and Gayatri Devi, however, were both members of Parliament when they were in jail. So, they knew. They knew of the jailed MPs, and the political prisoners who poured in into Tihar told them of the extreme measures India was suffering at the hands of the Gandhi mother-son duo - Indira and Sanjay - on the other side of the prison gates.
"We heard of the harsh measures taken in forced vasectomies on the male population; of the demolition of the houses at Turkman Gate area and other such excesses. The country was seething with fury against the regime," wrote Gayatri Devi.
A game of snakes and ladders
Meanwhile, Gayatri Devi's stepson Bubbles was let out of Tihar on parole. She remained in jail. The Jaipurs put their might and money behind trying to get the Rajmata out, but the moment they found headway, the government twisted the rules. This 'game of snakes and ladders' continued for five and a half months and Gayatri Devi lost weight, her appetite, and at times, the hope of ever seeing the free world.
"Many of the royals, especially those of them who had any tangential affiliation with the world of politics, did, what now seems to be, quite crazy things. Many of them sold off their jewellery at throwaway prices; some of them gave it away; some, apparently, for safety, put it in wells, and so on. So, they were under a tremendous degree of psychological pressure," says Tripurdaman Singh.
"And those, especially those who were not used to the rough and tumble of politics, or to facing the hard graft that the political world really necessitated; and Gayatri Devi is a good example; for them, it was a particularly hard period. And they didn't survive. She, of course, gave up [politics]. Others, like Madhav Rao Scindia, who spent the Emergency in exile, came back, resigned from the Jan Sangh, and joined the Congress. So, the pressure did make many of them crack," says Singh.
Christmas with sewer rats for company
A mouth ulcer helped Gayatri Devi start a conversation about release from jail. Her little excursions to the dentist and the physiotherapist became occasions to look forward to.
Soon, the cruel Delhi summer gave way to the monsoon which melded into winter, and the Rajmata of Jaipur found herself wondering if she would see the New Year in her beloved Pink City. That was not to be. Ayesha, the belle of the Christmas ball in Calcutta the previous year, with 'no time to pluck an eyebrow', spent December 25 with sewer rats for company. She did have her caviar and Cole Porter on the tape recorder though.
In the last week of December 1975, Gayatri Devi was admitted to Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital for a persistent pain in her right abdomen. She was diagnosed with gall stones. She had to be operated upon. At this juncture, Gayatri Devi put her foot down and refused to be operated upon without her family by her side. She also had to sign a 're-drafted letter' telling Indira Gandhi that she was leaving politics. "It was a set letter, I wasn't the only one who wrote it, many of us did," she toldIndia Todaymagazine in April 1977, a year after she left Tihar on parole.
Finally, on January 11, 1976, her parole order arrived.
Freer in Tihar than at home
"But being on parole was almost worse than being in jail -- it was just a wider jail," she toldIndia Today in 1977.
Gayatri Devi returned to her Aurangazeb Road home in Delhi, from where she was arrested, and found out, much to her chagrin, that the whole house was bugged.
"It was like that for everyone; many of those who, for health reasons, or similar were paroled during the Emergency after three-four-five-six-howmanyever months they had spent; or many of them who were transferred to hospitals, they all had their homes and workplaces bugged. In itself, I don't think Gayatri Devi faced anything worse than what most of the others were facing. I think she, in some ways, given her lifestyle and her background, and her outlook on life, was the least well-equipped to deal with it," Singh tells India Today.
Gayatri Devi's bugged house was diametrically opposite to Tihar,"where we were able to speak freely, and where every evening after supper the prisoners would shout anti-government slogans in which we would join in."
She wrote of her post-jail days in Delhi, "I soon realised that people in Delhi were afraid. I found it difficult to keep quiet. Luckily just after two days, Joey and I went by car to Jaipur."
Gayatri Devi was not allowed to travel by public transport (it was a stretch to even think that the Rajmata of Jaipur would take public transport, but well, the Emergency was a different time!). The Gandhi government wanted no gathering of people to greet Gayatri Devi. About 600 people defied those orders and met the Rajmata at Lily Pool when she arrived in Jaipur. It was her people, of the city she spent her life bettering, after all.
'Didn't ever know Indira Gandhi'
A year after she got out of Tihar on parole, Gayatri Devi poured her heart out in an interview toIndia Todaymagazine. It was April 1977. The Rajmata of Jaipur was in Lily Pool, the villa outside of Rambagh Palace she lived her last years in, and which was 'quite small, really'.
"I don't know what the charges against me were, I don't know why I was arrested. I honestly don't know why I went to jail. Maybe because I was in the Opposition. Maybe because Rajasthan had got a lot of seats in the 1967 election," she toldIndia Today.
Did Indira Gandhi have anything against her personally?
"She also arrested the Rajmata of Gwalior. We were both in jail. I don't know why I got so much publicity. I suppose she [Indira Gandhi] wanted to discredit me in the eyes of the people of Jaipur. They've never been able to get the Jaipur seat. And this time they've lost again... I liked her [Gandhi] as a person, but I never knew her well. She came to Rambagh here once or twice with her father and perhaps once or twice to our house in Delhi. She's always been very nice. But no, I didn't ever know her," said Gayatri Devi toIndia Today.
Escaping jail during Emergency was an insult
Once the dark years of Emergency were a bad dream from the past, Gayatri Devi looked back on those days with the occasional amusement and a lot of nonchalance.
Gayatri Devi told journalist-author Ann Morrow (Highness: The Maharajas of India), "I would never hold grudges. Besides, I would have been most insulted if she hadn't thought me important enough to put in jail."
And how could Gandhi not jail Gayatri. Devi had, till then, held the Guinness World Record for the largest majority won by any candidate in any election in any democratic country in the world. As far as the Opposition went, Jaipur could not be touched by the Congress. So, when the Emergency made it possible to jail anyone Gandhi deemed as a threat, there was no escape for the 'important' Gayatri Devi.
'We have taken revenge for what she did to you'
In March 1977, the Emergency came to an end and Indira Gandhi declared a snap election. She believed, quite naively, in retrospect, that the Congress would win by a landslide. The vengeful electorate dragged the Gandhi mother and son through the mud. They were handed a resounding defeat in their respective seats. People flung money at the news boards at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, where the results of the election were being chalked up.
When the news travelled 250 kms to Lily Pool in Jaipur, where Gayatri Devi was hosting a delegation of English polo players, champagne corks went pop. Gayatri Devi rushed to the Collectorate. The votes were being counted, and a jubilant crowd greeted her there. "We have taken revenge for what she [Gandhi] did to you," said her people. The people of Jaipur, her city.
The mood of post-Emergency celebrations transcended the borders of Jaipur to her well-wishers abroad. They no longer had to send marriage proposals to get the Maharani out of Tihar.
2024-09-07T03:19:28Z dg43tfdfdgfd