by Kuldip Nayar
It was tragic that the Gujarat riots came at a time when Muslims had begun joining the mainstream. Their faith in the constitutional guarantee of equality had been deepening and their confidence in the country’s secular ethos steadily rising.
Even after Partition, their romance with Pakistan had not ended, although they had felt let down. The liberation of Bangladesh, however, with one Muslim region cutting itself off from another, disillusioned the Indian Muslim community. For better or for worse, it accepted the fait accompli and began developing an identity that was neither theocratic nor pan-Islamic but wedded to the soil.
How can one otherwise explain their deliberately distancing themselves from the issues that captured the imagination of the Muslim world at large? India, after Indonesia, has the largest Muslim population in the world but Indian Muslims did not participate in a jehad elsewhere. Take, for example, Afghanistan. Pakistani Muslims fought alongside the Taliban against the US-backed Northern Alliance. So much so, that Islamabad took Washington’s permission to evacuate them. Some Bangladeshi Muslims were also found in Afghanistan, but no Indian Muslim.
Nearer home, take Kashmir. You find Muslims of different countries participating in spreading violence in the Valley, but no Muslim from elsewhere in India. Even their support for autonomy is lacking. The silence of Indian Muslims on such issues is often misunderstood, yet they have seldom said or done anything which they feel does not represent their sense of country.
What happened in Gujarat has indeed jolted the community. On the one hand, they were surprised at the reaction of those who were driven to such desperation that they went to the extent of burning the coaches of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra. On the other, the community suffered disproportionately when it came to ‘retaliation’.
The worst thing was that no Muslim victim was rehabilitated by the state and even when New Delhi sent funds for this Modi returned them. He converted the killings into Gujarat’s prestige as if his critics were challenging the state, not him for the crimes he had committed. He succeeded in winning the subsequent assembly elections but this happens in autocratic states where the top man changes the very nature of the people. The Gujaratis were taken in by the argument that it was their prestige which was at stake rather than meting out justice to thousands of Muslims who had suffered in what is known as Modi’s pogrom.
True, the Gujarat fire did not spread to the rest of India, barring stray incidents in three or four cities. That is of little satisfaction to the community given the periodic communal conflagrations. Their fears have heightened because they find the authorities deliberately inactive, the police partial, and the government more interested in covering up its tracks than in punishing the guilty. In fact, the community increasingly feels that a Hindu–Muslim riot generally evolves into a Muslim–police clash. The proposal to have a mixed force in every state has remained just that: a proposal.
The greatest challenge facing the community and the country is how to change the biased mind-set of the police. Almost equally challenging is how to stop the injection of communal poison by the RSS parivar in the states under BJP rule and elsewhere. Still more daunting is the reformation of the police force which tends to suspect Muslims and pick up their youth from the scene of a bomb blast or other such incidents.
The Gujarat riots proved to be a millstone around the BJP’s neck. Its slogan of ‘India Shining’ did not sell and the secular countryside rose against it. In the general election of 2004, the tally of BJP’s seats in the Lok Sabha fell to 138 in the 545-member House. BJP leaders attributed their defeat to over-confidence. The truth however was that the Gujarat riots and Modi’s role in the mass murder of Muslims turned civil society against the party. A few movies and books on Gujarat indicate that the conscience of civil society was deeply hurt but its voice is so muffled that it is primarily confined to the media.
19
The Manmohan Singh Government
The Second Phase of Economic Reforms, the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, and the Mumbai Terrorist Attack
The 2004 election results came as a surprise. The BJP was over-confident of forming the government as the head of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and convinced that its slogan, ‘India Shining’ would work in its favour. This notwithstanding, it won only 138 seats and its allies too lost much ground.
I was not enamoured of the BJP government, concerned about their communal predilections, and it was an open secret that the party was only the political arm of the RSS. Although most were certain that the BJP would return to power at the Centre, I had my doubts. I believed that most Hindus were pluralistic in their outlook. If that were not the case, the 80 per cent would have converted India into a Hindu Rashtra. I preferred Congress government because I felt it was the lesser evil.
The Congress unexpectedly won 145 seats, albeit only 7 more than the BJP, but parties ideologically akin to the former made a good showing. The Left won 60 seats, corrupt Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) 24, and casteist Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party (SP) 36 seats in the elections. The Congress constituted a United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and appointed Sonia Gandhi as its chairperson.
Within the Congress party there was a strong demand that Sonia Gandhi should head the government. I was surprised that Mulayam Singh, who had earlier refused her 13 votes which would have enabled congress to from the government, now did an about turn and supported the UPA.
I wanted the Congress to win the elections with Manmohan Singh as the prime minister and Sonia Gandhi as the party president, and that was precisely what happened. I had, however, never imagined that Manmohan Singh would only be an instrument in her hands and that she would be so dominant in the government that not even a minor appointment could be made or a meaningful decision taken without her concurrence. As the days of the government in office passed, Manmohan Singh began to be considered a stalking horse.
However, there was a lot of drama in the Congress parliamentary party before Manmohan Singh was finally nominated by Sonia Gandhi. The venue, the Central Hall of parliament, had the government-owned Doordarshan to disseminate the entire day-long proceedings of the members’ demand for Sonia to become prime minister. Some wept, some staged a dharna and some threatened not to leave the hall until Sonia agreed to become PM. Rahul Gandhi too jumped into the fray to say that her mother had won the election and should become PM. I watched the drama which became boring after a while.
That she allowed the pantomime to be staged was understandable in order to let everyone know where the real power lay. Manmohan Singh for his part was not overly happy. My sympathy lay with him and I was happy to find that there would be a break from dynasty.
Sonia Gandhi had to her credit a record of secularism but there were many shortcomings. Major among them was a trait of authoritarianism which she had copied from her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. I did not want her to be the country’s prime minister. When it appeared that the Congress would be forming the government, Ramoji Rao, editor of Eenadu, a self-made man and a friend for the last five decades, rang me up and asked me to do something to prevent the humiliation of India being ruled by an Italian. He represented the general opinion. I assured him, on the basis of a hunch, that she would not become prime minister.
I suspected that her plan was to bring in her son, Rahul Gandhi, at an appropriate opportunity. Her own election would have made it difficult for her to have her son succeed because the party and the country would not have reacted favourably to such a dynastic monopoly. Rahul Gandhi, who had returned from abroad, could easily succeed Manmohan Singh after spending some time in the organization learning the ropes. This was precisely the route she adopted.
Sonia Gandhi overlooked her daughter, Priyanka, who had been an extraordinarily successful election campaigner and had been more popular among the masses than Rahul. Manmohan Singh had worked under Sonia as the Opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha and proved through his loyalty that he would be her Man Friday. I still remember that when I propose
d in the House that another commission be appointed to examine the 1984 Sikh killings, the then Home Minister L.K. Advani accepted the suggestion but wanted the leader of Opposition, Manmohan Singh, to concur. I went to his seat and beseeched him to support the proposal but he remained silent. He announced the party’s acceptance of the proposal the following day because he needed to get Sonia Gandhi’s concurrence. A bureaucrat by training, he could be depended upon to do her bidding. It was Sonia Gandhi who drew up a list of cabinet ministers and showed it to him later.
It was an open secret that the key files went to 10 Janpath, her residence, for her approval. Envoys abroad were also chosen by her and posted to places she indicated. The credit for successfully running this dual-headed system goes to Manmohan Singh, not to her. I cannot think of anyone else among the ministers or Congress leaders who could have handled matters so efficiently and so obediently. For forms sake, Sonia referred to him as prime minister whenever she spoke to others, including foreigners. She was punctilious in her behaviour even at party meetings yet everyone was aware of who was the boss.
What disillusioned Manmohan Singh a few years later was that all roads led to 10 Janpath. He was distressed but compromised with or overlooked such instances because this was the price he had to pay to remain prime minister. After some years he told a few friends that he was fed up. Was he? Very few sacrifice their positions when forced to choose between office and the wilderness. Manmohan Singh is not one of them. Had he resigned when his reputation was lessening because of his concurrence with the decisions Sonia Gandhi took, he would have saved his reputation which continued to plummet.
As Sonia wielded so much authority she thought it politic to seek the advice of social activists and intellectuals she preferred. She appointed a National Advisory Committee (NAC) drawing members from among NGOs and retired bureaucrats to scrutinize the government proposals to ensure that they would conform to the people’s needs. Members of the NAC were people who had an unblemished record of integrity and had earned kudos in their respective fields. The fact, however, remained that they were not elected and yet were taking important decisions, also sometimes being privy to documents which ministers or top bureaucrats did only after taking an oath of secrecy.
The rationale of appointment to the NAC was probably the suggestion by Plato in his book, The Republic, that a person from among the intellectuals should be nominated so as to allow him to rule without the pressure of plebeians.
This NAC was akin to the Central Citizens’ Committee which Nehru had appointed under the chairmanship of Indira Gandhi to mobilize public opinion during India’s war with China in 1962. Indira Gandhi then had no locus standi. The committee gave her an official status and facilities. Sonia visibly had all the power and still sought to run a form of parallel government which would be effective and bear no responsibility.
Manmohan Singh’s principal contribution to the nation was the economic reforms initiated from 1991 (he was finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government from 1991 to 1996). He ended the licence-raj system and took major steps to integrate the Indian economy with the world economy. This was, however, not an unmixed blessing because the process of concentration of wealth in fewer hands had led to the growing strength and clout of the private sector and foreign investors in the decision-making process. It was globalization and a free market economy with a vengeance.
The Congress dismantled the structure that Nehru had built to put the public sector at the commanding heights of the economy. He spoke of ‘a third way which takes the best from all existing systems – the Russian, the American, and others – and seeks to create something suited to India’s own history and philosophy’. Yet the fact remains that the growth rate during his tenure averaged 3.5 per cent.
The Gandhians were most upset by the direction the economy took under Manmohan Singh and held many meetings, which I also attended, to initiate a Satyagraha to revive self-sufficiency through development of the rural economy based on the cottage industries that had been decimated by unbridled capitalism.
After the First Five Year Plan, Nehru had realized that the fruits of industrialization were not reaching the common man as he had visualized. He had then set up a committee. Manmohan Singh did not appoint such a committee although the GDP was averaging a growth of 8 to 9 per cent per annum. However, a government-blessed committee headed by Arjun Sengupta (2010), a distinguished economist and once part of Indira Gandhi’s entourage, said that 70 per cent of the people in India earned less than $2 (approximately Rs 100) and 41 per cent of them not even $1.
Manmohan Singh’s response was the legislation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a job guarantee scheme for rural India. The worst thing to happen during Manmohan Singh’s tenure was the setting of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) which were greatly resented by NGOs. What the zones meant was the acquisition by the government of large tracts of land (with negligible compensation) ‘in the public interest’ and handed over to Indian and foreign industrialists at much less than the market price. The government in this way brought back the era of feudal lords who converted the best agricultural land into industrial units, hotels, and places of entertainment. The setting up of SEZs was eventually abandoned after protests by NGOs but the government continued to acquire land in (public interest) and hand it over to industrialists and businessmen.
The CPM government in West Bengal burnt its fingers by giving land to the Tatas for their small car project (Nano) at Singur. There were large-scale protests in the region, but the worst repercussions were in Nandigram where farmers did not surrender any land and barricaded their villages to keep the government and CPM cadres at bay.
This was CPM’s first clash with the farmers who were unwilling to fall in line. This was also the most striking example of a people-oriented party using every method at its command, including its cadres assisted by the state police, to help rich industrialists. Many farmers died during the confrontation, but what was worse was that of hitherto disciplined party cadres behaving like rabble and indulging in rape, loot, and murder.
When I met CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat at his office in Delhi he admitted that the state government had handled the situation badly but regretted that the intellectuals who had supported the CPM had turned against the party and even dubbed them fascist. He was referring to Medha Patkar who openly attacked the CPM. The West Bengal government not only lost the project but also prestige and people support. This became evident when Mamata Banerjee’s party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), routed the CPM government in the state elections of 2011 after having ruled the state for almost thirty-four years. In a landslide victory, the TMC and its allies won 226 seats in a House of 294. However, at the Centre, the Left, with its 60 odd seats, was a strong supporter of Manmohan Singh. The situation changed when he made the India–US nuclear treaty a prestige issue. The treaty, opposed by an influential section in the US itself, was the result of Manmohan Singh’s personal rapport with US President George W. Bush Jr. It took three years for the deal to fructify because India had to overcome the hurdles of a hostile International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a suspicious US Congress. The deal separated the civil and military nuclear facilities in India and opened up all the civilian nuclear plants, thirty-five in all, to IAEA inspection.
Politically the deal hurt the Congress and Manmohan Singh personally. It was generally viewed as a step opening up India to US pressure and influence. The Congress lost the support of the Left which had also given the party a liberal image. The Congress continued to remain in office but it was a weak government and forever on the defensive.
It is an open secret that before the vote in parliament on the nuclear deal the Manmohan Singh government made ‘certain deals’ with some small political parties and independent members to win them over. The motion was carried by 19 votes. Some members disobeyed the whip by abstaining or crossing the floor. The BJP dramatized the cash-for-votes accusation by displaying wads of
currency notes in the House. The whole thing misfired in the sense that the then Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee greatly disapproved of the tamasha and ordered a probe which the Delhi Police did not take seriously for three years until the Supreme Court stepped in. The astonishing part is that nobody from the Congress, which had benefited from the situation and had survived the no-confidence motion, was held responsible. It was obvious who was responsible for Delhi Police delay as the force fell directly under the home ministry. A really positive achievement of the Manmohan Singh government was the enactment of the Right to Information Act (RTI).
India also witnessed, during Manmohan Singh’s tenure, a well-planned attack on Mumbai on 26 November 2008. The Pakistan government had prior knowledge of it. Hafiz Sayed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba and Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) had planned the attack from their soil and had sent some ten Pakistani terrorists by boat from Karachi to attack the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, the Jewish Synagogue, Cama Hospital, Leopold Café, and the CST killing in all some 175 people. The attack continued for three days. One Pakistani terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, was arrested and confessed to his involvement in the attack and that of his Pakistani collaborators.
The entire country reacted with anger and universal condemnation of Pakistan because, for the first time, the entire attack was graphically captured live on Indian television screens. Anti-Pakistan feeling ran high but was somewhat assuaged when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Pakistan’s Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, on 16 July 2009. The latter admitted that his government had no control over the army which used ISI to mastermind the entire operation. Apparently, it was a hush-hush affair, as Riaz Khokhar, the Pakistan high commissioner in Delhi at that time told me that he was not aware of the attack. He was sufficiently frank to admit that if Pakistan was behind it and, as India suspected, it was an act of war.