Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  History cannot be revenged. The best we can do is strive to emancipate ourselves from its punishing torments by being honest about it.

  Rao weathered the fallout from Babri’s destruction and continued to lead a minority government for five years. Indian elites, hypnotised by Manmohan Singh’s pitch to turn India into ‘a major economic power in the world’, quickly moved on. The opening up of the economy is also what saved Rao from becoming a toxic figure overseas: it was clearly seen to be counterproductive to censure a man who was granting access to so many consumers. Foreigners overwhelmingly cheered him on. After berating Indians for ‘clinging to the past’ by electing Rao, the Economist showered him with praise. In Berlin, industrialists hailed him as ‘a corporate chief executive’. German chancellor Helmut Kohl considered him a refreshing departure from Rajiv.20 In America, the Christian Science Monitor congratulated him for ‘negating Nehru’.21 In Britain, the Financial Times nominated him alongside China’s Deng Xiaoping as its Man of the Year.22 Rao, lauded by the traffickers of the post-Cold War economic consensus, grew increasingly impatient with the unchanging obsessions of fellow developing countries. When Zimbabwe and Malaysia delivered blistering attacks against the West at a summit, he pointedly asked the gathering: ‘Have you come across any conference where all the speeches are identical?’23

  Rao even agreed to meet the influential Jewish leader Isi Liebler, who came to India in 1991 to lobby for Israel. Such a meeting would have been inconceivable even for a Congress premier with a firm majority. Rao took the meeting despite his shaky position. A historic vote to overturn the Zionism-equals-racism resolution, which India had voted for, was about to come up at the United Nations, and Liebler appealed to Rao to vote for it. He argued passionately for full diplomatic relations between Delhi and Tel Aviv and complained that India had treated Israel as a ‘pariah’. Rao assured his guest that India never equated Zionism with racism, but refused to make a commitment.24 When details of the conversation were leaked to the press, India’s longstanding Arab friends reacted angrily. Rao was unperturbed. When the resolution to revoke 3379 was tabled at the UN, India voted for revocation. As talk of upgrading relations with Israel picked up momentum, Rao quickly sought to mollify Arab sentiment by inviting Yasser Arafat on a state visit to India in January 1992. The Palestinian leader was lavishly feted in Delhi for his ‘efforts to promote peace and international friendship’. At the end of his tour, Arafat blessed Rao’s plans to befriend Israel.

  Rao aggressively renewed India’s lapsed relations with East Asian states, particularly Singapore and Japan, with his ‘look east’ policy. He travelled to Singapore and Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing, Malaysia and Thailand, and Tehran, Paris, Bonn and London. The only two major capitals he omitted from his hectic early itinerary were Moscow and Washington.25 He ignored the former and, in 1994, made a groundbreaking visit to the latter—the first by an Indian head of government in a decade. Bill Clinton’s decision to sell F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, coupled with his administration’s ceaseless rebukes of Delhi over its conduct in Kashmir, provoked a furore in India. Rao came under severe pressure to cancel the trip. There was intense clamour, too, to assert India’s independence by staging a nuclear test. Rao ignored the cacophony and got on a plane.26 The Americans received him as something of a revolutionary. The Wall Street Journal praised him effusively for repudiating Nehru’s ‘xenophobia’ and embracing free markets.27 Morgan Stanley released a report prophesying that Rao’s economic reforms were destined to move India towards ‘tigerisation’. A group of major American businesses—including AT&T, GE, Ford and Coca-Cola—formed an autonomous body called the ‘India Interest Group’ to lobby for Delhi in Washington. Bowing to the markets, Clinton assured Rao that the US would no longer air its concerns about human rights in public. Rao, in turn, vouched that ‘there will be no turning back’ from the liberalisation of the economy.28

  By the close of 1995, India was pulling in more foreign investment than it had managed in the previous four decades combined. Two-way trade with the US leaped to US$ 7.3 billion. There were 422 American companies with investments in India. CEOs of major companies streamed in and out of the country. George Soros showed up to invest a billion dollars. Coca-Cola was back after twenty years. General Electric poured in US$ 200 million.29 ‘Foreign exchange coffers are filled as never before. Industry is booming as never before. Most of all, there is a palpable hope in the air,’ one commentator wrote.30

  Babri had fallen by the wayside.

  India was now a different country. The middle class became more conspicuously consumptive than ever. Indians now drank 2,880 million bottles of fizzy drinks and flew ten million times each year. The credit card industry, which had a negligible presence in India before the reforms, expanded into a US$ 64 million business by 1996. Mastercard alone grew by 106 per cent in India—the highest growth ever registered by the company in Asia.31 The creed of this emerging ‘New India’ was captured in the advertising jingles on TV and slogans on the billboards of big cities: ‘I. Me. Mine.’ ‘It’s My Life.’ ‘Keep Up or Be Left Out.’ ‘Wear Your Attitude.’ ‘Zamana Badal Gaya Hai: The Times Have Changed.’ The Economic Times, an early supporter of Rao’s reforms, saw its circulation surpass 500,000 from less than a meagre 100,000 just four years prior, making it the second-largest financial newspaper in the world.32 ‘One of the psychological legacies of the Nehruvian socialistic era was that the more affluent sections of the society were branded as being rather vulgar and spending money to live well was considered an even greater sin,’ Aroon Purie, the proprietor of India Today magazine, wrote. ‘Today, that stigma seems to have vanished for many.’

  Even as New India erupted in self-congratulation, it had to contend with the odd spectacle of seeing its architect run from his accomplishments. As elections approached, a different India was screaming for attention. Rural poverty in the reform years remained largely static. The benefits that accrued to a small group of Indians did not percolate downwards. Ninety-seven per cent of Indians in the countryside lived without access to sanitation.33 The parvenus perusing India Today could now exhibit their wealth without remorse. But most Indians felt crushed by rising food prices. A disproportionate burden of the deficit reduction programme was borne by the poor. Since the government’s tax concessions to the corporate sector made it impossible to increase revenues, it resorted to cutting public investment and social expenditure.34 At the same time, a dozen or more of the country’s top fifty private corporations—the cathedrals of New India—succeeded in avoiding taxes altogether.35

  As economic liberalisation picked up pace between 1993 and 1995, Rao’s party was defenestrated from power in traditional Congress strongholds throughout the country. In Rao’s home state, it was reduced to twenty-six seats in the 294-seat legislature. Campaigning for re-election in 1996, Rao excised all references to economic reforms. The New York Times reported that he ‘feared provoking a backlash among poor Indians who have had to pay more for rice, sugar and fuel’ by appearing in their midst. Party leaders pleaded with Rao to stay away from their constituencies. He cut a desperate figure on the campaign trail, sitting alone in his aircraft and gazing out of the window. In the elections that followed, Congress suffered the worst defeat in its history.

  Five years after Babri, Hindu nationalists stitched together a governing coalition. For the first time, India had a BJP prime minister.

  Nehru had erected the Indian republic on four pillars: democracy, secularism, socialism and non-alignment in foreign affairs. Rao took a hammer to what remained of them four decades later. He implemented Manmohan Singh’s economic policies by subverting democracy: critical reforms were made as executive decisions, prices were hiked when parliament went into recess, and parliamentary opposition was overcome by exploiting legal technicalities and blackmailing recalcitrant MPs with the intelligence agencies’ files on them.36 The Indian state’s commitment to secularism also collapsed under Rao’s rule. It did not occur when Advani’s Hindu
hordes tore down Babri. It happened when the government failed to honour its pledge to rebuild the mosque. India’s secularism thereafter felt increasingly like a self-fulfilling myth, a promissory note to be cherished but never cashed. This was the upshot of Rao’s unpardonable reluctance to pulverise Hindu warriors with the fullest might of the state when they declared war on India at Ayodhya.

  Rao was the first Indian leader who made foreign industrialists feel as if they were in the presence of a ‘chief executive’, not a politician—an early incarnation of praise which, sanctified by years of repetition at Davos, became the highest aspiration of third-world ‘modernisers’. But in applauding him and Singh for supposedly correcting the failures of Nehru, the beneficiaries of New India at home and abroad overlooked the seeds of discontent planted by the pair. Those seeds matured soon after Rao left office. Across India’s most impoverished regions, untouched by material development, armed Maoists intensified their guerrilla warfare against the state. Rao’s own ancestral estate was seized by Maoists in the nineties and distributed among the poor.

  Rao led India out of one of the worst economic crises in its history, opened it up to the world, tore down the licence–permit–quota raj, dismantled old orthodoxies and pursued unthinkable new friendships. In doing so, he corrupted India’s democracy and crippled its commitment to secularism. He left behind an India that was wealthier (but more unequal), confident (but less empathetic) and integrated into the world economy (but closed off to its poorer citizens). He is now reviled in his own party, forgotten by the world and neglected in India. He remains the only departed prime minister to be denied a memorial in the country’s capital. It is under him that India made the most total break from its foundational beliefs. His embrace of capitalism, quickening the rise of Hindu nationalism, demonstrated to all those aspiring to succeed him that you could vandalise the values of the republic and still be vaunted—so long as you pleased the markets.

  Sonia Gandhi finally took over Congress in 1998 and Rao, deemed insufficiently deferential to the family when he was in office, was swiftly ostracised. Credit for his achievements was given to Singh and—absurdly—Rajiv, and Rao’s name was gradually effaced from Congress’s history. Rao spent his final years fighting corruption charges dating back to his time in office. He became the first former prime minister to be convicted in a criminal court on the charge of suborning MPs not to vote against his minority government. The decision was overturned on appeal, but it was an ignominious twilight. When he died, erstwhile colleagues in Congress, indulging the Gandhi family’s vindictiveness, refused to allow his wake to take place in Delhi. His body was flown back to Hyderabad, where it lay in state in an empty hall. His funeral was poorly guarded and thinly attended by the party hierarchs.

  ‘I am the only Congress prime minister not of the family to complete a full term, and I am still paying for it,’ he had told a visiting journalist months before his death in 2004.37 After he was gone, stray dogs tore at the remains of his partially cremated body.38

  4

  Dissolution

  India is all set to regain its due place in the comity of nations, as a plural, secular, and liberal democracy.

  —Manmohan Singh, 2007

  In 2004, Manmohan Singh was sworn in as the thirteenth prime minister of India. Congress had unexpectedly returned to power at the head of a coalition that year after almost a decade in the opposition. Singh, nowhere to be seen during the campaign, crawled out of restful oblivion for the second time in his life to take centre stage in government. Sonia Gandhi viewed her Italian birth as a disabling factor for the top job. Her judgement was unsupported by facts: scattered before her were the remains of the nativists who’d sought to marshal voters against her origins. Indians long ago accepted her as their own. When John Fisher Burns, the doyen of American foreign correspondents, travelled through the country in the late 1990s, he found ordinary citizens bristling at the mere mention of Sonia’s heritage. ‘If you call her a foreigner,’ a veteran of India’s freedom struggle warned Burns, ‘I will not talk to you, not another word.’ ‘At rally after rally, in state after state,’ Burns recorded, ‘ordinary Indians said her origins were irrelevant, and often then portrayed the issue as a matter so insulting that it should not have been raised.’1 The ‘nationalists’ arrayed against her were ‘Indian’ by accident of birth. She was Indian by choice.

  Sonia’s insecurities about her identity intensified, ironically, in the moment of her triumphal vindication. She became overcome by fear that her ascension to the premiership might resurrect the xenophobes fixated on her descent, generate consequences she may not be able to contain, and potentially jeopardise the inheritance of her children, Rahul and Priyanka. So she turned to Singh, a trusted family retainer with a lustrous pedigree—Oxbridge, Planning Commission, Reserve Bank, Finance Ministry—to serve as a placeholder. This act of self-preservation, enabling Sonia to minimise her exposure while retaining maximal authority, was given the gloss of sacrifice and high moral purpose. Singh’s installation in the highest political office in the land was certainly a tokenistic affirmation of Indian secularism; for some in Congress, it also expiated the party’s sins in Punjab and Delhi. But most of all, it was a measure of the family’s disdain for the conventions of the republic. As a minister in Singh’s cabinet explained to the press, Sonia ‘is the queen. She is appointing a regent to run some of the government’s business.’2

  Politically, Singh was the least qualified candidate for the job. He had never won an election to any office—not councillor, not ward member, not dogcatcher—in his entire life. The one election he contested, in 1999, was for one of the safest Congress boroughs in Delhi. The establishment, from major newspapers and corporate titans to famous columnists and film personalities, loudly endorsed him. Singh made history by losing the seat.3 But, accustomed to being inserted by his powerful patrons into the heart of government without ever winning a vote, the thought of contesting a parliamentary election seemed to him surplus to the requirements for holding India’s highest political office. He became the first prime minister of the republic to govern for two full terms from the upper house. Delegated the job of steering the economy by Sonia, he had no contact—no avenue for contact—with ordinary people. A lifelong theoretician, he was suddenly placed in a position where he could implement his theories without having to account for their social ramifications. Nobody could dispute the theoretical soundness of the logic underlying his deference for the market: that to finance social welfare, India had to generate wealth. But what he engendered in practice was a lavish social welfare scheme for the rich financed by the public.

  India’s burgeoning cast of billionaires raided state banks for loans, the deepening nexus between politics and business under Singh having destroyed oversight. When they failed to repay what they borrowed, they were granted additional lines of credit.4 The thought of seizing and nationalising their assets was garlic to the vampire who launched the fetish for privatisation. The government used half of a US$ 4 billion loan package from the World Bank in 2009 to capitalise state banks depleted by the defaulters.5 They are now owed nearly 10.5 trillion rupees by the plutocrats fostered by Singh.6

  While the soi-disant wealth creators were being rewarded with more cash for their failures, the countryside lit up with the funeral pyres of farmers ruined by Singh’s neglect. Their dire state was captured by a survey conducted by the government in the last years of Singh’s rule. It showed the average monthly income of agricultural households in India was Rs 6,426, while the average expenditure was Rs 6,223: Rs 203 was all that families could put away.7 Unable to access credit, left to the mercy of usurious private lenders, 16,000 farmers killed themselves every year for all but two years that Singh was in office;8 many addressed their suicide notes directly to the prime minister.9

  Singh was unfazed. He had form. Two years into his term, as foreign dignitaries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, descen
ded on Delhi to attend yet another conference on India’s ‘rise’, thousands of tribal peasants and landless famers from fifteen Indian states marched to the capital to register their peaceful protest and demand land rights. The rally’s organiser, a Gandhian activist by the name of P.V. Rajagopal, described it as an unprecedented event. ‘Non-violent direct action has never been tried so effectively,’ he said. ‘These people are living, walking and sleeping on highways since we set out.’ But as soon as they arrived in Delhi, having walked over 600 kilometres to get there, the Congress government had them herded into a roofless enclosure and posted armed guards to keep them there.10 The heat in Delhi can bake human flesh; the protesters were not even given water.

  The severest bruises of Singh’s reforms were borne by the historically marginalised and trod-upon layers of Indian society. Dalits and tribals constitute only one-fourth of India’s population; but as the economist Amit Bhaduri has shown, they account for 40 per cent of those whom modernisation has ‘dispossessed of land, livelihood and habitat’.11 Democratic protest was not a tool they could wield in Singh’s India without inviting a homicidal backlash from a state increasingly beholden to private interests. In 2008, when tribals in central India passed a resolution in a free vote against the government’s decision to hand their land over to a private company for the setting up of a power plant, the authorities ignored them. When they then staged a peaceful mass rally, with some 10,000 participating in a procession, the police opened fire.12 The government traduced troublesome tribals as Maoist sympathisers, a charge that instantly negated the need for due process. The Maoist insurgency is real enough, and it is true also that it often preys on the poor it claims to be rescuing.