Classy lady’s lament

India’s Broken Tryst by Tavleen Singh harper collins; Price: Rs.699; Pages: 414 Well-known political columnist and author Tavleen Singh’s fourth book begins with the author relaxing in the garden of her luxury home in Alibaug, the retreat of Mumbai’s rich and famous — a mere three miles across the sea from dirty, teeming Mumbai in which all except the super-rich (including Tavleen and her partner construction tycoon Ajit Gulabchand who reside in the most expensive apartment block in India) live miserable lives. In this salubrious setting while perhaps counting her blessings, one of which was the crushing defeat of the Congress in General Election 2014 a few months earlier, Tavleen receives a long-distance call from a former minister of the Congress-led UPA I/II government who requests — and is endowed — anonymity. The former minister confirms Tavleen’s suspicion that she was high on Sonia Gandhi’s hit list which explained why “ bad things had happened in my life and to people in my life under Sonia Gandhi’s reign” (2004-14) in which prime minster Dr. Manmohan Singh was a mere puppet. One of these “bad things” was a tax raid when some very unbeautiful and undeferential tax collectors disturbed her peace and rudely searched her/Ajit’s seaside home to find “nothing more than Rs.40,000 and some jewellery worth barely anything”. Meanwhile she managed to sneak a phone call to a neighbour who turned up and imperiously announced she was the Princess of Morvi. Then, while the tax raiders ate their modest meal out of “plastic boxes”, she ordered the butler to serve her and the princess red wine and grilled fish, in full view of the low-paid bureaucrats to “really annoy the raiders”. Such disdain for all who aren’t as classy and connected as herself (btw it’s not so classy to have red wine with fish) including Sonia Gandhi who the Welham-educated Tavleen often reminds the reader, has very modest origins, pervades this book. Nevertheless there’s no doubting that the author has a deep sympathy, empathy and even love for the wretched of the mean streets of Mumbai, poor children in particular. Several chapters of India’s Broken Tryst examine why India’s “tryst with destiny” proclaimed by Jawaharlal Nehru, free India’s first prime minister on August 15, 1947, has ended in a shambles. Quite rightly, Tavleen blames inorganic, Soviet-inspired socialism which Nehru — a natural sciences graduate of Cambridge University — imposed upon newly-independent India after he was ill-advisedly appointed independent India’s first prime minister, for the huge mess the country has become. The mess was made messier by his daughter Indira Gandhi who nationalised the country’s major banks, multiplied capital-intensive and hugely loss-making public sector enterprises, and severely debilitated institutions of governance such as Parliament and the judiciary. Moreover in 1975 she imposed a 19-month internal Emergency upon the nation after the Allahabad high court found her guilty of electoral malpractice. Tavleen’s ideological epiphany began after the late eighties, before which she was a regular Rajiv-Sonia courtier, as reportedly recounted in her earlier book…