Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  The tragic irony was that Indira, reviled in life by Hindu supremacists as a villainess, was reduced in death to her religion and then claimed as the faith’s bloodied mascot. As Rajiv drove to the presidential palace on the evening of his mother’s death to take the oath of office, a vehicle burned every fifty yards on either side of the road. A few hours earlier, a mob had attacked the motorcade of the president of India, Zail Singh, as he rode to the hospital. The police did not intervene. By nightfall, Hindus were dragging Sikh men—easily identified by their beard and turban—from buses and trucks and pulling their beards and slapping them about. The government had a firm protocol for containing communal disturbance: to call in the army. Not only was this procedure not activated, but the police in Delhi also stopped recording or acting on complaints of harassment and threats brought to them by Sikhs. Instead, they went to Sikh-heavy neighbourhoods in the city and disarmed the Sikhs. No sooner did they leave than armed mobs of Hindus, led by the city’s familiar Congress Party leaders, appeared on the scene and slaughtered Sikhs. Dozens of Sikh women were gang-raped by Hindu men.13

  The mayhem was too meticulously choreographed to be called anarchy. Congress, whose moral authority after the Emergency rested entirely on its claim to being the bulwark against ‘communal forces’ in the country, maintained a conspiratorial silence for three days as Delhi burned. For those exposed to the uproar, it seemed as though the government and its security organs had granted a licence for a seventy-two-hour purge of civilians. Is it possible that ordinary Hindus harboured such a deep pool of hatred against a minuscule community—whose members accounted for 2 per cent of India’s population but made up more than 10 per cent of its armed forces, were over-represented in the police, were the backbone of Indian agriculture, were seen historically by Muslim conquerors as defenders and protectors of Hindus—that they needed three days to drain it?

  The defence of ‘spontaneous eruption’ of rage insults the intelligence of those to whom it is retailed. Violent mobs acquire a momentum of their own, but they do not form impromptu: they coalesce around some tangible idea. And when intent is established—killing a specific group of people, or pulling down a place of worship—the mob must be armed, directed to the target and supervised. The disorder of a mob, the thing that makes a mob a mob, conceals a great deal of order in India: people who are part of it know the names, addresses and families of one another. A genuine rabble can easily be dispersed with a minor show of force. In Delhi, the ‘mobs’ were assisted by the authorities.14

  What happened in Delhi in the aftermath of Indira’s assassination was a pogrom—an organised slaughter abetted by the state in which, by official estimates, 3,000 Sikhs were murdered—the first of its kind in the republic’s history.15 And humans were not the only casualty. Trust forged over decades between communities was dead too. Why didn’t the government intervene? Were the killings, molestations and plunder tolerated for cold reasons of the state: to telegraph to the Sikhs, as a community, the cost of rebellion against India and to disabuse them of any mistaken faith in the state’s willingness to intervene on their behalf against the country’s wounded majority? If this was the case, Indian secularism was a sham all along. Or was it something as chillingly banal as the desire on the part of Congress leaders to aggrandise Indira posthumously through violence? When Rajiv finally acknowledged, two weeks later, the blood spilled all around him, he used a clarifying metaphor: when a big tree falls, he said, the earth shakes a little. Reverse the figure of this callous speech, and you grasp the logic of the anti-Sikh rampage: if the earth did not shake, the tree risked being written off as puny.

  Abroad, the killings of Sikhs barely registered beyond the Sikh diaspora. Instead of sustained scrutiny, the violence occasioned the dusting off of flyblown stock phrases—on ancient hatreds, on the propensity of Indians to lapse periodically into inexplicable savagery—which culminated invariably in reminders about the need for the civilising presence of the selfless Gandhi clan at the top of India. Six months after the worst sectarian bloodshed in decades, the late American journalist Mary McGrory gushed about Rajiv in the Washington Post: ‘Watching him address a joint session of Congress, you had to believe in genes.’16

  Within India, too, memories became distorted with time. Confronted by the menace of Hindu nationalism, it was possible to imagine the past under Congress as more virtuous than it had actually been. In 2002, as Muslims were being butchered in Gujarat on Modi’s watch, the Indian Express adduced Rajiv’s handling of the anti-Sikh violence in 1984 as a model of accountability for the government of the day. ‘Congressmen whose names surfaced or were even popularly mentioned in connection with the killings all paid the price,’ the Express’s then editor, Shekhar Gupta, asserted. ‘Political careers of HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar never recovered from the taint of 1984.’ As a matter of fact, two of three men whose careers Gupta said ended in ignominy were inducted into the government by Rajiv after the riots and served for years as ministers; one served as a Congress minister in 2004, twenty years after the anti-Sikh carnage of Delhi.17 Asked in 2014 if he felt any sorrow for the death of Muslims in 2002, Modi replied: if ‘someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not?’18 The answer outraged liberal commentators in Delhi. Yet hardly anybody seemed to recall that Modi was only echoing the phrase used by Rajiv’s government to explain the outbreak of violence against Sikhs: ‘even when a baby or a cow is killed in an accident, the anguish of the mob is discernible.’19

  1984 was the most violent year since Partition, and the eighties was the decade of gruesome communal rioting. And yet what happened in Delhi, the seat of the union government, was sui generis. Congress’s claim to being the guardian of Indian secularism was in tatters. When elections were announced, the RSS, sworn foe of Indira, campaigned for her son, who refused to disavow their support.20 Riding the wave of sympathy generated by Indira’s assassination, when Rajiv was returned in December 1984 to government with 415 out of 543 seats in parliament—the largest mandate recorded in the republic’s history—he radiated uncertainty rather than confidence. He had no convictions and what passed for his political philosophy was a collage of banalities. He railed against corruption, but became embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. He spoke of the importance of secularism, but crumbled before religious nationalists. Fixated on keeping power, he oscillated between capitulations to fundamentalist followers of Islam and militant votaries of Hindu nationalism.

  The surrender began with Rajiv’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision in 1985 upholding the right of Shah Bano Begum, a Muslim divorcee, to a meagre maintenance from her ex-husband. India’s Constitution, drafted in the aftermath of Partition, sought to reassure the Muslims who refused to go to Pakistan by preserving for them a separate civil code. Future generations were passed the task of bringing other religious communities under its purview when India’s unity was consolidated. Four decades on, the Supreme Court quickened the secular aspiration of the Indian Constitution by voiding the mullahs’ prerogative to determine the fate of Shah Bano by recognising her entitlements as a full citizen of the state. This was an exultant moment for all who believed in equality before the law. Rajiv, however, sank into despondency. Muslim ‘leaders’ were inundating him with threats to pull their support from Congress if he did not intercede on behalf of the ‘community’.

  The monumentality of what had just occurred might have prompted another leader to test the strength of the panjandrums who put themselves up as spokespersons of India’s Muslims. Rajiv enjoyed a bigger parliamentary majority than any prime minister before him. But crippled by what one shrewd member of his cabinet called ‘a peculiar sense of political insecurity’,21 Rajiv refused to engage directly with ordinary Muslims and instead huddled with his political advisers to locate a painless way to placate reactionaries who called themselves, with no evidence, the authentic representatives of Muslim citizens.
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  Congress’s defeat in the Assam state elections that year intensified the anxieties of the prime minister and his coterie. Convinced that the result was the upshot of the crisis generated by the Shah Bano case, the government drafted and rushed through parliament the Muslim Women’s bill, a craven piece of legislation which liberated Muslim husbands—who could take up to four wives and discard them on a whim by chanting ‘talaq’, or divorce, three times in accordance with the laws of Islam—from the obligations of maintenance post-talaq, and shifted the responsibility for the upkeep of penurious divorced Muslim women to their families and charities. A Muslim minister in Rajiv’s government resigned in disgust at the prime minister’s cowardice.

  The only Indians who rejoiced were hidebound Muslim men and Hindu nationalists. Rajiv’s prostration preserved the male privileges of the first and lent credence to the claim of the second that Congress secularism as enforced by the state, essentially a form of ‘appeasement’ of Muslims, was effectively anti-Hindu. Hindu protests in the 1950s, when Congress was resolutely reforming the religion’s orthodox traditions, had elicited only contempt from the party; Muslim protests, on the other hand, resulted in express legislative redressal of their grievance. The demand for equal treatment of all Indians irrespective of their religion implicit in the Hindu-nationalist agitation against Rajiv’s climbdown should have been treated with derision coming from ideologues whose ambition was to establish a nakedly majoritarian state in India.

  But Rajiv was too compromised to laugh at them. Having disenfranchised Muslim women in order to propitiate Muslim men, he hastened to mollify aggrieved Hindu nationalists by allowing them to lay the foundations for a future temple inside the Babri mosque by ordering the gates of the building, sealed explicitly to prevent communal flare-ups, to be opened. The mosque became the symbol, in Hindu-nationalist propaganda, of India’s millennium-long subjugation by Muslims. After extracting such a colossal concession from a nominally secular prime minister, Hindu nationalists, a negligible force in mainstream politics until then, claimed parity with Congress. Muslims, understandably, became livid. So Rajiv atoned at the next available opportunity—not by forcing Hindus out of the mosque but by imposing a pre-emptive roundabout ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses because it was deemed offensive by Muslim zealots even before it had been published. The world’s largest democracy became the first country on earth to proscribe the novel.22

  What remained of Rajiv’s prestige was devoured by a major corruption scandal when credible allegations surfaced that he may have been aware of the massive kickbacks received by Indian officials on a defence contract placed by the government in 1986 with the Swedish armaments manufacturer Bofors. It was the first time that a prime minister had become personally implicated in a scam. And what made it all the more scandalous was that it involved the defence of the nation. The absence of internal democracy in Congress meant that Rajiv could not be removed. Instead of accountability from the prime minister, what India witnessed was the repeated shakeup of the cabinet; an open confrontation with the president, who threatened to dismiss Rajiv’s government; and the demotion of Vishwanath Pratap Singh, a minister with a cast-iron reputation for integrity, because he was looking too closely into allegations of graft. V.P. Singh, eventually sacked by his paranoid prime minister, left Congress and floated his own political front with Arif Mohammed Khan, the young minister who had resigned from the government in protest of Rajiv’s betrayal of Shah Bano.

  The prime minister’s decision, against the backdrop of his dissolving domestic prestige, to threaten Sri Lanka with military action on behalf of that island’s Tamil separatists should have revived his fortunes. Indian jets breached Sri Lanka’s airspace in 1987, leaving Colombo in no doubt that a full-scale invasion was imminent if it did not agree to a truce with the Tamils. But this show of force produced the opposite result. Dispatched by Rajiv to safeguard the peace accord Colombo reluctantly signed, Indian troops were attacked by the Tamil rebels. Sri Lanka became India’s Vietnam, a bleeding ground that claimed too many lives because the cost of extraction came to be equated with loss of pride. Thousands of Indian soldiers were wounded and almost 1,200 killed on the island—the largest toll suffered by Indian forces on foreign soil since the Second World War in what was the first total defeat for India in South Asia.23

  At home, the political terra firma was rapidly yielding to single-issue parties. These regional formations began attracting substantial support with appeals built around sub-identities. In the north, parties consecrated to social justice for marginalised castes acquired momentum. In the south, social justice mixed with linguistic pride. It was this democratic fragmentation, rather than Rajiv’s lip-service to the republic’s foundational values, that complicated the BJP’s effort to consolidate the electorate under the standard of religious solidarity. But on a pan-Indian level, Hindu nationalists were the principal beneficiaries of Congress’s collapse. They carried to voters their pledge to heal the Hindu pride injured by Muslim invasions by constructing a temple to Lord Rama on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

  When elections were called, in 1989, Rajiv desperately attempted to out-Hindu the Hindu nationalists by launching his campaign from Faizabad, the district headquarters of Ayodhya, with the promise to inaugurate Rama Rajya—the rule, the kingdom, of Rama.24 What remained of the secular character of India after the slaughter of Sikhs and the cascade of concessions by Congress to competing communal claims was now on the line. Muslims abandoned Rajiv. Hindus who wanted Rama Rajya had more authentic alternatives on offer. Having started with the biggest parliamentary majority in Indian history, Rajiv led Congress to its second defeat. Hindu nationalists, accounting for two seats in 1984, returned with eighty-five members of parliament.

  3

  Decadence

  Let the whole world hear it loud and clear.

  India is now wide awake. We shall prevail!

  —Manmohan Singh, July 1991

  Consider the view from Delhi in 1991. India was a nation of 843 million people and five million telephone lines.1 Two billion dollars separated the country from bankruptcy. The Indian map had rarely looked so vulnerable to another cartographic revision. If the flames of separatism in Punjab appeared to be abating, the secessionist strife in Kashmir was just peaking. Hindu nationalists, a fringe force in Indian politics a mere decade ago, now occupied the bulk of opposition seats in parliament, poised to banish permanently the secularism that was the foundational basis of Indian nationalism. Indians were voting in the tenth general election, the most violent in the republic’s history. Eight hundred people had already been killed in political clashes when, on 21 May, a Tamil suicide bomber from Sri Lanka assassinated Rajiv Gandhi at a campaign stop in Tamil Nadu, triggering a fresh burst of bloodshed and renewing questions about India’s ability to survive. Beyond its own imperilled borders, the Soviet Union, India’s guardian and lodestar, was lurching towards disintegration. Moscow had shielded India from international criticism for its repression in Kashmir, maintained a crucial US$ 6 billion trade relationship and supplied defence equipment in exchange for goods.2 For a generation of Indians, the USSR’s demise upended the certitudes of a lifetime. Visiting India at this time, Ved Mehta felt ‘a sense of dread about the economic, political, and religious direction of the country which I don’t remember encountering in any of my other visits over the past twenty-five years’.3

  The barren rhetoric of economic self-reliance and political non-alignment could no longer conceal the republic’s decaying reality. Here was a colossus of a country that compelled its enterprising middle-class citizens to make fifty trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer. Did you want a telephone connection? That could take anything from six months to three years. Did you want to buy a car? The waiting period for the Morris Oxford knock-off ran up to twenty-two months. Did you want to manufacture vacuum cleaners? You needed a licence for that. In the mood for Coca-Cola? That Yankee beverage was as contraband in th
e ‘sovereign socialist secular democratic republic’ of India as liquor in the Islamic Republic next door.

  How did India retreat from the threshold of economic collapse to reform itself and emerge, by the start of the twenty-first century, wealthier and more powerful than at any point in its history? It is now de rigueur to credit Manmohan Singh, who became finance minister in 1991, with India’s rapid metamorphosis. But in a country where economic isolation was an inviolable ideological axiom, putting Singh’s prescriptions into action was a distinctly political challenge. The man who shouldered this responsibility was an unlikely figure. He was seventy and had undergone triple-bypass surgery when he became prime minister. A career politician, he had no political constituency of his own. There was hardly a voice that did not lament his rise to the top. And yet if Nehru ‘discovered’ India, it can reasonably be said that P.V. Narasimha Rao reinvented it.

  On the evening of 21 May 1991, Rao was packing the extensive library in his Delhi mansion in preparation for something unheard of in Indian politics: retirement. After spending two decades in the capital, he was eager to revive the scholastic life curtailed by his conscription into government. Born in 1921 in Muslim-ruled Hyderabad, Rao was adopted as a child by an affluent Brahmin family. In the Nizam’s kingdom, the law, literature and activism were privileges available to a very small minority, and Rao excelled in all of them. He had garnered a reputation as a freedom fighter, barrister and scholar before he turned thirty. He trained as a guerrilla to fight the Nizam, smuggled bombs and materiel into Hyderabad, founded and edited a literary journal, translated a Marathi novel into Telugu and a Telugu novel into Hindi, and published a clutch of short stories. After Hyderabad was incorporated into the newly independent India, and then appointed capital of the newly created state of Andhra Pradesh, Rao was elected to the provincial legislature. He stumbled through a number of ministries before Indira Gandhi, disregarding caste-based opposition, made him the state’s chief minister. Rao forced through an ambitious land reform act, forcing feudal landlords, many of them his colleagues, to distribute their enormous holdings to landless peasants. He, in turn, gave up most of his own inherited estate. Such reformative zeal was not welcome in a centralised party that answered to one family. When Indira dismissed Rao’s government and summoned him to Delhi, he was over fifty but sufficiently pragmatic to grasp the secret of survival in Congress: never display autonomous drive or initiative.4