by John Keay
But the good news had a downside: Punjab was in danger of becoming the victim of its own success story. Mechanisation had reduced the demand for labour, while inflation plus greater productivity had pushed up the price of land. Those not in receipt of foreign earnings were having to sell up and join the ranks of the landless. In what was acclaimed ‘India’s breadbasket’, some 40 per cent lived on or below the breadline. Meanwhile the prosperity generated by the combination of ‘green revolution’ technology and ‘greenback’ remittances had so roused the envy of other states that Mrs Gandhi felt justified in discouraging industrial development in Punjab and directing it elsewhere. Thus the easiest means of taking up the slack in the labour market was ruled out. According to Helweg, ‘disparity between the rich and poor’ was becoming engrained. Only those with emigrant connections ‘could buy land, invest and maintain a good standard of living; others could not’.8
From competition for land and jobs, the growing tension between the ‘remittance haves’ and the ‘remittance have-nots’ spread to issues of local leadership. In affairs of common interest the haves expected a say commensurate with their newfound status; the have-nots resented this and were inclined to see the emigrant as ‘the scapegoat for India’s ills’. Such factionalism was not unusual and anywhere else might have been ignored. But Punjab in the 1980s was a special case in more respects than one. The most progressive state, it was also one of the most assertive and distinctive. Claims that it was Punjabi farmers who fed the nation and Punjabi soldiers who defended it were no doubt an exaggeration, although not groundless. Punjabis were as pre-eminent and over-represented in the armed forces as they were in cereal production. But above all, and as a result of some opportunist redrawing of federal boundaries, Punjabis were now deemed synonymous with Sikhs.
Ostensibly this was the outcome of the belated reorganisation into language-based states of India’s post-Partition half of the British Punjab province. Back in the 1950s Jawaharlal Nehru, though accepting the principle of linguistic states in the south, had resisted it in the case of Punjab. He reasoned that, since all Sikhs spoke Punjabi, partitioning what remained of the already partitioned province into Hindi-speaking and Punjabi-speaking units would make the latter in effect a Sikh state. This would undermine the nation’s secularism and encourage divisive sentiments elsewhere. But in 1966, shortly after her selection as Prime Minister, Mrs Gandhi had decided otherwise. Anxious to win support wherever she could in her battle with the Congress Party’s Syndicate, she had acceded to demands for the Punjab’s trifurcation. Its hill districts, many of them once princely states, were grouped together as Himachal Pradesh (the state capital being Simla); its mainly Hindi-speaking southern and eastern districts (around Delhi) were detached to form the new state of Haryana; and its now mainly Punjabi-speaking heartland continued as Punjab.
Strategically crucial as bordering both Pakistan and Kashmir, it was this last creation that had become such a success story. The agreement with Pakistan over the sharing of the Indus waters, the higher productivity associated with the Green Revolution, and the boom in migration and remittances were all working in favour of the mini-Punjab. Additionally, apart from the trouble spots of Kashmir and Nagaland, Punjab was as yet the only state in India with a non-Hindu majority; for as Nehru had foreseen, those who claimed Punjabi as their first language (and the Gurmukhi script as its written expression) were overwhelmingly Sikhs. More important still, the state embraced the Sikh holy city of Amritsar along with its Golden Temple complex, the revered Mecca-cum-Vatican of the Sikh religion.
Not surprisingly Sikhs, both in India and abroad, came to regard their new Punjab more as a hallowed homeland than an administrative division of the Indian republic. Though far from united, all Sikhs subscribed to a tradition which, like that of Islam, stressed the relevance of doctrine to every aspect of life, politics included. At the time of Partition they had been promised the freedom to exercise their faith plus such autonomy as this required. The main Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, was pledged to realising this autonomy, and in 1973, at a place sacred to the memory of the last Guru, it had adopted a radical Resolution to that effect.
Known as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, it advanced forty-five demands, some essentially parochial or economic, others distinctly incendiary. One revived the British Cabinet Mission’s proposal that what the Akali Dal called ‘interference’ by New Delhi in the governance of the states should be limited to defence, foreign affairs, currency and ‘general administration’. In this it also echoed the six-point programme of Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League; and just as the latter had led to the break-up of Pakistan, so the Akali demand could be seen as threatening the integrity of India.
Other demands in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution referred to the Sikhs as a qaum, an Urdu word that could be understood as meaning ‘community’ (which was acceptable) or ‘nation’ (which echoed the ‘two-nation theory’ of Pakistan’s founders and was quite unacceptable). Additionally, the Akali Dal insisted that Chandigarh, the bleakly futuristic city designed by Le Corbusier as the capital of India’s pre-1966 Punjab, should be awarded to their own truncated Punjab. This was anathema to Hindi-speaking Haryana, and had already provoked riots and rival fasts-unto-death. Solomon-like, Mrs Gandhi decreed that both states should share Chandigarh’s capacious facilities. Under further pressure, she then changed her mind and awarded the city to Punjab. But there was a quid pro quo. Punjab would have to relinquish two districts by way of compensation to Haryana. This suited neither state, and provoked trouble in both. It remained unimplemented until, in 1984, renewed Punjabi demands for Chandigarh would goad Mrs Gandhi into waging her ‘Last Battle’. Otherwise known as ‘Operation Blue Star’, this Indian army assault on Amritsar’s Golden Temple would be regarded by many as the century’s greatest sacrilege.
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If a rampant populism had typified the whole South Asian political scene in the 1970s, a rabid communalism was more in evidence in the two following decades. Earlier, the importance attached to nation-building had encouraged Nehru, and to a lesser extent Jinnah and Mujib, to play down confessional identities and promote a supposedly inclusive secularism. But such neutrality in matters of religion antagonised those who favoured a more public role for their preferred belief system, and was often belied in electoral practice by confessional communities voting en bloc for parties pledged to defend their interests. Protestations of secularism notwithstanding, religious identities were far from dormant and were eminently susceptible to new stimuli.
One such stimulus was another by-product of emigration. In respect of Islam, migrants coming and going to the Arabian peninsula often brought home a sounder notion of their faith’s supra-national profile and a new regard for the fundamentalist tenets and uncompromising attitudes of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi elite. Likewise remittances, whether they originated from sojourners in the Gulf or settlers in the West, often came with doctrinal strings attached. So of course did the devotional and educational endowments that were increasingly directed at South Asia by charitable foundations in the Middle East and the West. Moreover, such patronage could prove provocative. Being funded to speak out on matters of faith and promote a particular doctrine could amount to proselytisation. When in 1981 several thousand Dalits (‘Harijans’, ‘Untouchables’) in Tamil Nadu opted to mass-convert to Islam, it was widely reported that Muslim inducements, including Gulf cash, had played a greater part in their decision than the discriminatory practices to which they had previously been exposed as Dalits. By the adherents of other cults and creeds, among them India’s vast Hindu majority, such conversions were seen both as a threat and a challenge. To meet it they would mobilise their own resources – financial, organisational and agitational.
Affirming a national religious identity could also pay political dividends. In both Pakistan and Bangladesh the Generals Zia cultivated support for their military regimes at home and abroad by stressing their Muslim credentials and appeasing their countries’ I
slamic leaderships. Thus in the late 1970s Ziaur Rahman scrapped all reference to secularism in the Bangladesh Constitution, and in the late 1980s General Ershad finally decreed that Bangladesh should call itself an ‘Islamic state’. Meanwhile Ziaul Haq in Pakistan had given statutory expression to what this vexed concept might mean in practice. All were no doubt sincere believers; yet they were also aware that ‘to generals badly in need of legitimacy the approval of Muslim ideologues was the next best thing to democratic endorsement’.9
India remained avowedly secular. Indeed, a new clause to this effect was written into the Constitution by Mrs Gandhi during her Emergency. But secularism meant different things to different people. For the agnostic Nehru it had been an intellectually persuasive proposition; for his daughter it was a shibboleth to be trotted forth when required; and for J.P. Narayan it was something of a religion in itself. As a one-time colleague and disciple of the Mahatma, JP was convinced not that religious belief should be denied a role in public life, but that public life, once it had been cleansed and devolved to the village level, would no longer provide a congenial arena for the universalist claims of competing belief systems.
As someone who had once acted as a government go-between with both Kashmir’s Sheikh Abdullah and the Naga leader Angami Zapu Phizo, JP brought a similarly eclectic vision to matters of political allegiance. In fact his ‘total revolution’, after restoring power to the people, was supposed to usher in a homespun utopia that would be as devoid of politics as it was of religious bigotry. This conviction, plus his untainted reputation, enabled him to command the loyalties of a decidedly kaleidoscopic coalition. To Mrs Gandhi the sight of diametrically opposed ideologues marching shoulder-to-shoulder under the JP umbrella seemed a travesty of electoral democracy, indeed evidence of some kind of conspiracy. But JP’s unlikely coalition held together; and come the Emergency detentions, it was actually strengthened. Scions of the ex-princely families found themselves sharing cell space with revolutionaries of Marxist-Leninist persuasion, one-nation Hindu fanatics bedded down beside bearded Jamaati mullahs, and socialist mavericks like Raj Narain bandied anti-Indira slogans with business-friendly Congress stalwarts like Morarji Desai.
Weirdest of all, and yet crucial to the success of the JP Movement, was the coming together of non-violent disciples of the Mahatma, like JP himself, with the successors of Nathuram Godse, the man who had assassinated the Mahatma. After Gandhi’s 1948 shooting, Godse had quickly been disowned by the ultra-Hindu RSS (the extra-parliamentary organisation that Nehru believed to be ‘in the nature of a private army … proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines’). Yet there was no denying that Godse had once belonged to the RSS, and that he had been swayed by its outspoken attacks on the Mahatma’s even-handed stance towards Muslims. Following Godse’s conviction, the RSS had been banned and thousands of its activists arrested. Although the ban had soon been lifted, the Jana Sangh, the political wing of the RSS, had since been treated as a pariah by the more secular political parties, and had struggled to make an electoral impression. Its decision to join the JP Movement, and even ‘assimilate’ with it, represented an important change of tactics. Still the voice of a patriotic and determinedly one-nation Hinduism, the Jana Sangh was bidding to enter the mainstream of Indian politics.10
In return the Sangh made available to the JP Movement a nationwide structure and organising capacity which the Movement otherwise lacked. Derived from the party’s association with the well-drilled cadres of the RSS, these assets had proved crucial to mounting the Movement’s massive pre-Emergency demonstrations in Delhi, and had become even more germane in the politicking that went on inside prison. In fact, by January 1977, when Mrs Gandhi lifted the Emergency, announced elections and released those still in detention, the JP Movement had metamorphosed into a formidable electoral contestant. Comprised of the Jana Sangh, the Socialists, Congress (O) and a powerful farming caucus, it emerged into the light of day as the newly fledged Janata Party.
By giving just a few weeks’ notice of the 1977 election Mrs Gandhi had again counted on taking her opponents by surprise. But this time she had miscalculated. Whatever credit she claimed for her Emergency was more than offset by popular outrage over its excesses. Janata was ready to take up the cudgels, and had merely to stress the obvious. Savaging Sanjay’s slum clearances and forced-sterilisation programmes, and decrying the arrests and the press censorship, it promised an immediate return to constitutional integrity, democratic normality and Gandhian values. Important figures in Indira’s Congress sympathised and defected to it; meanwhile seat-sharing arrangements with regional parties like the Tamil AIADMK (like other parties, the original DMK had split) and the Sikh Akali Dal ensured that the anti-Indira vote was not fragmented.
The result was a sweeping Janata victory. In the national parliament the new party won 295 of the 542 seats, and performed equally well in most of the states. Indira’s Congress slumped to 154 seats, at the time its lowest ever representation. In Rae Bareilly the Prime Minister herself was roundly defeated by Raj Narain; in a neighbouring constituency Sanjay’s attempt to win a seat bombed. For the first time ever India had a non-Congress government. The Emergency had been discredited, and with it the lurch towards authoritarian rule. Portraying the result as less a critique of Mrs Gandhi’s constitutional tinkering and more a test of the nation’s commitment to democracy, a standard history of the period reassures its readers that there was ‘no doubt that the Indian people passed the test with distinction if not full marks’.11
But while the Janata Party had triumphed in the polls, it was ex-Jana Sangh members who had triumphed in the party. Their tally of ninety-three seats was twice that achieved by ex-members of any of the other Janata components. After much jockeying for position, J.P. Narayan was asked to arbitrate over the choice of a leader, and installed the octogenarian Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. But Jana Sanghis also got portfolios, among them the party’s President Atul Behari Vajpayee as Minister for External Affairs. In this role Vajpayee belied his party’s reputation for intransigent Hindu triumphalism by visiting Beijing and Islamabad. Fences were mended with both; and while good terms with Moscow were maintained, a new relationship with Washington was signalled when in 1978 President Jimmy Carter paid an official visit to India. Carter gratified his hosts by likening the shock of Delhi’s recent Emergency to that of Washington’s recent Watergate. Clearly Hindu nationalists, once in power, were not necessarily a liability and could act as responsibly as any Congress Minister.
The same could hardly be said of the Janata Party’s non-Jana Sangh membership, nor of its domestic policies. Jana means ‘people’, with janata being its adjectival form – so ‘people’s’. Under the influence of Nehru’s social levelling policies, so-called janata amenities had been popping up everywhere. There were janata banks and janata housing schemes, and in the railway timetables a number of trains were billed as ‘Janata Expresses’. These connected the country’s main cities and were to be avoided if at all possible; for a ‘People’s Express’, though certainly popular, was not express-like in terms of luxury or speed. Comprised entirely of non-AC third-class carriages, it stopped at every station (plus points in between), was jam-packed even by Indian standards, lacked adequate toilet facilities and invariably arrived late. On the railways as elsewhere, ‘Janata’ represented the lowest common denominator with its combination of universal access and rock-bottom standards. As a brand, it was one to avoid; it was not a promising name for a political party.
In so far as the excesses of the Emergency were quickly addressed, the Janata government may be said to have got off to a good start. Mrs Gandhi’s constitutional amendments were reversed, and a legal minefield was laid down to prevent any repeat of the Emergency. The ex-Prime Minister herself was humbled with a flurry of judicial inquiries into her conduct in office. Additionally, in deference to JP’s Gandhianism and Janata’s farming lobby, the government nudged economic policy away from centrally planned industrialisation and t
owards rural development and small-scale manufacturing. Ironically, it also improved conditions on the railways, including the dreaded Janata Expresses. A quasi-computerised system of seat reservations was introduced, along with what Guha calls a ‘far-reaching measure’ to pad the hard wooden berths of second-class sleepers with three centimetres of foam rubber.12 But more village crafts, less central planning and a squidgy berth covered in plastic rep was not a lot to show for a government with such an overwhelming majority.
In fact, the majority was proving to be the problem; for the solidarity that had carried the Janata Party to power instantly deserted it in office. Its ex-Jana Sangh members refused to forswear their allegiance to the RSS, and insisted on a nationalist agenda in respect of such things as the rewriting of school textbooks. Neither of these reassured their associates in office, who favoured preferential treatment for farmers, ‘money for work’ schemes, and extending the educational and job opportunities reserved for the ‘scheduled’ tribes and lowest castes to those belonging to other backward castes. However well-intentioned, all this merely stirred up caste conflict, leading to violent clashes and some notable atrocities. Thus ‘the political momentum of the regime was lost by the end of 1977 [so within just nine months] and the uneasy coalition that was the Janata Party began to disintegrate’.13 A Janata government lingered on until 1979, but it was amid bitter internal struggles plus growing unrest in the country as the second round of oil-price hikes sent inflation back up to 20 per cent.
Mrs Gandhi had only to bide her time. The Jana Sangh’s obsession with ‘Mother India’ (or Bharat Mata, a supposedly indivisible and primordially Hindu personification of the nation) was countered by the nation’s rediscovered affection for ‘Mother Indira’ (or Indira Amma). Her star rose with every move to impeach her or impede her rehabilitation. Janata’s pursuit of justice began to look like a vendetta; Sanjay’s strong-arm tactics were forgotten. Re-elected to Parliament in a 1978 by-election in Karnataka, Mrs Gandhi once again purged her party, then mobilised it to support a breakaway Janata coalition. This arrangement lasted but a matter of weeks. JP was now a dying man, and with him was expiring all hope of his Janata being reconstituted. When in August 1979 Mrs Gandhi’s Congress withdrew its support of the breakaway coalition, the government lost its fragile majority. New elections were called for early 1980. India’s first ever non-Congress government had lasted less than three years.