Death of a PM

Race Course Road
Author: Seema Goswami
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 288
Price: Rs 299

Fans of the popular TV series, House of Cards, were greeted in the middle of the Oscar telecast last month with a teaser that showed how Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright, had taken over the Oval Office. This was not  unexpected: The previous season had ended with Underwood, wife of former US president Frank Underwood, taking over the presidency. “My turn,” she had told audiences, breaking the fourth wall. Senior political journalist Seema Goswami takes us on a similar rollercoaster ride in her novel, Race Course Road, set in the official residence of the Indian prime minister and our very own house of cards.

The novel begins, like a true-blooded thriller, in the middle of action: with the assassination of the current patriarch of the house, Prime Minister Birendra Pratap Singh, during an election campaign at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi. This cataclysmic event sparks off a number of events across the world: A succession battle within his party and his family, pulling into the vortex everyone from Opposition leaders to the media to the security and bureaucratic machinery that populates the periphery of Raisina Hill. Goswami’s no-nonsense, journalistic prose eschews the window dressing of description and keeps up a swift pace that turns this 300-page book, with rather small type, into a quick read.

Of course, the subject of the novel is also very timely. With another Lok Sabha election scheduled in about a year, Goswami and her publishers could not have chosen a better time to put out this book. The unwieldy beast of Indian politics is brought to life with great competence in its pages. The readers are given a taste of the Machiavellian machinations of politicians and their lackeys, the hangers-on and bureaucrats, the fixers and the scribes, everyone caught up in the heat and dust of this game of thrones. It is an accurate simulation of what it is to live in contemporary India, with rising decibels of TV debates, political rhetoric soaked in divisive ideology, corruption and sex scandals, the crests and troughs of the characters’ fortunes.

Book cover of Race Course Road

Goswami draws heavily on her journalistic experience, and the readers are frequently treated to details of the protocols that govern the lives of India’s high and mighty. For instance, she informs readers in some detail how various prime ministers, starting from Rajiv Gandhi onwards, have used the prime minister’s residence, where Narasimha Rao’s sons had lived, and how the helipad had been constructed during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure. This enriches the narrative considerably, making it more authentic — a necessary quality of a thriller of this nature.

Unfortunately, this is also the narrative’s Achilles heel. Goswami occasionally tends to go overboard with these details or misplace them in the narrative. A prime example of this appears early in the book: Just after the prime minister has been assassinated and is being rushed to AIIMS, she starts telling us about how the Special Protection Group, tasked with protecting the prime minister, had been formed after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The details are interesting, but they slow the narrative and distract from its focus. Surely this could have been tucked away somewhere else. 

The real strength of the narrative is in the number of different strands that Goswami negotiates at the same time, without any confusion or obvious errors in plotting. There is, of course, the central murder mystery, but along with that there are numerous other plotlines: a corruption scandal involving senior Cabinet ministers, domestic troubles in the first family, and an international conspiracy. Goswami is also adept at drawing characters, some of whom we are obviously meant to sympathise with, such as Birendra Pratap’s daughter, Asha, and journalist Manisha Patel. Others are sharp caricatures, such as Gaurav Agnihotri, a senior TV anchor transparently based on Arnab Goswami. But none of the characters are black and white. If Asha is obviously a bereaved, helpless daughter, she has a few tricks up her sleeves, and even Agnihotri, the TRP-glutton that he is, will draw a line at how far he will go to get a few extra viewers. The denouement is all the more satisfying because it is quite unexpected, but I will not give any spoilers here.