It’s a dangerous place, I tell you. It was a democracy once but then a populist party won the election twenty years ago… People live like sheep now, in their stone pens. Chicanery, Timeri N Murari’s new political thriller, loses no time in stepping on the gas from the word go. The comments made by a border guard about democracy’s slide into dictatorship marks the beginning of the novel, a blistering account of unbridled authority and its consequences.
Murari, the author of Taj: A Story of Mughal India (2004) and The Taliban Cricket Club (2012), sets his new novel in an imaginary nation on the eve of a decisive election to tell the story of tyranny and resistance. If The Taliban Cricket Club was about a daring escape from Afghanistan under the Taliban in the guise of playing in a cricket match in neighbouring Pakistan, in Chicanery, its protagonist returns to his homeland that has a warrant for his execution.
Chicanery begins with David Richelieu leaving his lover’s side in the middle of the night to cross borders and enter a country where he was the prime minister two decades ago. Richelieu had fled the country when his Authentic Party lost the elections to the New Purity Party, which promised to free the citizens from the corruption of the previous government. Instead of fulfilling its promise, the new regime goes on to create a surveillance state. Libraries and bookshops are soon closed down and textbooks are withdrawn. Free speech is banned too.
Nepotism runs through the new dispensation. The new president’s father owns the media and the internet, his uncle the mining industry, his father’s friend the weapons industry, another owns agriculture and yet another infrastructure. A White Book promptly replaces the Constitution and “seditious words like liberty and freedom” are deleted from the language. People vote through their mobile phones and married women are disenfranchised.
Murari builds a frightening narrative of a police state, but offers remedy in the form of a former prime minister and a resistance called the Others who are working behind the scenes to return their country to democracy. The bulk of the book is devoted to a curious inquisition of Richelieu who is arrested on his return, and the president’s actions of guiding his country from the comforts of his official residence, called Palace of Serenity, while watching his ministers closely for randoms acts of defiance and mutiny. There is plenty of palace intrigue, betrayal and revenge.
Chicanery offers a wide view of the contemporary world where populism and authoritarianism fuel a growing urge for governments to control citizens and their rights. The author sets a feverish pace to a political thriller to complement a race to the finish by two different sides, one eager to cling to power to serve its own interests, and the other keen to protect the people and their rights.
Chicanery
Timeri N Murari
Niyogi Books
Pp 418, Rs 695
