(Book Extract) How Indira’s bete noire Raj Narain gave her a sex scandal to nail Jagjivan Ram

New Delhi, Aug 1 (SocialNews.XYZ) In a book packed with riveting accounts of how important decisions have been taken by India's prime ministers -- from Rajiv Gandhi's waffling over Shah Bano, which was a serious body blow to India's secular identity, to Manmohan Singh's triumph on the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal -- a tragi-comical story recounted by the author, veteran political journalist and television commentator Neerja Chowdhury, is about Suresh Ram, wayward son of Jagjivan Ram, one of India's longest-serving Union ministers and Dalit leader.

Chowdhury, in her book, 'How Prime Ministers Decide' (Aleph Book Company), outlines how a strange coalition of people acted in unison to expose Suresh Ram, who was having an affair with a college student from the Jat community and kept pictures of their bedroom escapades shot on a Polaroid camera in the glove compartment of his car.

The dramatis personae included the late liquor baron Kapil Mohan (who was close to both Indira Gandhi and her bete noire, the then Health Minister Raj Narain); Indira Gandhi, who could not forgive Jagjivan Ram for turning against her after the Emergency was lifted, and teaming up with the opposition; Morarji Desai, the then prime minister, who was getting insecure about Jagjivan Ram, his defence minister; Charan Singh, who was conspiring against Desai to become prime minister; Krishan Kant, a former Congressman who was Jagjivan Ram's confidant (he later became India's Vice-President); Raj Narain, whose henchman got the photographs that nailed Suresh Ram; and of course, Sanjay Gandhi, whose wife Maneka ran the pictures and shamed Jagjivan Ram in her 'Surya' magazine, darkly suggesting that it was a Chinese operation to get to India's defence secrets.

The scandal shattered Jagjivan Ram, but it did not help Charan Singh or his 'Hanuman' Raj Narain (who, incidentally, had moved the Allahabad High Court against alleged electoral malpractices by Indira Gandhi and got her unseated). It was Indira Gandhi who not only effectively terminated the political ambitions of Jagjivan Ram, but also set in motion the demise of the Desai government and her dramatic comeback in 1980.

Excerpts from Neerja Chowdhury's book, 'How Prime Ministers Decide':

Luck favoured Indira Gandhi in the second half of 1978. The first windfall was a sex scam involving Suresh Ram, Jagjivan Ram's son.

On 21 August 1978, there was a car accident in front of the gates of the Mohan Meakin plant in Mohan Nagar on the outskirts of Delhi. The car, a Mercedes, hit a man who died on the spot. Inside the car were a man and a young woman.

Fearful that they would be attacked by witnesses, they rushed towards the gates of the plant. The watchman, who had seen the accident, called up the office on the intercom.

Anil Bali, then the manager, came out. He recognised Suresh Ram, son of Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram, and took him inside.

Suresh Ram told Bali that he was being followed and was trying to shake off his pursuers when the accident took place. His car had been tailed by two Janata Party workers, K.C. Tyagi and Om Pal Singh, proteges of Raj Narain, and they had been keeping Ram under surveillance for several days.

"Babuji dekh laenge garhi ko (My father will take care of the car)," Suresh Ram told Bali about the damaged car. Bali sent the couple home in one of the company’s cars.

The FIR Suresh Ram filed that day in the Kashmere Gate police station told a somewhat different story from the one he had narrated to Bali. He alleged that he had been kidnapped the night before (20 August 1978) by a dozen hefty men.

Apparently, his Mercedes Benz had been followed by two taxis in New Delhi. When they reached a lonely spot near Nigambodh Ghat, his pursuers overtook him, forced him to stop the car, jumped out and whipped out their revolvers. They opened the door of the car, and made the young woman sit at the back. They forced Ram to drive to Modinagar; and he and the woman were taken to a room inside a school. They asked Ram to sign blank papers.

When he refused, they beat him up until he lost consciousness. They were told they had both been photographed in compromising positions.

Raj Narain's associate Om Pal Singh said that they had been tailing Suresh Ram because he was involved in all kinds of "nefarious activities". They knew he used to take photographs with a Polaroid camera to keep his girlfriend, Sushma Chaudhary, a student at a Delhi college, who was from the Jat community, in check and get vicarious pleasure from the exercise.

They wanted to lay their hands on the photos and found them in the glove compartment of the car Suresh Ram was driving. As soon as Narain's boys managed to lay their hands on photographs of Suresh Ram and his girlfriend, they rushed the pictures to their boss.

That night, Jagjivan Ram met Narain. The meeting was arranged by Kapil Mohan at his house. Though Kapil was close to Indira Gandhi, he had equally good relations with Ram, and others across the political spectrum.

Suresh Ram would visit him, as would Kanti Desai, Morarji Desai’s son.

That night, "Babuji Raj Narain ko manane aaye thae (Jagjivan Ram arrived to try and bring Raj Narain around)," Bali recalled. Jagjivan Ram obviously "wanted to strike a bargain" with Narain. ...

Jagjivan Ram and Narain were inside for "about twenty minutes". When Ram emerged from the meeting, Kapil saw him off to his car. This must have been around "11.45 p.m.".

When Kapil Mohan came back into the house, Narain quipped gleefully, "Aaj yeh kaboo maen ayae (Today he has been caught out)." He said: "Babu Jagjivan Ram offered me anything I want -- money, CMship of a state, anything at all in return for the photographs." Apparently Jagjivan Ram also told him, "Main PM banane wala hoon, kisi ko mantri banana ho toh batana (I am going to become PM soon, let me know if you want anyone made minister)."

Despite all the blandishments offered by Ram, no deal was struck between him and Narain.

Then Raj Narain handed over some of the photographs to Kapil Mohan, "around fifteen of them", and kept the rest. "There must have been forty to fifty of them," recalled Bali.

As soon as Narain left, Kapil Mohan turned to Bali with an urgency,

"Take these photographs to Sanjay. Now. Immediately."

A surprised Bali drove to Indira Gandhi's house in the dead of night.

"I must have reached there around 1 a.m. I asked to see Sanjay Gandhi and said it was most urgent."

Sanjay was woken up. "Yeh koi aane ka waqt hai (Is this a time to come)?" he fumed.

"I told him about the accident and handed him the photographs."

He looked at them. "Tu kya mujhe pornography dikhane aaya hai (Have you come to show me pornography)?"

"Yeh pornography nahin hai, yeh Suresh Ram hai (This is not pornography; this is Suresh Ram)."

Without saying anything more, Sanjay went inside the house. "He woke up Madam." Indira Gandhi came out. "She was wearing a cap on her head."

She asked, "Who else knows about this?" Bali told them about K.C. Tyagi and Om Pal Singh.

You keep them both safe somewhere," Sanjay told Anil Bali. (Jagjivan Ram was after all the defence minister and could have got Indira Gandhi's house raided to seize the photographs.)

"And you tell Kapil Mohan to keep Raj Narain under control," Indira instructed Bali.

The next morning (on 22 August) the phone rang at 2, Telegraph Lane, the home of Krishan Kant, who was then a Janata Party MP. It was 9 a.m.

The family was sitting at the dining table having breakfast. The phone was in Kant's bedroom and he went there to answer it. The call was from the defence minister's residence. When he returned to the dining room he remarked, "Ek aur bete nae apne baap ko duba diya (One more son is the undoing of his father)." Those cryptic words were the only ones he uttered that morning to his family.

Ten minutes later, an official car came from the defence minister’s residence to pick him up. When he arrived at 6, Krishna Menon Marg, where Jagjivan Ram lived, he asked all those seated with him to leave the room.

When they were alone, Ram stood up, took off his Gandhi cap and placed it at Kant’s feet. "Ab meri izzat apke haathon mein hai (My self-respect now is in your hands)," he said to Kant. He told Kant that his son, Suresh Ram, had got into trouble. Although he was widely seen as a spoilt brat in Delhi circles, and had got into several scrapes, this time it was serious.

He had been using a room at Western Court, a building meant for MPs not far from the Parliament House, to meet his girlfriend.

Two nights earlier (20 August), he was going to drop her back home when he was tailed by the two henchmen of Raj Narain, K.C. Tyagi and Om Pal Singh. ... Babuji requested his old friend Kant to manage things. He did not want adverse publicity.

Krishan Kant helped Jagjivan Ram deal with the media. Jagjivan Ram was worried because Suresh Ram's photographs had made their way to newspaper offices. A front-page item appeared in the 'Indian Express'. It was written by Saeed Naqvi -- and it was a piece not unsympathetic to Suresh Ram.

"RNG ('Indian Express' proprietor Ram Nath Goenka) called me," Naqvi was to recall years later, "and asked me to accompany him in the car. We sat in his Studebaker. When he used to go to meet important people, he would travel in his Studebaker. On the way, using four- letter words against Raj Narain, he said, 'We have to help Babuji'."

When they arrived at Jagjivan Ram’s house and went inside, "Ram was crying copiously". He told them what had happened to Suresh. Naqvi wrote his piece. "It was a command performance (by me)," he admitted ruefully.

Otherwise, the mainstream media remained silent on the sordid affair. Later, though, the matter rocked Lutyens' Delhi -- and the country. 'Surya' magazine, edited by Sanjay's wife Maneka, published a two-page spread of photographs showing forty-six-year-old Suresh Ram and Sushma Chaudhary "indulging in sexual acrobatics’".

The article was headlined, 'The Real Story'.

Though the evidence uncovered by its 'investigative team' would hardly stand up in a court of law, 'Surya' ran headlines like 'Sushma pawn in international spy ring' and 'Defence secrets leaked to Chinese Embassy'. The magazine's sales, which had slumped after the Emergency, soared. And Jagjivan Ram's reputation nose-dived.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it was clear that the photos were part of a plan by "Charan Singh and his henchman (Raj Narain)" to entrap Jagjivan Ram's only son, Suresh Ram, in a "sordid sex scandal". The idea was to damage Jagjivan Ram.

Both Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi knew he was the only other serious contender for the top job -- and would need to be marginalised if their plan were to succeed. ...

[Back in 1977, when the Janata Party was swept into power, two] things went against Jagjivan Ram for PM -- he had been with Indira Gandhi till recently and he had moved the resolution on the Emergency in Parliament in 1975. But he didn't see it that way.

He told his supporters bitterly, "A Chamar can never be the prime minister of this country." It was JP who persuaded an irate Ram to join the government as defence minister.

Again in 1978, a year into the Janata government, Jagjivan Ram began to see a glimmer of hope, as Morarji Desai began to lose ground, and many MPs started to view Ram as a possible alternative. But the sexcapade of his son proved to be a setback to his ambition once again.

Desai was not unhappy to see his rival cut to size. Charan Singh was elated.

For Indira Gandhi it came as a windfall. "Kissi bhi keemat par Jagjivan Ram pradhan mantri nahin banane chahiye," she would tell her confidants. "Hatenge nahin zindagi bhar (Jagjivan Ram should not become prime minister at any cost. He will never leave the office.)"

--Extracted from Neerja Chowdhury, 'How Prime Minister's Decide', with permission from the publishers, Aleph Book Company, an independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India.

Source: IANS