Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  When the petition was unexpectedly granted, it was assumed that this could only have been the result of prime ministerial intervention. ‘It was said that Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks on the advice of his colleague Arun Nehru, who thought the Congress now needed to compensate the [Hindu] chauvinists [for defeat in the Shah Bano affair].’9 To Rajiv the gesture may have been one of even-handedness. But to the extended Sangh Parivar it was the green light: the VHP took it as vindication of its efforts to unite Hindus; the RSS saw it as evidence of its long-sought awakening of Hindu national pride; the BJP scented a substantial electoral dividend; and although implementation of the order was again frustrated by the courts, all saw it as proof that no vote-conscious government cared to defy such a display of concerted action.

  At this point, as if to fan the sparks of Hindu resurgence, in January 1987 all India plunged into a prolonged orgy of Rama-mania. Sunday after Sunday for eighteen months the nation immersed itself in the televisual screening of a spectacular seventy-eight-episode dramatisation of the Ramayana. For an hour each week the traffic fell silent and the streets emptied. The audience figures were among the highest ever recorded. Commissioned by the state network at enormous expense – and apparently without any ulterior prompting – it was certainly a triumph for television. Set-ownership rocketed; the small screen had stolen a march on Bollywood and the channel responsible basked in unwonted applause. A ninety-one-episode version of the Mahabharata, the other great Hindu epic, was immediately commissioned, and proved equally popular. For all of four years, two of which included national elections, Indians wallowed in the high-minded sentiments, the low intrigues and the convoluted storylines of divine soap-opera.

  In some households the act of watching became one of worship. For the appointed hour, sets were garlanded, lamps lit and incense burned. Family and friends gathered; refreshments might follow. With an estimated 91 per cent of the nation’s televisions tuning in, any load-shedding of the power supply was out of the question. The gods took priority. Although there exist numerous different recensions of the Ramayana, the one favoured by the TV producers was naturally that richest in heroic endeavour and romantic entanglements. Lord Ram was promoted as pre-eminent among all India’s deities, ‘co-extensive with all beliefs’ and epitomising everything that was noblest and most admirable in Hinduism.10 Bolstered by the viewing figures, this tele-version won universal acceptance and was accorded near-canonical status. For once, Hindus of whatever sect sank their differences and subscribed to a single glamorised presentation of the epic. Moreover, in immersing themselves in it simultaneously, they experienced a new sense of congregation that was both compelling and quasi-national. Thanks to the TV schedulers, India’s confessional majority emerged from each Sunday screening as charged and uplifted as church-goers from a Sunday service.

  How this devotional confidence would play out at the polling booths was uncertain. But already the elections due in 1989 – five years after Rajiv had won a massive mandate in the aftermath of his mother’s assassination – did not bode well for Congress. Naipaul’s ‘million mutinies’ were happening ‘now’. As noted, the accords brokered over Kashmir, Punjab and Assam had unravelled; violence in all three states had revived, and in none could a Congress or Congress-friendly majority be confidently expected. Other insurgencies troubled the north-eastern states in particular. The continued influx of immigrants and settlers from Bangladesh had sparked a reign of terror by ‘nationalists’ in the state of Tripura and another by the indigenous Bodo people of Assam. Meanwhile the Nagas’ irredentist struggle was affecting not just Nagaland but neighbouring states like Manipur with a large Naga minority. Even West Bengal only remained intact thanks to concessions to a Gorkha National Liberation Front demanding greater autonomy for Nepali settlers in the state’s hill districts.

  Elsewhere in the country the catastrophic harvests of 1985 and ’87 had reawakened the spectre of famine. Five in every ten Indians still lived below what most indices considered the poverty line. Additionally, the government was mired in a scandal over the payment of bribes by the Swedish Bofors company in connection with a Defence Ministry arms purchase. Rajiv’s reputation as ‘Mr Clean’ was as tarnished as his standing as ‘Mr Peace-Maker’.

  The débâcle in Sri Lanka looked like the final straw. Some now spoke of that island as ‘India’s Vietnam’. A thousand members of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force had been killed there, yet a settlement was more remote than ever. In retrospect, the situation looked like an early case of what Afghanistan-watchers would call ‘blowback’. New Delhi’s attempt to relieve the Tigers (LTTE) of the arms and safe havens that it had once made freely available to them had backfired. Instead of bolstering the Sri Lankan Tamils’ prospects of autonomy, the Indian troops found themselves targeted by the Tigers, and so fighting Colombo’s war against Tamil autonomy. This suited the Sri Lankan government, which could deploy its own forces against an uprising in the south of the island. But once that was taken care of, growing Sinhala resentment of the Indian presence was, if anything, gratified by the vicious Tamil attacks on the Indians. Unpopular with all Sri Lankans, whether Tamil-speaking or Sinhala-speaking, by 1989 the Indian Peace-Keeping Force was in the early stages of an ignominious withdrawal.

  For the most part these setbacks affected India’s peripheral states. But it was in the populous core regions of north, central and western India that elections were traditionally decided; and it was there that the Sangh Parivar was most active. In the run-up to the 1989 elections, the VHP organised a repeat of its Ekatmata Yatra, this time with the focus on Ayodhya. To build a massive new temple at what some were now calling ‘the Hindu Bethlehem’, the faithful were urged to bake bricks. These were then consecrated in elaborate ceremonies before being taken on the road in mobile tableaux accompanied by armies of slogan-chanting followers. Violence often marked their progress. Muslim districts responded to the challenge of anti-Islamic taunts with brickbats; police roadblocks were attacked. In the communal riots that accompanied the Ram shila pujans (Ram brick ceremonies) hundreds died and property was looted or burnt from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to UP and Bihar. The death toll in the Ganges town of Bhagalpur alone was officially put at 538 and unofficially at over a thousand.

  The victims being disproportionately Muslims, newspapers in Bangladesh and Pakistan afforded generous coverage of the mayhem. In a rare show of unanimity, Pakistanis met every twist in the Ayodhya assault on Muslim sensibilities by taking to the streets to demand vengeance. Muslim Bangladeshis simply turned again on Hindu Bangladeshis. Thousands of the latter, who had somehow weathered the Partition of 1947, the anti-Hindu ‘riots’ of the ’50s and ’60s and the birth pangs of Bangladesh in the ’70s, finally gave up. They trailed across the unpoliceable border into Indian territory.

  In October 1989 the VHP tested its strength by issuing a directive to Hindus worldwide. At precisely 1.35 p.m. on 10 November all were enjoined to down tools, face in the direction of Ayodhya and make an offering of flowers. That was the moment at which, on a piece of disputed ground near the Babri Masjid, the foundation-laying ceremonies for the new temple would be reaching their climax. ‘There the principal symbol was the heap of 167,093 Ram Shilas [Ram bricks] collected throughout India and in the Hindu diaspora, which had then been transported to Ayodhya.’11 Despite the vast crowds, prominent among whom were many of the BJP’s electoral candidates, these ceremonies passed off peacefully. The government made no attempt to interfere, for fear of a threatened backlash. Instead Rajiv Gandhi ‘expressed satisfaction’ over their orderly conduct.

  The elections that followed later the same month were arguably the most significant in India’s history. Rajiv’s Congress was humiliated. It lost more than two hundred seats and could no longer claim a majority. In fact, for the first time ever, no single party had a majority. A new pattern was being set in which cross-party alliances would be crucial and coalition governments would become the norm. More obviously, the BJP had made its long-awai
ted breakthrough as a power-broker. From just two seats in the previous Lok Sabha, its tally had shot up to eighty-six, mostly from constituencies that had witnessed Ayodhya-related activity. With BJP support and that of the Communist Party (Marxist), a government was formed. It was headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Rajiv’s former Finance Minister and an ex-Rajah of doughty integrity. Based on a left-leaning coalition of anti-Congress interests, Singh’s National Front government had much in common with the Janata government cobbled together under J.P. Narayan’s banner in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

  Nor did the new National Front government fare any better or last any longer than its Janata predecessor. Within eighteen months it had lost the support of the BJP, lost the leadership of the respected V.P. Singh and lost its parliamentary majority. Like his mother in 1981, Rajiv thus found himself making a swift return to the hustings at the head of a resurgent Congress. While campaigning for these second elections in two years, in May 1991 he went to Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. There, as with his mother seven years earlier, nemesis caught up with him. He too was assassinated, in this case blown to bits along with eighteen others by a woman who wore a belt of explosives beneath her sari.

  Suicide bombings, although not unknown in the Middle East, had by now become the hallmark of the Tamil Tigers. Though conspiracy theorists would have a heyday, there seems no reason to doubt the findings of two subsequent inquiries that Rajiv’s assassin and her accomplices were part of a well-planned LTTE plot. But while the LTTE’s involvement seems certain, its motivation is less so. Possibly it was in revenge for Rajiv’s role in sending the IPKF to Sri Lanka in the first place; possibly it was to pre-empt his recent threat to do the same again; and just possibly Indian Tamil militants were somehow complicit. ‘Blowback’ is of its nature imprecise.

  Come polling day a sympathy vote, this time for Rajiv’s widow Sonia and their children, again proved decisive. It helped return another Congress government, albeit after heavy losses in the northern states and in alliance with lesser parties to make up a majority. Sonia Gandhi, handicapped by her Italian birth, her poor Hindi and her inexperience, declined the prime ministership. She did, though, lend her name and image to Congress publicity, and would later be persuaded to take on the leadership of the party. Instead the prime ministerial office went to Narasimha Rao, a fragile-looking but experienced Congress Minister with an unexpectedly open mind on the economy.

  But the BJP had done well too, increasing its representation from eighty-six MPs to 120. An ‘also ran’ in 1984, in 1991 the political wing of the Sangh Parivar was now second only to Congress in the Lok Sabha, and controlled several states, including the largest, UP. And again it had done so on the back of one of the Sangh Parivar’s Ayodhya spectaculars.

  Having got the bricks for the new temple, the VHP had still faced the problem of how to secure possession of the site. Various legal approaches were explored; but as these failed, the idea of simply commandeering the site and then removing the mosque found much support. If allowed to go ahead, this would be a blatant sacrilege in Muslim eyes, as well as the most flagrant betrayal imaginable of India’s secular pretensions.

  Undeterred, in 1990 the VHP had launched another yatra. The centrepiece this time was a rath (or temple chariot) like those familiar to viewers of the TV epics – and like them in fact a Toyota pick-up suitably customised, bedecked in saffron, and adorned with Hindu symbols, including the lotus of the BJP. In its air-conditioned cab rode Lal Krishna Advani. A former member of the RSS and now the fiery-tongued and silver-moustached President of the BJP, Advani was fêted by relays of party activists, some wearing monkey masks to identify them as followers of Lord Hanuman, the leader of Lord Ram’s simian army in the Ramayana. Setting off from Somnath, a place on the Gujarat coast where a gleaming new temple had already replaced one destroyed by Muslims in the eleventh century, the cavalcade had for weeks wound its way east and south as far as Hyderabad. Then it headed north for Delhi and Ayodhya.

  The rath yatra had a dual purpose, which was often summed up as ‘Mandal and Mandir’. On the one hand it was undertaken as a protest against Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s adoption of the so-called Mandal Report. This had been prepared ten years earlier at the request of the Janata government. Justice B.P. Mandal had been asked to look into the question of whether those affirmative-action opportunities – principally in terms of reserved educational places and government jobs – that were already available to the lowest so-called Scheduled Castes (SCs) should be extended to castes equally disadvantaged but not quite so low in the pecking order. Mandal thought it should. In fact, since these Other Backward Castes (OBCs) accounted for around half the total population, he recommended even more reserved places for OBCs than for SCs. But the report had found no favour with the subsequent Congress governments, and had been shelved.

  When resurrected by V.P. Singh in 1990, it met with the condemnation that Congress had feared. This came from the higher castes. Mindful of their own chances in a careers market drastically reduced by the reservation of over 50 per cent of all educational and governmental places, the less well-off members of the upper castes protested vehemently. Some schools and colleges were forced to close, sixty protesters were killed in battles with the police, and hundreds of Brahmin youths set fire to themselves. Implementing a report aimed at redressing one example of social inequality simply stirred up another. Although supposedly anathema in independent India, caste was in effect being written into law. Moreover, inter-caste competition would intensify as a result: decidedly un-backward castes would begin mobilising to have themselves downgraded, so qualifying for OBC status and the opportunities it promised.

  All of which posed a quandary for the BJP. The party was dominated by the higher castes; moreover, the Mandal recommendations were clearly divisive, and therefore objectionable to anyone committed to uniting ‘the Hindu nation’. Yet the BJP could hardly risk alienating that half of the entire nation that stood to gain as OBCs. The trick in 1990 had therefore been to disguise the party’s opposition to Mandal by a dramatic reassertion of its commitment to Mandir. ‘Mandir’ is the Hindi word for ‘temple’, the mandir in question being of course that planned for Ayodhya. As the rath yatra sped north, Advani appealed for kar sevaks, or ‘volunteers’, with the strength and dedication to throw down the Babri Masjid and begin the erection of a Ram Mandir worthy of what some now saw as the future ‘Hindu Vatican’.

  Accordingly, once arrived in Delhi, Advani had challenged V.P. Singh to put aside the contentious Mandal and concentrate on the glorious Mandir. The suggestion had been declined, which was the signal for the BJP to withdraw its support for the Singh government. The 1991 mid-term elections – those that proved so fatal to Rajiv – followed in May; and the hot potato that was Mandal thus passed to Narasimha Rao’s Congress ministry. Since Congress had fared dismally in states like UP where the anti-Mandal agitation was most intense, Rao jumped at a chance to re-establish his party’s fortunes by endorsing Mandal. With a few amendments, the report finally passed into law.

  Meanwhile, the rath yatra had run into trouble. Entering UP in October 1990, it had been stopped by the state government, whose ruling party was part of the National Front coalition in Delhi, and whose Chief Minister was himself an OBC member. Advani was arrested along with 30,000 supporters, whereupon ‘violence affected most of the country’.12 The nationwide demonstrations led to Hindu–Muslim riots as far away as Karnataka. Hundreds of deaths were reported, and in UP, to keep Ayodhya volunteers at bay, whole trains were turned back at the state border. The final total of those detained within this one state was reported by the Indian Express to be around 150,000.

  Some 40,000 kar sevaks nevertheless reached Ayodhya; and of these a hardcore forced their way through to the Babri Masjid. The gates were broken open, the mosque stormed and a saffron flag raised above it. Further damage was prevented by the police, whose tactics resulted in the deaths of dozens more. Like Mother Ganga’s holy water and L
ord Ram’s bricks, the ashes of these ‘martyrs’ were then trundled round the countryside for mass veneration, The new temple remained unbuilt, and the old mosque still stood; but the VHP and its allies in the Sangh Parivar were far from cowed.

  *

  Just over a year later, at a dinner in New Delhi’s embassy quarter early in 1993, the UK’s High Commissioner (i.e. ambassador) rose from his seat at the head of the table, prayed silence with a ringing tap on a wine glass, and announced that he was about to break with diplomatic protocol. The situation was so ‘concerning’, he said, that he was sure the assembled company of some twenty mainly Indian luminaries would understand. Starting on his left, then, he would ask each guest in turn to share his or her thoughts on the crisis. The speakers could be as candid as they liked. Their impromptu contributions were to follow the port decanter round the table.

  No one demurred; no one even disputed that there was a crisis. Sadly, and with little in the way of after-dinner pleasantries, each held forth on what one described as ‘the greatest threat to the nation since Independence’. Memories of Partition were dredged up. Scenarios dire and less dire were painted. For once the perennial platitudes about ‘tolerant India’, ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘this non-violent nation’ went unmentioned. Instead someone suggested that an India now so catastrophically divided might be described as tolerant only of a quite appalling level of violence. The usual reference to ‘a foreign hand’ behind the recent ‘troubles’ was also missing; and no one thought to reflect on how these ‘troubles’ might appear to India’s neighbours. As if faced with a purely personal tragedy, grief and shame made the usually ebullient company look inward.

  Elsewhere in the subcontinent, the democrats – Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad, Girija Prasad Koirala in Katmandu and Khaleda Zia in Dhaka – were currently in the ascendant. Moreover, for once no superpower was exercising undue pressure in the region. Washington’s interest in South Asia had cooled following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; Moscow was no longer a global contender; and Beijing was busy trumpeting growth rates to drown out the memories of Tiananmen Square. Why then was it New Delhi, with the proudest of democratic records and a natural preference for an unaligned South Asia, that found itself plunged into an existential crisis? No one round the table asked this. No one reflected on how Mandal and Mandir had impeccably Indian pedigrees; and though both demands enjoyed enormous popular support, no one suggested that democracy itself might in some way be to blame. Perhaps the pain of the moment was too great, the prognoses of what might follow too grim.