India

by Patrick French

  A general election was called in 1989, and Congress tumbled to defeat at the polls. A coalition government took power headed by V. P. Singh, a senior minister whom Rajiv Gandhi had sacked for investigating corruption too vigorously. During his brief period as prime minister, V. P. Singh brought in a major and exceedingly controversial affirmative action programme to help lower castes, reserving a quota of government jobs and university places for them. Rajiv began a period of introspection. He realized he had made mistakes and distanced himself from his courtiers. Some of his associates felt he would make a much better prime minister if he had a second chance in office.

  In 1991 the minority coalition administration fell, and Rajiv Gandhi returned to the election trail. The new government had reduced his personal security. Near the end of the campaign, he arrived exhausted for a rally at a small town near Madras. Advancing through the throng in a plain kurta pyjama and red-and-white Lotto training shoes, he was surrounded and jostled by well-wishers and supporters. One of the crowd was a young woman called Dhanu, a Tamil Tiger terrorist set on avenging his government’s military escapade in Sri Lanka. As she bent down to touch his feet, as if in homage, he stopped and bowed slightly over her. At that instant she pressed a toggle switch on her belt, exploding a bomb. Rajiv’s old friend and media adviser Suman Dubey heard a low noise and watched the crowd dissolve “like a red flower unfolding in slow motion.”40

  When Sonia heard the news, she told her daughter Priyanka that she wished she had died too. She had an asthma attack and began to howl; her cries could be heard by the Congress activists who were gathering outside the house. In the days that followed, Mrs. Gandhi made it clear to visiting dignitaries, as well as to close friends and family, that she would never, ever enter politics.

  3

  THE CENTRIFUGE

  THE CONGRESS STORY is not the only story. If you are Lal Krishna Advani, you might have bad memories of Indira Gandhi, not only politically but personally, for what she did to you. When I asked him about this, he said he was not bitter but was unable to forget she had taken away two years of his freedom by putting him in prison. “I was protected by my station: others had a worse experience.” She returned to power, was killed, her son came to power, was killed, and later her son’s widow and son’s son would come to a different kind of power, orchestrating the government from behind the scenes.

  Advani did not like the idea, still propagated by the legions of Congress sycophants, that one family had a destiny to rule a country. Resentment, not surprisingly, was part of the undertow for him and his colleagues. “When Manmohan Singh became prime minister he visited me and said he had a list of five statues he wanted to be put up, and needed my agreement as leader of the opposition. I looked at the list and said to him, they’re all from the same family! Can’t you at least put up one of Narasimha Rao, who made you the finance minister?”

  At the time the Emergency was declared, Advani was president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, an organization founded in 1951 to promote Hindu culture, a non-socialist economy and a strong India. He was in Bangalore, staying in a shared room in a hostel, when woken by news that prominent Congress and opposition MPs, including himself, had been arrested; so it was not a surprise when police officers arrived after breakfast and yoga. Together with his long-time colleague Atal Behari Vajpayee, he was taken into custody. They had time to tell reporters this was as significant a moment in national history as the mass arrests during the Quit India movement in 1942. His wife and children were not allowed to see him. The crackdown spread far. The private houses of several former princely rulers were requisitioned and damaged. Students, trades unionists, regional politicians, farming activists and personal enemies of Indira Gandhi were all scooped up, along with some of her late father’s associates. J. B. Kripalani was an example: during the First World War he was a college professor who fought against colonial rule, in 1942 he was imprisoned by the British in Ahmadnagar Fort with Nehru, 1947 found him in the Constituent Assembly framing the future of India, and by 1975 he was protesting against the Emergency, although Indira Gandhi did not dare to detain him for long.1

  In jail, Advani and his colleagues forged lasting bonds, as Nehru and his colleagues had before them. They were given books from the prison library, Vajpayee did the cooking and each evening they would take a two-mile circular walk inside the compound. The idyll did not last. They were released and rearrested, transferred north, shifted again and on arrival had their possessions pulled apart by a convict warder, searching for hidden papers. With other leading politicians, they were placed in a prison dormitory. Information from outside was patchy. They heard mass non-violent resistance was taking place, and more people were being rounded up. Then they were transferred back to south India. Sometimes the prisoners were able to pick up foreign radio stations like the BBC and Voice of America and learn of the opposition to “Madam Dictator.” At times they would see direct evidence of what was happening. A young student caught distributing underground literature was brought to the jail covered in bruises, followed by another who was so terrified after being interrogated upside down for five days on a pulley that he was unable to talk. A 22-year-old Bharatiya Jana Sangh worker from Mangalore called Vishwanath was brought in with his back paralysed. Advani wrote pamphlets under the name “A Detenu” which were distributed illegally: A Tale of Two Emergencies compared the methods of Adolf Hitler and Indira Gandhi, and Anatomy of Fascism suggested her talk of discipline was a smokescreen for the concentration of state power in the hands of a single group. Meanwhile, scraps of news reached the prisoners, in one case via leaflets that were dropped from an aeroplane and fluttered into the compound. They announced a forthcoming appearance by Sanjay Gandhi. Advani noted in his prison diary: “One of them reads: ‘If you miss this rally, you will be missing the unfolding of a new chapter in the history of the nation.’ ”2

  Despite detention without trial and instances of torture, the Emergency was conducted with restraint compared to similar crackdowns in neighbouring countries. It always felt like a temporary solution. The strength of opposition and the instinctive Indian dislike of dictators, stemming from the tendency to believe in several possible solutions rather than a single answer, meant the prospect of an end was never out of sight. Unlike in Pakistan, the army in India had never had the political prestige needed to seize power. The most worrying moment came when a document was circulated at the end of 1975 proposing permanent constitutional change: power would pass to the president, the judiciary would be made subordinate to the executive and the fundamental rights detailed in the Indian Constitution would in effect be abolished.3 The response to this proposal was so strong, with the Bar Council of India calling an emergency meeting to say it would lead to the destruction of democracy, that Mrs. Gandhi and her loyal ministers backed down.

  “When I was picked up from the hostel,” said Advani, “we were all surprised. It was a shocking thing for an MP to be arrested. Only a week or so before my arrest, an astrologer had said it was foretold in the stars that I would be facing two years in exile.” Today in his eighties, Advani looked in remarkably good health. As a staunch follower of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS—a pro-Hindutva organization which gave rise to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, now called the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP—he was a believer in restraint and self-discipline. He followed a strict diet and never ate more than was necessary; I noticed each entry on his blog ended with the injunction: “If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!”

  L. K. Advani’s view of the world was formed by his experience of partition. Unlike many of his generation in the RSS, he was not from a higher-caste Maharashtrian or north Indian background. His family were Amils from Karachi in Sindh in the far west, with links to the vaishya, or trader, community. In retrospect, he liked to stress the pious, syncretic culture in which he had been raised, with Muslims and Hindus attending the same shrines and fighting foreign invaders together in earlier centuries. He went to
a Catholic school where there was one Muslim boy in his class. At his childhood home, the family “deity” was the Sikhs’ holy book, the Guru Granth Saheb. He said he had joined the RSS because he was impressed by its patriotism.

  In 1947, things fell apart—Karachi was now in Pakistan, and L. K. Advani had to depart. He was homeless, and would need to make his way in the world. “I came to Delhi. The contacts I had made in the RSS were the nearest thing I had to a family there. Previously I had been to Indore, Ahmedabad and Nagpur for training and had watched Hindi films, which I loved, but I couldn’t speak the language too well. I knew some words of Hindi but could not read or write it. I was a pracharak, an old-timer who lived on the subsistence of the RSS.” He spent his days touring the north, trying to establish roots for the organization. After the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi—whom Advani had admired for his ascetic qualities—he and numerous other RSS workers were arrested because the killer had tangential links to the organization. Like later political murders in India, it achieved the opposite of its objective: the killing made people turn against the perceived philosophy behind the assassin, and the Hindutva movement would for decades be tarred as violent and extremist. (Similarly, after Indira Gandhi was murdered, the campaign for a Sikh homeland was suppressed in a counter-insurgency campaign that left tens of thousands dead; and Indian sympathy for the Tamil Tigers—which had never been very strong in the first place—evaporated after Rajiv Gandhi was blown up by a suicide bomber; it took until 2009 for the Tamil Tigers to be annihilated, but this was inevitable from 1991.) The RSS continued, a conservative brotherhood organization which held regular camps where its members saluted each other and paraded in baggy khaki shorts. There was even such a thing as the “RSS honeymoon,” when bride and groom, in an inoculation against Western decadence and purportedly un-Indian values, would set off on a holiday after their wedding accompanied by the groom’s extended family.

  How did Advani cope with the long decades of obscurity? Did he believe the Hindutva philosophy would ever gain mass political support? “No, no, no, I never thought we would form a government in New Delhi. For a long time it seemed we would not come to power, and would only remain a pressure group, with influence in one or two states. In a country as vast and pluralistic as India, an ideological party seemed unlikely to succeed at the centre. I wrote so at the time. It was the same for the communists.” Did he lose hope or his temper? “I’ve read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know there is no point in trying to force people to change their mind. You have to do it in other ways. It was in the 1970s, at the time of the Emergency, that I saw we might band together with other parties. I saw we might be able to succeed.”4

  For forty years, Hindu organizations rested on the fringes of the political mainstream. Advani and Vajpayee worked and plotted, hoped and waited, alert for the moment when Congress could be displaced as the natural party of government. In 1984, in the election that brought Rajiv Gandhi to power, the BJP returned only two MPs out of 542 in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament: a decade after that, the BJP was becoming the most important force in Indian politics. A perfect storm of events shot the Hindutva movement to the centre of national life. The Gandhi family seemed to have disappeared; middle-class shopkeepers and business people were ever more unimpressed by the stifling web of controls and regulations instituted by successive Congress governments, and by their willingness to manipulate communal politics for political gain. The BJP worked with this popular sense: Advani called the Congress interpretation of secularism an “allergy to Hinduism.” A hugely successful television series of the Hindu epic the Ramayana produced a coincidental feeling of non-sectarian religious excitement. L. K. Advani took note of this and, despite being a displaced Sindhi from a very different religious tradition, harnessed the power of Lord Ram in northern India. Acting on the advice of Pramod Mahajan and Narendra Modi—two rising stars of the BJP, both born since independence—he set off on a rath yatra, or chariot trip, from the temple at Somanatha to the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, where a mosque had been built on the orders of the first Mughal emperor, Babur. They would erect a Ram Mandir, a temple to Ram.

  There was a difficulty here: Ram was a mythological figure, and there was no evidence he was born in Ayodhya, or indeed anywhere else. Because the mosque, like many religious buildings around the world, had probably been built on an earlier sacred site, it was deduced that it was the birthplace of Lord Ram. Advani himself wrote that once the rath yatra got started, it was less about “reclaiming a holy Hindu site from the onslaught of a bigoted foreign invader … It was about reasserting our cultural heritage as the defining source of India’s national identity.”5

  This was the crux of what the BJP was trying to do. It wanted to redefine Indian identity by linking it to a mythologized Hindu past and at the same time turn itself into a busy, modern political movement. There were elements of Bollywood in L. K. Advani’s long procession across north and central India. A naturally reserved man with a clipped white moustache now found himself the most famous politician in the country. As his chariot—really a decorated Toyota truck—drove from town to town, ceremonial arches were erected and enormous crowds turned out; in remote rural areas, the chariot would be stopped by apolitical villagers so that ceremonial pujas could be performed, honouring Lord Ram.

  Advani was astonished by the depth of religiosity he encountered. From a political point of view, he had attained success. After years in the wilderness, wandering about with men in khaki shorts at hot RSS camps and avoiding large meals, he had found a deep, raw, colourful instinct through which he could channel his theoretical Hindu nationalism. Back in political circles in Delhi, the rath yatra was at first ignored and then—once the giant crowds turned out—spoken of as an embarrassing manifestation of mystical fervour. Who was this kacchawallah, this wearer of shorts, wooing the masses from a garlanded Toyota truck? The Congress-led minority government prevaricated over what to do. Could they allow a Ram Mandir to be built at the site of the mosque? The new prime minister, Narasimha Rao, a Brahmin from Andhra Pradesh who in his youth had been given a rough time by the Razakars, the Muslim guards of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, tacitly allowed the worship of Hindu deities inside the mosque. When more than 100,000 people gathered at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, inspired by Advani’s chariot ride, little was done to disperse them. The atmosphere at this time—and the surreal but not uncommon reasons for the veneration—was described by the journalist Jawed Naqvi, who noted the idol of Lord Ram “in his avatar as a toddler” placed on a platform inside the mosque, protected by a pujari, or priest, the whole overseen by security:

  A tobacco-chewing policeman with a .303 rifle, stood idly under the southern dome. He claimed to know the entire history by heart of what many believe is the birthplace of Ram. I engaged him in his native Awadhi dialect. When was Ram born here? I probed. “Kahat hain ki nau laakh saal hoi gaye haye hain,” he replied, mouth slanted upward to prevent the copious drool of masticated tobacco spilling over. (They say Ram was born nine hundred thousand years ago.) Where exactly was he born? I persisted. “Jahaan pujariji khadey huye hain, wahi ke jaano chaar paanch phoot yahan wahan.” (He was born on the exact spot where the pujari is standing, give or take four or five feet.)6

  This was Ayodhya a few months before sadhus carrying tridents and frenetic youths in saffron-coloured headbands climbed on top of the old mosque and smashed the domes, some of the men plunging through the rubble to their death, watched by an uneasy parade of BJP bigwigs, including L. K. Advani himself. With the mosque destroyed, Advani was careful neither to embrace the violent desecration nor to repudiate it, but at the general election four years later, the BJP displaced Congress as the largest single party; the ruined Babri Masjid has remained under guard ever since, the Ram Mandir unbuilt, the incendiary issue fading from public consciousness. More recently, Advani has said he never intended the old mosque to be damaged in such a way, but it took no imagination t
o see what would happen if you combined popular religious fervour with an angry determination to make good a perceived historical wrong. Against this, a member of a family at the heart of the Ram Mandir movement told me: “We were all watching it on television. The family were showing pure delight, the elders knew exactly what was going to happen on that day, and disapproved of Advani, whom they said was cowardly.”7 The implication here was that hardliners had intended to destroy the mosque regardless of Advani’s instinctive caution.

  For Nehruvians, the destruction of the Babri Masjid appeared to mark the end of India as a secular state, with no mosque or Muslim now safe from Hindu fundamentalists. The author Vikram Seth and his mother, Leila Seth, who was the first woman to become the chief justice of an Indian high court, published an advertisement in the Times of India saying the demolition had “shamed the nation across the world” and “debased Hindu culture.”8 Amartya Sen, the economist, deduced the destruction had been caused by “the extreme gullibility of the uneducated.” The Hindu masses of the cow belt were unqualified: “While illiteracy may not be a central feature of communal fascism or of sectarian nationalism in general, its role in sustaining militant obscurantism can be very strong indeed.”9

  Several thousand people were killed in the riots that followed, most of them Muslim, and in 1993 a series of bombs exploded across Bombay (now Mumbai) in revenge, planted by a Dubai-based Indian Muslim crime and terror mafia. The most damaging effect was local to Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, where relations between Hindus and Muslims became polarized. At aggressive rallies, loudspeakers blared the injunction: “Jab jab Hindu jaga hai, desh se mullah bhaga hai”—“Every time the Hindus rose, the mullahs fled the country.” Aware of the degree of Congress duplicity in what had happened, Muslim voters shifted to other political parties. In the words of one man from nearby Kanpur: “There was now a view among the enabled class of Indian society that rabid feelings against Muslims were acceptable. It was regressive. As a child I was taught by the maulvi saheb [teacher or Islamic scholar] to be proud of being Muslim and proud of being Indian.”10