by John Keay
This question of accommodating the guerrillas topped a growing agenda of contentious issues that soon threatened both the peace and the constitutional process. The setting up of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission was repeatedly postponed; so was the deadline for agreement on the new Constitution. Meanwhile parliamentary business ground to a standstill as the Maoists backed up their demands by orchestrating strikes and walk-outs. Disaffection and factionalism within both the main political parties further complicated matters.
A resolution of these problems looked no nearer in 2014 than it had six years earlier. Elections due in 2012 had twice been postponed. The Maoist guerrillas were still awaiting rehabilitation; human rights abuses dating back to the war had yet to be investigated, and likewise the scale of compensation to be offered for the Maoists’ land grabs. The new republic remained without a Constitution, and for all practical purposes the country remained without a government. The best that could be said was that all parties, including the Maoists, professed a commitment to the democratic process and were still gearing up for elections.
In a sign of more hopeful times, tourism – ‘the second biggest income-earner after remittances from Nepalese abroad’ according to the BBC – began to pick up. No doubt it was boosted by the introduction in 2012 of the first ‘Guerrilla Treks’. Offering twenty-one days among the erstwhile cadres and their collectivised holdings in Rolpa and Rukun, these looked like Nepal’s way of consigning the war to history.25
The tourists themselves were another sign of the changing times. Once mostly backpacking Westerners, they were now overwhelmingly free-spending Indians. From an airport enlivened by the liveries of Indian-owned budget airlines, the visitors were being bussed into town in Indian-built vehicles past billboards advertising Indian-made furnishings. Katmandu can have seemed no more exotic than Gangtok. Indeed to outsiders, especially Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, Nepal appeared to be showcasing Indianisation as the twenty-first century’s riposte to Partition.
Just as sharing a subcontinent with the world’s largest democracy enhanced the prospects of electoral accountability elsewhere in South Asia, so sharing it with one of the most dynamic of the world’s emerging economies promised dividends of a different sort. Hitherto, ‘dynamic’ had been a word not readily associated with the Indian economy. The economic miracle had been a long time coming; it took many by surprise and was already faltering. But there was no doubt that, in the space of a couple of decades, India’s prospects had been transformed. Rising living standards, however unevenly distributed, plus a more aspirational environment also served to quell dissent and draw the sting of protest. Communists could become IT entrepreneurs, ‘slumdogs’ become millionaires. For South Asia as a whole there was much to be learned from a suddenly ‘Shining India’.
11
India Astir
By common consent the 1980s had been India’s worst decade to date. Predictions of an imminent economic lift-off had again proved hopelessly misplaced. By the end of the decade the national debt had risen to an unsustainable $70 billion; the growth rate was sluggish, investment likewise, under-employment endemic and reserves of foreign currency perilously low. Once projected as ‘the Japan of the 1980s’, the country felt more like the China of the 1930s. Navigating it meant dodging sudden curfews and endless demonstrations. The roads were not for the faint-hearted, and the extremities of the country were virtually no-go areas. Trains got blown up, rivers either stank or flooded. Although television had already reached some villages, audiences for the nation’s state-run network were subject to the vagaries of the state-run power supply. Making a telephone call could take a morning, buying an airline ticket or cashing a cheque took all day. Always unwieldy, India in the 1980s was feeling increasingly unmanageable.
Rajiv Gandhi’s big idea as Prime Minister (1984–89) had been to wean the people off their reliance on the state and get them to take responsibility for their own lives. He liked computers and believed in self-empowerment. A paperless desk matched his peerless complexion, and when a lamp needed fixing he dug out a screwdriver. Instead of fielding endless petitions he pleaded for local initiative. ‘If a road needs ditching, why don’t they organise it themselves?’ he said. ‘The people have become too dependent on the state providing everything.’1 He too favoured bottom-upwards regeneration; but not because, as in Bangladesh and Nepal, there was a governmental vacuum, but because there was a governmental overload.
For in India it was decision-making that had been moving upwards. With the democratic process reduced to an electoral bunfight, parliamentarians looked on office more as a reward than a responsibility. Between repeated adjournments for unruly conduct, the Lok Sabha continued to function; but it legislated little. State governments were no better: when not actually suspended, they lived in constant fear of being so. The courts, on the other hand, were busy: their backlog of cases stretched back a decade or more. Seemingly, litigation led where legislation feared to tread. Willy-nilly everything non-actionable, from protest to dissent, found its way into the Prime Minister’s office, and from there onto the national agenda.
It was depressing fodder. In 1988, for a published collection of his recent journalism, the respected editor M.J. Akbar chose the title Riot After Riot. Two years later V.S. Naipaul subtitled the last of his three India books A Million Mutinies Now. The Jeremiahs were having a field day. Ramachandra Guha quotes from a 1985 edition of the Calcutta weekly Sunday, to which numerous distinguished journalists contributed gloom-laden observations: ‘tension and frustration everywhere – social, economic and political … Acts of sabotage, arson, killings and destruction are breaking out all over India like an ugly rash … [F]ear is growing that we are moving beyond the point of no return … discontent seems to have reached a bursting point … India finds itself at a crucial point in its history.’ Guha added the caveat that ‘every decade since Independence had been designated the “most dangerous” ’, but there was clearly not much to celebrate.2 Hostilities of caste, class, creed and ethnicity hogged the headlines. Forty years after Independence, Indians were more divided among themselves – and more violently divided – than ever before. If the nation was going anywhere, it was not upwards but backwards.
Pakistan, on the other hand, was receiving comparatively favourable ratings. Moderately progressive in 1967, by 1987 some found it even more so. Here was ‘a fast-moving country’, according to The Economist’s special report of that year. Pakistanis could look back on their first four decades with some satisfaction. Starting out with little in the way of industry or infrastructure, the economy was now powering ahead of India’s. Cotton production had made up for the loss of East Bengal’s jute. GDP per head stood at $390 compared with India’s $260, and growth under Ziaul Haq was averaging 7 per cent against India’s 4 per cent.
It has better road, transport and telephone services than India. It has 450,000 cars compared with 1.5 m in India, which has eight times as many people. Colour television is common in areas called slums. The people are bigger and healthier looking. You do not find the hopeless poverty of lethargic, underfed people that is still so common in India’s backward areas.3
The Economist had its reservations, as always. The prosperity was down to ‘foreign money’, notably the diaspora’s remittances ($2–3 billion a year in the mid-1980s), US aid ($0.6 billion a year and rising) and profits from the arms-and-heroin trade (‘incalculable millions’). Businessmen were not complaining; but then, neither were they investing. The political future was too uncertain. ‘A psychoanalyst would tell Pakistan that it … was stuck in a crisis-ridden adolescence.’ Democracy had stalled, and dictatorship was becoming addictive. Only 24 per cent of the adult population was literate, because education received a pitiful 1.5 per cent of budgeted expenditure compared with the around 40 per cent earmarked for the defence establishment. General Zia conjured up plenty of resentment. But compared with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The Economist reckoned his repression less arbitrary and less offensi
ve. As of 1985, in which year Zia’s regime had acquired a civilian veneer with the appointment of the mild-mannered Mohamed Khan Junejo as Prime Minister, ‘Pakistan was freer than it ever was under Bhutto.’
Such comparisons only contributed to the gloom that enveloped India. Nor were reports from Karachi of the ethno-sectarian carnage there much consolation. For if the Islamising of an avowedly Muslim Pakistan was proving highly divisive, then just so was the Hinduising of a proudly secular India. Nehru had embedded religious neutrality in the nationalist prospectus; his daughter Indira had pruned it back for electoral advantage; and then, for similar reasons, her son Rajiv seemed to have wrenched at its roots.
Rajiv was not alone in this, nor was he perhaps fully alert to its consequences. Nevertheless, when an excruciating legal issue had floated up to the prime ministerial desk in July 1985, his vacillation had done much to light the fuse of confessional strife. Known as the ‘Shah Bano affair’, the case caused acute embarrassment at the time. Liberals wrung their hands in anguish and huddled in corners whispering over their whiskies late into the night. Foreign observers struggled to follow the intricacies of the case. Often they failed to appreciate its significance; it made for laboured copy. But the profound discomfort was real enough.
The issue at stake concerned the relationship between Indian civil law and Muslim customary law. A petition from an organisation called the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) had urged the Prime Minister to amend an Article in the Directive Principles of the Constitution which foresaw a uniform civil code applying to all Indian citizens, regardless of their faith. In particular, the Prime Minister was asked to overrule a decision of the Supreme Court which, anticipating this universal civil code, had just found against a plaintiff in the sensitive matter of a Muslim divorce settlement.
At the centre of the affair was Shah Bano, a seventy-five-year-old Muslim lady from Indore in Madhya Pradesh. Divorced six years previously by her lawyer husband, Shah Bano had taken her case for indefinite maintenance as per the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure to a local court; and she had won. But her ex-husband had then contested this in the Supreme Court, on the basis that Muslim personal law obliged him to pay maintenance for only three months. Thus, in rejecting the appeal, the Supreme Court had found in favour of Shah Bano and the civil code. The Court also somewhat gratuitously backed up its judgement by offering the view that Quranic jurisprudence could in fact be taken to favour maintenance payments for as long as the divorced wife’s circumstances required.
In effect, the Supreme Court had not only upheld the primacy of the secular civil code, but had presumed to interpret Muslim family law. Orthodox Islamic opinion was incensed: vast Muslim crowds – one supposedly of ‘400,000 people in Bihar and one of 300,000 in Bombay’ – demanded greater protection for Muslim rights.4 Conversely, Hindu supremacists, already smarting over the erection of Saudi-funded mosques and a wave of Dalit conversions to Islam, heartily approved.
All of which was too much for the AIMPLB, which redoubled its lobbying of the Prime Minister; and it was too much for Shah Bano, who, vilified by fellow Muslims, eventually disclaimed her victory and announced that her ex-husband’s princely allowance of 179 rupees a month (about $6) would be donated to charity. It was also too much for Rajiv Gandhi. Having just defeated a private member’s Bill to exempt Muslims from the offending section of the Criminal Procedures Code, in early 1986 he performed a political somersault. Muslim voters appeared to have deserted Congress in recent by-elections; to win them back, therefore, the Code must after all be amended: Muslim practice would be excluded from its purview, and a Muslim Women’s Bill would be introduced to ‘protect’ (i.e. enshrine) Muslim ‘rights’ on divorce – including the husband’s option of terminating maintenance payments after three months. Congress MPs, who had just been whipped through the lobbies to vote down the private member’s Bill exempting Muslims, were now whipped through the lobbies in support of the Muslim exemption.
Naturally this about-turn provoked varied reactions. Orthodox Muslims celebrated; their mass demonstrations had paid off, and they had repelled an assault on their religious autonomy. Liberal secularists, on the other hand, along with those Muslims anxious to shed their faith’s reputation for gender discrimination, were acutely embarrassed. The exemption seemed to conflict with the equality of rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and worse still, it meant that enlightened members of the intelligentsia now found themselves lining up alongside the enraged champions of Hindu supremacism.
For to the BJP, the RSS and their saffron-shirted associates on the Hindu right, the decision was a clear case of the government capitulating to ‘Muslim fundamentalism’. ‘From now on, the underlying theme of all discussions among militant Hindus was that of “Hindu society under siege”.’5 Yet while stigmatising Islam as an obscurantist and proselytising menace, militant Hindus also saw fit to learn from it. They urged their co-religionists to rediscover their own culture, to promote it with pride and to unite en masse for the purposes of political action. A Hindu backlash was looming. Meanwhile ‘Rajiv’s reputation as a peace-maker – won in brokering accords in Kashmir and Assam as well as Punjab – was shattered, his political honeymoon over.’6
Along with the BJP as its main political wing and with the RSS providing a disciplined and motivated all-India network of activist volunteers, the so-called Sangh Parivar (the ‘Family Association’ of patriotic Hindu organisations) comprised a host of other political, religious and social groups. Among them was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or ‘World Hindu Council’. This body had long been engaged in trying to get the different sects within ‘the Hindu communion’ to coalesce. Common objectives, like cow-protection and the abolition of ‘untouchability’, were promoted; and all manner of revered holy men (acharyas, saddhus, mahants, sants, pujaris, gurus, etc.) were encouraged to sink their sectarian differences in support of a ‘Faith Council’. In effect, through a nationwide programme of conferences an attempt was being made to endow Hinduism with the authoritative guidance of what amounted to a clerical establishment, indeed an ‘ecclesiastical hierarchy’.
Such moves appealed strongly to those devout Hindus who were aware of their religion’s doctrinal and organisational deficiencies when compared to other faiths. In particular the VHP’s Hindu ecumenism found influential supporters and donors among some of India’s industrialists and mercantile magnates, and among the Hindu diaspora in the US and Western Europe. The movement would not be short of funds.
To promote this Hindu ‘reformation’, in 1983 the VHP had hit on the idea of organising a nationwide Ekatmata Yatra, or ‘unity pilgrimage’. Images of ‘Mother India’ and ‘Mother Ganga’, both of whom were more national divinities than sect-specific ones, were mounted on trailers for motorised processions that converged on sites rich in Hindu associations. Water from India’s holiest rivers was collected and distributed along the way, and devotions to the deities were performed before massive crowds led by distinguished Hindu leaders. As an exercise in ‘ethno-religious mobilisation’, the yatra ‘introduced a new ideological devotionalism’ and was reckoned a sensational success.7 A repetition of its explosive combination of ecstatic worship, mass organisation and political activism promised much to the Sangh Parivar. All that was lacking was the tighter focus which a single symbolic issue or a single emotive location would confer.
*
Ayodhya is a small, unfashionable city in western UP. Many Hindus believe it to be Ramjanmabhoomi, or ‘the birthplace of Lord Ram’, himself a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu and the hero of the Ramayana epic. Whether Lord Ram was in fact born in Ayodhya, indeed whether he was born at all, is debatable. Some historians bow to tradition in the matter, others dismiss it; archaeologists too are divided. More certainly, a mosque was built there in the sixteenth century during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Babur. In the belief that this three-domed Bab[u]ri Masjid was erected on the very spot where a temple commemorating Lord Ram’s birth had once st
ood, some devout Hindus had been laying sporadic claim to the site ever since.
In 1949 a recitation of the Ramayana outside the mosque had attracted large crowds. It also occasioned visible hostility towards the Muslim community, plus a minor miracle: a tinseltown image of the baby Ram materialised inside the mosque. Though the state authorities and then Nehru himself ordered the removal of the image, their instructions were stymied by the courts. Instead the whole site was fenced off and its gate locked. ‘In effect, the mosque was shut down.’8 Muslim plans for its restoration were put on hold; so were Hindu plans for replacing it with a temple. The only concession to Hindu opinion was occasional admission, plus permission to construct a platform outside the fence from which Hindu worship of the Ram image could be performed, albeit at long range.
No one was happy with this arrangement. Muslim groups formed a committee for the defence of the mosque even as Hindu groups agitated for its demolition. In the Ramayana Lord Ram, a quintessential god-child, grows up to become the epitome of Hindu kingship; thus the idea of his ‘miraculous’ image being imprisoned within a mosque was deeply offensive to devout opinion. Posters and wheeled floats depicting the young god encaged behind bars also served as a powerful metaphor for the supposed plight of contemporary Hindus. The message was obvious. A ‘pseudo-secular’ state intent on appeasing its Muslim minority was forcibly constraining its Hindu majority and depriving them of their rights.
Although ‘liberating’ Ayodhya’s Ramjanmabhoomi had earlier featured among the VHP’s demands, as of 1985 it became the central plank. New processional cavalcades began converging on the city from different parts of the country; overseas Hindus were alerted to the need for funds and endorsement through conferences and the formation of local chapters; and a petition was filed with the district court for the (re-)opening of the site for Hindu worship.