by Kuldip Nayar
Before the arrival of Zail Singh and Rajiv Gandhi in Delhi, the CWC held a hurried meeting to more or less endorse Rajiv Gandhi’s candidature. There were, however, two conscientious dissenters. One, Pranab Mukherjee, said that the seniormost person should be the officiating prime minister till Rajiv Gandhi was formally elected by the Congress parliamentary party. Arjun Singh was on a different wicket. He insisted on having Sonia Gandhi as prime minister. Rajiv Gandhi understandably did not include Mukherjee in the government he constituted. Soon he resigned from the prime-ministership to hold early general elections.
14
Rajiv Gandhi
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Influx of Migrants into Assam, Operation Brasstacks, My Interview with A.Q. Khan, the
Bofors Scandal
Rajiv Gandhi returned to the Lok Sabha with a massive majority, securing 48 per cent of the votes polled and 77 per cent seats, 419 in the 545-member House. His youth and inexperience evoked sympathy, but Arun Singh, Rajiv Gandhi’s friend, and Arun Nehru, whom Indira Gandhi had inducted in her council of ministers, formed part of the prime minister’s inner circle of advisers and would decide among themselves on important issues before they were addressed in the cabinet. Both were the principal architects of Operation Bluestar.
The troika arrangement initially worked well but broke down due to personal differences. Arun Nehru explained to me that the understanding on the basis of which the arrangement between them was based was vitiated by the media. Press stories of differences that barely existed surfaced. The worst was that Arun Singh or he (Arun Nehru) was played up at Rajiv Gandhi’s expense, Rajiv naturally finding this unpalatable. This was too facile an explanation.
My guess is that the importance attached to Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, only ministers of state, was too much for the other ministers to stomach. The cabinet within a cabinet was a form of humiliation which many senior ministers could not take. It was therefore only a matter of time before such an ascorbic circle would end. This happened within a few months of Rajiv Gandhi assuming power.
Stepping into the big shoes of his mother was not easy. Rajiv Gandhi began with the same handicap as his mother. Indira Gandhi had to devalue the rupee under US pressure; Rajiv Gandhi to let off Warren Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide Corporation, which was running an outdated gas plant in Bhopal which leaked, resulting in the death of some 20,000 people on the night of 2-3 December 1984. Rajiv Gandhi rang Arjun Singh and instructed him to release Anderson and to arrange to fly him to Delhi.
The outdated plant in question, of a model ordered to be closed in Canada, had been installed in Bhopal during the Emergency (1975–77) at the behest of Sanjay Gandhi in the face of serious official objections. I, as correspondent of the Times, London, based in Delhi, failed to realize the enormity of the problem and really slipped up. So disturbed was the Times that they sent the newspaper’s old hand, Trevor Fishlock, a friend of mine, to Bhopal. The troika of Rajiv Gandhi, Arun Singh, and Arun Nehru were in the main faced with two principal issues that beleaguered the nation. One was the question of terror-stricken Punjab and the other Assam, which was in the throes of agitation against the influx of migrants from Bangladesh. The militancy in the wake of Operation Bluestar and the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs had given a new lease of life to the movement for Khalistan. The militants found the Sikh community in the rural areas willing to help and shelter them when pursued by the paramilitary forces and the police.
I invited Arun Singh and some friends to my home to learn something about what the government had in mind for Punjab. Arun Nehru was sufficiently frank to admit that the situation was bad but not out of control and assured me that they would negotiate an early settlement with moderate Sikh leaders.
Rajiv Gandhi initiated talks with the Akali leaders who were opposed to the Bhindranwale ideology. He believed that if he was able to win over Sikh liberal opinion he would be able to demonstrate to the community that he was sincere about reaching a settlement, and thereby isolate the militants.
K.P.S. Gill was the director general of police in Punjab. He used questionable strong-arm methods with a total disregard for the tenets of human rights. Many innocent people were killed and many remain missing to this day. He had been given a carte-blanche by Chief Minister Beant Singh to bring the situation under control regardless of the consequences. I was a great critic of his, but even so he invited me to address his men at Chandigarh on the violation of human rights. Gill had that kind of courage.
What greatly helped Punjab to eliminate militancy was Islamabad’s gesture. It is significant that the civilian government in Pakistan which had come to power in the wake of military rule provided India with the names of the militants who had once taken shelter in Pakistan, and this helped in uprooting militancy from Punjab.
Longowal, the leader of the movement, had realized that his softness towards the terrorists had emboldened them, but his greatest concern was the cleavage between Hindus and Sikhs. He took me along on his rounds in Delhi to meet several Hindu families who had lost family members at the hands of terrorists. Longowal apologized for the killings and worked single-mindedly to bring back the alienated Sikh community into the mainstream.
However, the negotiations made little headway. On one of those days, the prime minister invited me to breakfast to discuss the future of Punjab. I told him that the Sikh psyche had been deeply hurt, first by the army operation at the Golden Temple and then by the large-scale massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere. I said that I found no objection to Longowal’s interpretation of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, the state having more powers. Rajiv wanted to know if I could suggest a way out. My advice to him was to cultivate Longowal who was in a mood to settle the issue.
The Sikh Khalistan movement was an insurgency fighting for a separate country. At its height I visited the Golden Temple. Five young Sikhs surrounded me at the premises. They argued that the Sikhs wanted Khalistan because they too wanted a country of their own where they could enjoy the glow of freedom, the words that Nehru had used in another context, and preserve their identity.
I told them that I would not go into the viability of Khalistan but wanted to know how they would achieve it because the nation would fight with its full might against secession. They said that Pakistan and China had promised to send their forces to ‘liberate’ them. I told them quite frankly that I could not imagine a situation in which China and Pakistan would wage war against India to ‘liberate’ Punjab and station their troops there to defend it. ‘Do not underestimate New Delhi’s power,’ I told them.
I could judge from their diction and argument that they were well-read in Maoist writings. In fact, some of the posters at the Golden Temple, written in red ink demanding Khalistan, convinced me that the leaders of the terrorists once formed part of an extreme Left movement. They wanted to give me their names but I declined to have them. A terrorist’s average life was two years. I was not surprised when one of them met me in Delhi a few years later and informed me that his colleagues had been killed.
It took the government some time to curb terrorism in Punjab. The assassination of Longowal made the common Sikh feel that the gun would not take the community far. The greatest error of the terrorists was that they alienated the Sikh rural population, their principal base of support.
I recall that once an old man came to me all the way from a village in Punjab to tell me how his wife and daughter-in-law had been raped before his own eyes while he was tied in a corner of the room. Many such instances were reported. A common occurrence was of militants going at night to houses in the village and forcing their inmates to cook food for them, and the following morning the security forces taking the inmates to task for having given succour to the militants. The people just got fed up.
The militants killed Beant Singh, the chief minister of Punjab but failed to sustain their movement. The government ruthlessly pursued them and their accomplices, killing scores of them in the process. To this day the number of missing persons does not tally w
ith that of the total number of casualties.
True, terrorism was successfully crushed. Equally true was the allegation that the state itself indulged in terrorism. If ends justified the means, the state would have been entitled to have murdered even suspects, but in a democratic society, even a known murderer is provided with a fair trial in court which alone is entitled to pronounce a verdict and decree the quantum of punishment.
There was a settlement between Longowal and Rajiv Gandhi. Chandigarh was to stay as the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, administered as a union territory; a committee was appointed to allocate river waters to Punjab and Haryana and the spirit of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution was accepted. Justice R.S. Sarkaria was appointed as a one person commission to deal with the demand for autonomy and Centre–state relations.
After the settlement, Rajiv Gandhi jokingly told Longowal that he would need a bullet-proof jacket, akin to what he wore. Had Longowal listened to this advice he would probably have saved his life from the bullets of the terrorists who killed him, believing, as they did, that the settlement was ‘a betrayal’.
Rajiv Gandhi was plagued by another major agitation: that of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). The genesis of this was a determination of the indigenous people of Assam that people who had infiltrated into the state from Bangladesh be expelled. The movement was directed by two AASU leaders, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and Bhrigu Phukan. When I went to Guwahati to cover the agitation on behalf of the Indian Express, I was struck by their integrity and dedication. Both were students at that time but they guided the state-wide agitation extremely well, and for the Assamese their word was a law. Both of them would order the population to defy the curfew imposed by the government and thousands would come out on the streets, and when they proclaimed a people’s curfew not a single candle burned, and a curfew declared by the government was not observed. So non-violent was the agitation that at their call hundreds would line up peacefully outside the deputy commissioner’s office to violate Section 144, a ban on the assembly of over five persons.
The government appreciated the point that people from across the border should not be allowed to enter India without valid documents but the border between Bangladesh and India was so porous that it could be crossed at many points. The BSF were also partly to blame, allowing many to infiltrate in return for a paltry bribe.
The first time New Delhi detected the infiltration was in 1955 when I was information officer in the home ministry. The influx of migrants reached such proportions that the local population in Assam began to feel it was being crowded out. The AASU espoused the demand that the infiltrators be expelled, in contrast to the Congress party’s encouragement of the inflow. When I once raised this question in Bangladesh, it was strongly disputed. However, one MP, who later became the prime minister of Bangladesh, told me in reply to my question, that India should give ‘some land’ to Bangladesh.
Rajiv Gandhi signed a pact with the AASU in 1985, committing the government to revising the electoral rolls and deleting from them the names of foreigners. That agreement also stated that those who had infiltrated after 1971 would be sent back, but this entire exercise was only on paper without any implementation whatsoever on the ground. Mahanta and Phukan, the students’ leaders, founded their own party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), which swept the polls but was unable to evict the Bangladeshis because New Delhi did not cooperate. Later, because of some differences Mahanta and Phukan, split, and paved the way for the return of the Congress.
The number of infiltrators has vastly increased since. My guess is that the Assamese-speaking population in relation to the total population has fallen to about 40 per cent. The Bangladeshis have for their part learnt Assamese and have affirmed, whenever asked, that Assamese is their mother tongue.
Subsequently, when in the Rajya Sabha, I suggested to the then deputy prime minister, L.K. Advani, that work permits be introduced and made available in Dhaka and Chittagong. At one stage it appeared that the government had decided to introduce a work permit system but the bureaucracy and the extremists in the BJP defeated the entire initiative.
I hold former Assam Chief Minister B.P. Chaliha responsible for the division of Assam which once included all the states in the Northeast. He was chief minister when he refused to have English as the official language alongside Assamese. Representatives of the north-eastern states, then called hill-districts and dominated by Christians, declared that they would remain part of Assam provided English was also given the status of official language.
I recall how first Govind Vallabh Pant and then Lal Bahadur Shastri spent days at Guwahati persuading Chaliha to accord English the status of the official language of the state. The Centre also placated the leaders of the hill districts by granting them autonomy within the state of Assam, akin to the Scottish pattern. Nothing however worked, primarily because of Guwahati’s chauvinism, and Assam was eventually split into five states: Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, and Assam.
Mizoram had raised the standard of revolt under the leadership of Pu Laldenga for an autonomous state within India. New Delhi was able to devise a formula to constitute Mizoram as a separate state within the Indian union.
Today the entire Northeast has become a welter of violence, corruption, and extortion. Small states are welcome but when they become too small they are prey to the greed of politicians, contractors, and bureaucrats. The worst fallout of splitting Assam has been the rise of armed groups that rob, extort, and kill people at random. The ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) came into being after the Assam Accord of 1985. It has sustained revolt, although it is today considerably weaker than it was earlier.
A number of militant organizations raised the standard of Independence. They initially projected some idealism but lost general support when they indulged in violence, procuring arms from East Pakistan to keep their rebellion alive. Their secessionist demands were patently unacceptable.
As I wrote sympathetically about the ULFA, I imagined I had the support of its leadership and endeavoured to foster conciliation between the government and the ULFA. On one visit to Guwahati, Justice Krishna Iyer and I issued an appeal to the ULFA to initiate a dialogue with New Delhi under our good offices. I learnt that they were willing to do so provided they received free passage and could retain their arms. This happened many years later. There was a ceasefire, not once but several times. The ULFA utilized every ceasefire as an opportunity to consolidate itself. Finding operation from within India difficult, the ULFA leadership took refuge overseas, sometimes in Myanmar, sometimes in Bhutan, and sometimes in Bangladesh. New Delhi improved its relations with all the three countries and made it difficult for the ULFA to remain a formidable force. It was Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina who handed over the ULFA leaders to India.
As a human rights activist, I brought to the Supreme Court’s attention the handcuffing of a pro-ULFA editor in a hospital. Distinguished Justice Kuldip Singh ordered that no one should be handcuffed. The police were not surprisingly upset by the order. Today it is illegal to and inhumane handcuff anyone.
Rajiv Gandhi’s new foreign policy began with the dismissal of Indira Gandhi’s closest foreign policy adviser, G. Parthasarthy. He was deemed to have been ‘a failure’ in relation to Sri Lanka. Rajiv Gandhi replaced him with Ronen Sen whom he knew well. This was largely Rajiv’s effort to bring in his own favourites, a tradition to which all prime ministers have adhered.
Unlike the Indira Gandhi of later years, Rajiv believed that friendly ties with the US were a key to India’s economic and technological growth. In November 1984, when visiting the US, he signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on ‘Sensitive Commodities and Technologies’. Rajiv should be lauded for introducing computers in government offices at the Centre. Initially, there was resistance to the scheme and I heard people remark that it was a waste of funds, but in time government functionaries began appreciating the utility of computers.
However, not all the changes bro
ught in by Rajiv Gandhi address the fundamental problems of India’s painfully slow economic growth which my friend, Raj Krishna, described as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Rajiv was more interested in military than economic prowess.
India organized a large-scale military exercise, called Brasstacks on the borders of Pakistan and China during November 1986 and March 1987. The chief of the army staff Gen. K.S. Sunderji almost wandered into Pakistan and China while leading the exercise!
Some senior politicians and bureaucrats in Islamabad doubted New Delhi’s intentions. It was perhaps they who decided to sound a warning to India that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb. The calculations might have been that my interview with Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s father of the nuclear bomb, would convey the necessary message. Had I published the interview straightaway, the hands of Abdul Sattar, the Pakistan foreign secretary, who came to India three days after the interview to discuss the pulling back of Indian troops stationed right on the border, might have been strengthened. My idea was, however, to organize the simultaneous publication of the interview in India and abroad. I began the exercise after my return to India on 6 February 1987 and I was able to arrange for publication on 28 February in the UK, Canada, and Hong Kong, apart from India and Pakistan. That is how the controversial bomb interview took place.
Mushahid Hussain, editor of Muslim, a daily from Islamabad, invited me to his wedding. He was a close friend who had once met me in Delhi when he was a lecturer, to seek my advice on whether he should take up journalism. I found his writing promising and predicted that he would one day make a good editor if he took to journalism seriously. Mushahid was at the airport to receive me when I landed in Islamabad. He told me that he would give me a wedding gift, and then whispered in my ear that A.Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist, had agreed to meet me. I was flabbergasted. True, I had asked him many times to arrange a meeting with A.Q. Khan but had never imagined he could pull it off.