The Telephone Capers

As the world goes gaga over the release of the latest iPhones, and mobile companies try to poach each other's customers, we revisit a time not so far back when there were only landlines...and yet, as the concluding portion shows, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

On August 22, 1986, the front pages of the national dailies carried such headlines as 'P. C. SETHI GOES BERSERK' and 'PHONE STRIKE AS SETHI "ABUSES" OPERATORS.' The Sethi episode quickly came to dominate not only the news but also casual conversation, since it gave people a new excuse to attack the political establishment, the telephone service, and the Army. It seemed, from the newspaper accounts, that on August 21st, at 11:05 p.m., an 'urgent' telephone call, which has priority over pending 'ordinary' calls, was placed to Bombay from New Delhi as a 'V.I.P. booking,' which has priority over other 'urgent' calls. It was booked from the government residence of Prakash Chand Sethi, a member of Parliament for the ruling Congress Indira Party and a former Minister of Home Affairs—one of the three or four most important government positions in the country. The night operator who handled the call said she had reported back that there was no reply at the Bombay number. She said she had tried the call again five minutes later, as is customary with 'urgent V.LP. bookings,' and had again reported back that there was no reply. A few minutes later, a new, 'lightning' call, which has priority over all 'urgent' calls, was placed, also as a 'V.LP. booking,' from the Sethi residence to the same Bombay number. The night operator said that when she called back a third time to say that there was still no reply she spoke to Sethi himself. It seemed that Sethi didn't believe that she had ever tried to place his call. According to her, he told her that he was coming down to the telephone exchange to 'settle scores' with her; abused her in obscene language; and said he knew that girls like her could be had for five rupees, as if to say that she was cheaper than the cost of his call to Bombay. 'I was hurt at what he was saying,' the operator later told the Delhi Sunday Mail. 'But what could I do? After all, it was a V.I.P. booking.' 

At around one-thirty in the morning, Sethi, who was sixty- six years old and the father of six children, arrived at the Delhi central telephone exchange carrying an automatic pistol. He was accompanied by one of his sons-in-law and by two bodyguards armed with Sten guns. He forced his way past the security staff, stormed up to the ninth floor, where the night operators work, roundly abused all and sundry, and confronted the operator who had handled his call. 'Mr. Sethi ... abused me in front of my colleagues,' the operator told the Statesman. 'He was dead drunk and blew the smoke from his cigar at my face several times. He also brandished a pistol and threatened that he would kidnap me. When some of my colleagues came to my rescue he lay flat on the floor pretending to be innocent.' Around the same time, he apparently got into a scuffle with a male supervisor and with another man, who had summoned the police. There was pandemonium at the exchange. The women operators jumped up onto the tables and squatted there, shouting for Sethi's arrest. 

The telephone workers called for a strike. 

When the police arrived, they found Sethi lying on the floor with his pistol beside him, and they apparently carried him out of the building. In due course, three formal charges were lodged against him: assault to deter a public servant from performing his duty; trespassing in order to commit an offense punishable with imprisonment; and insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace. He was not, however, arrested. It was immediately said that the charges were pro forma—that because of his high position nothing would ever come of them. In any event, Sethi gave the press a totally different account of what had happened. 

According to Sethi, he had been trying to get through to a relative in Bombay for at least two and a half hours before the time reported in the newspapers, and he claimed that it was impossible that the Bombay relative would not have answered the ring, since that person must have been at home and his telephone was by his pillow. It was in order to examine the various reference tickets for his call—to establish for himself that the operator had not done what she said she'd done—that he had gone down to the exchange, he said. He explained that he was carrying a pistol and had armed bodyguards with him only because government regulations advised such precautions for people who were on a Sikh extremists' hit list, as he claimed to be. At the exchange, he had been set upon by the women operators. 'It was they who abused me,' he told the press. 'These women formed a ring around me. I was pushed by their union secretary. I even fell down.' He told the Sunday Mail that at no point had he been drunk or had he abused the night operators, adding, 'If I wanted to ... misbehave with women I know where I have to go. I wouldn't wander into a restricted area'—a reference to the exchange. He told the Statesman, 'I have not talked to [the] Prime Minister's house about this. Why should I bother him with this?' He all but threatened to dismiss the police commissioner and his deputy in the event that he became Home Affairs Minister again, and he charged that 'the whole episode has been manipulated to malign me in public.' Indeed, in the press accounts he sounded unrepentant, saying that the operators were 'fat, lazy ladies, every single one of them.' (The fact is that for years now there has been direct dialling between Delhi and Bombay, so Sethi could have avoided going through the operator altogether, but then he would have got no priority; no one knows whether he might have been able to get his call through.) 

Sethi was not without his sympathizers. On the heels of his escapade, the Indian Express published an account of one New Delhi subscriber's frustrating experience with Indian telephones. One evening, at around six o' clock, he found that his telephone had gone dead. He cursed, and called Complaints from a neighbour's house. The operator noted down his number and his address, and gave him a 'ticket number.' At nine-thirty the next morning, his telephone was still dead. He called Complaints again, and was given three different numbers at which to try to reach the supervisor. He got no reply when he called the first two numbers but did reach the supervisor at the third. The supervisor said that he would remind the repairmen. At 1 :30 p.m., the telephone was still dead. The subscriber tried the three numbers for the supervisor again, but this time he got no reply from any of them. When he did eventually get through to one of the numbers, he had to give all the particulars to the supervisor once more. On this occasion, however, the subscriber pretended to be a high city official. The repairmen came immediately, traced the trouble to a squirrel's having chewed through wires in the junction box, and got his telephone working. The moral of the story seemed to be that if the subscriber had not used the ruse about his identity he might have been without a telephone not for twenty hours or so but for days.

'Why blame Mr P.C. Sethi?' another telephone subscriber, this one from Calcutta, wrote to the Telegraph. 'How many of your readers will swear, hand on heart, that they are not inclined to do the same to every telephone department functionary, minister downwards? It's just that it takes a former Union Home Minister to throw circumspection to the winds and act.' And the New Delhi correspondent for the London Times, Michael Hamlyn, wrote in his paper, 'Anyone who has dealt with the women of the central exchange will have a sneaking sympathy for Mr. P. C. Sethi.' He went on to explain to his readers, 'Communications are one of the most frustrating aspects of living and working in India .... The attitude of the exchange staff does not help. It is often off-hand, uncomprehending, and mulish. Horror stories abound, and many subscribers have felt like taking a pistol down to the exchange and sorting them out.' 

A friend of mine in Delhi used to say, 'Telephones here look like the real thing until one tries to use them.' Often, one found it impossible to get a dial tone. If one did get it, the telephone might ring busy at the dialling of just the first digit of the number. It was so difficult to complete a call that some offices employed people whose only job was to keep dialling numbers. If one did succeed in completing a call, it might be only to reach a wrong number. If one reached the right number, telephone conversation might be drowned out by cross-talk or bursts of static, or the telephone might simply go dead. During the heavy monsoon rains, telephones in whole areas remained out of commission for days. And there were other anomalies. Overseas calls were routed (by operators) through the Indian space satellite, but local calls relied on equipment that was in some cases at least fifty years old. Consequently, a call to London might be put through within a couple of hours, but a call to Bombay might take a couple of days. Both the telephone service and the production of telephone equipment were in the public sector, and, although the government tried to modernize the system, its attempts mostly misfired. (In the seventies, it bought new switching equipment, but by the time the equipment was installed it was outmoded.) The government also tried to loosen its hold on the system by issuing licenses to local private manufacturers and by holding talks with foreign delegations interested in supplying materials to the Indian telephone industry. But these efforts, too, bogged down—in disputes over how much telephone equipment should be imported, and how much of the manufacturing of equipment in India should be turned over to private enterprise. On top of everything else, the telephone bureaucracy was notorious for being cumbersome, for widespread absenteeism, and for corruption. Bribes were routinely paid to get a telephone repaired; without official priority, it generally took five years to get a telephone and telephone connection. The government committed itself to spending three billion two hundred million dollars between 1986 and 1990 to upgrade the system, but the funds seemed not to be enough even to maintain it. The truth was that in the country's scale of priorities telephones had to be near the bottom. At the time, there were three million telephones in the entire country and a million would-be subscribers on the waiting list, and the people with telephones, of course, were the people with power and money. But they constituted less than half of one per cent of the country's population. Fortunately, however, in the nineteen- nineties there has been a marked improvement in the telephone exchanges of some major cities. 

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Around the same time, a story in the Times of India about a women's conference in New Delhi read:

The incident involving Mr P.C. Sethi is only the symptom of a malaise which has gripped the higher echelons of society. People in high places, with their money and power, treat human beings as their property and debase the dignity of women especially...Women belonging to multifarious organizations expressed anguish at the fact that in spite of his 'indefensible' behaviour, Mr. Sethi had not been arrested. Another disturbing trend was that mostly in the cases involving assault on the dignity of women, political leaders holding high officers were involved and in spite of exposures of their misbehaviour no action was taken up by the higher-ups, they said...

The meeting also deplored the activities of the chief minister of Orissa, who reportedly exploited women sexually. The speakers demanded the immediate resignation of Mr. [J.B.] Patnaik.

The fact that the Prime Minister had not issued any statement so far on the conduct of Mr. Sethi invited the ire of all women present. It only meant his silent approval, they said.

Excerpted with Permission from Penguin Books India