India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The decision to send in troops to Sri Lanka was consistent with India’s growing perception of itself as the ‘rightful regional hegemon in South Asia’.62 In demographic and economic terms it dominated the region, and it was now determined to express this dominance in terms of military preparedness as well. In January 1987 Indian infantry units mounted a large exercise on the Pakistan border, ostensibly to test new equipment but really to display to the old enemy a new-found power.63 Then, in March 1988, India tested its first surface-to-surface missile, capable of attacking targets up to a distance of a hundred miles away. A year later it successfully tested amore sophisticated device, which could carry a load ten times more powerful and reach targets 1,500 miles away. Indian missile scientists had taken their country into an exclusive club whose only other members were the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China and Israel.64

  These developments attracted apprehension in the smaller countries of South Asia. People were talking of the ‘Ugly Indian’, as they talked in other parts of the world of the ‘Ugly American’. India, admitted a Calcutta weekly ruefully, is regarded as the bad boy of the region’.65

  X

  Rajiv Gandhi had come to power with a massive mandate in the polls held after his mother’s death. As the general election of 1989 approached, however, the prospects for his party were decidedly uncertain. As in 1967 and 1977, now too the once regnant Congress was being hard pressed to maintain its position.

  There was, first of all, the ever more serious challenge of regional parties. Through much of Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure the Asom Gana Parishad had ruled in Assam, the Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh (where N. T. Rama Rao had come back to power in 1985), and the Akalis in the Punjab. In January 1989 the DMK was returned to power in Tamil Nadu. More robustly placed than all these parties was the CPM in West Bengal, which in 1989 had been in office for twelve years. In this time their leader and chief minister Jyoti Basu had ‘grown phenomenally in stature’. Basu was held in great esteem in the countryside for the agrarian reforms his party had brought about. Unusually for a communist, he was also respected by industrialists, who admired his pragmatic approach to investment and his tempering of trade union militancy.66

  A second challenge came from the Hindu right. The old Jana Sangh, since renamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had won a mere two seats in the 1984 elections. But it had now hitched its wagon to the campaign for a Ram temple in Ayodhya. As that movement gathered popularity, so the party’s fortunes rose. BJP cadres joined VHP and RSS workers in carrying out Ram shila pujans, ceremonies to worship and consecrate bricks which, they hoped, would be used in the construction of the Ram temple. To force the issue, the VHP announced that it would organize a formal shilanyas (foundation ceremony) at the disputed site in Ayodhya on 2November. Bricks from different districts reached the site on the appointed day. The Congress government in Delhi was advised to stop the shilanyas, but eventually let it go ahead for fear of offending Hindus ahead of the general Election. The VHP chose a Dalit labourer from Bihar to lay the first brick of what they claimed would, one day soon, be a glorious temple dedicated to Lord Ram.67

  The brick worship ceremonies led to religious conflict in several towns in northern India. The worst hit was the city of Bhagalpur, in Bihar, where Hindus and Muslims battled each other for a whole week in November. The conflict spilled over into the countryside, where RSS activists led groups in the smashing of looms and homes owned by the region’s celebrated Muslim weavers. Several hundred Muslims died and many more were rendered homeless. These were gathered into relief camps run not by the government, but by Muslim merchants and Islamic relief organizations. The riots in Bhagalpur, and the aftermath of the Ram pujans generally, further polarized the communities. The Muslims felt betrayed by the Congress, while a large section of the Hindu middle class was drawn into an open support of the BJP.68

  A third challenge to the prime minister came from his erstwhile Cabinet colleague V. P. Singh. As finance minister, Singh had conducted a series of raids on industrial houses accused of tax evasion. This was seen as exceeding his brief; he was shifted to the Defence portfolio, and later dropped from the Cabinet altogether. Not long afterwards a storm broke out over revelations that commissions had been paid to middlemen in a deal involving the sale of the Swedish Bofors gun to the Indian army. The news was first announced over Swedish radio in April 1987. Over the next two years the press and opposition politicians kept up the pressure on the government, demanding that it name and punish the offenders. The government stonewalled, prompting speculation that the middlemen were somehow linked to the prime minister himself. The fact that there had been corruption in a defence transaction provoked widespread outrage, which was further intensified when it emerged that army experts had preferred a French gun to the Bofors, but had been overruled by the politicians.69

  In the public mind, the Bofors controversy was, rightly or wrongly, linked to the departure of V. P. Singh from the Cabinet. The appellation ‘Mr Clean’ was transferred from Rajiv Gandhi onto him. Singh left the Congress, and in June 1988 stood and won as a candidate of the combined opposition in a parliamentary by-election in Allahabad. By now he had become the focal point of a growing anti-Congress sentiment. In October 1988 his Jan Morcha was merged with the old Janata Party to form the Janata Dal. This new party then joined hands with regional groupings to create a National Front, launched at Madras’s Marina Beach and hailed by one of its members, the ever-ebullient N. T. Rama Rao, as a chariot ‘drawn by seven horses [that] will dispel the gloom and shadows that thickened through the passage of the last few decades of national history’.70

  In the last year of his government’s tenure Rajiv Gandhi embarked on four initiatives that aimed at reversing his declining popularity. In September 1988 he introduced a bill aimed at checking the freedom of the press. Under its terms, editors and proprietors could be sent to jail if they were guilty of ‘scurrilous publication’ or ‘criminal imputation’, terms whose definition would be the privilege of the state alone. The bill was evidently a response to the spate of recent stories on corruption; it was a ‘belated preemptive strike before more damage could be done to the government’s image’. It prompted a collective protest by editors across the country and a walk-out in Parliament, and was eventually dropped.71

  Then, in January 1989, Rajiv Gandhi visited China, the first Indian prime minister to do so in more than three decades. This was, among other things, an attempt to recast himself as an international statesman. In talks with Chinese leaders the border question was delicately sidestepped. However, New Delhi ceded ground on Tibet, while Beijing for its part said it would not aid insurgents in India’s north-east. Rajiv Gandhi had a ninety-minute conversation withthe84-year-old Deng Hsiao Ping, where he was told: ‘You are the young. You are the future.’72

  Next, in March 1989, Rajiv Gandhi reversed the outward-looking, growth-oriented economic policies of his first years in office. In the last budget tabled by his government he increased taxes on consumer durables and introduced fresh surcharges on air travel and luxury hotel bookings. At the same time, a new employment generation scheme was introduced for rural areas. With the elections beckoning, Rajiv Gandhi was ‘going back to the kind of populism that his mother specialized in’.73

  Finally, in the summerof1989, the government launched a series of high-profile events to celebrate the birth centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru. Seminars, photo exhibitions, TV quizzes, poetry festivals, musical concerts, even skating competitions, were held in Nehru’s name, all paid for by the state and publicized by state radio and television. On the face of it, these programmes merely honoured India’s first prime minister, but at another, more subconscious level, the blitz repeatedly and subtly whispers the real but hidden message: that there has been no better guardian of the nation than the Nehru family and letting the family down would, in the ultimate analysis, amount to spurning a sacred legacy and inviting the forces of chaos’.74

  Sti
ll, Rajiv Gandhi was leaving nothing to chance. In his campaign for re-election he addressed 170 meetings in different parts of the country. As in 1984, he was advised by Rediffusion to stress the threats to the country’s unity, stoked and furthered by a sectarian opposition and to be overcome by the Congress alone.75 This time, however, the message did not resonate nearly as widely. For one thing, the accusations of corruption had gravely hurt the government’s credibility. For another, the opposition was far better organized. The three main groupings had co-ordinated their strategy so that in most constituencies the Congress candidate faced only one main opponent – from either the National Front, the BJP, or one of the communist parties.

  The elections, held in November 1989, were a body blow to the Congress Party. They won only 197 seats, down more than 200 from their previous tally. On the other hand, the opposition couldn’t quite claim victory either. The Janata Dal won 142 seats, the BJP 86, and the left a few more than fifty. V. P. Singh was sworn in as head of a National Front government, with the left and the BJP choosing to support it from outside. Thus, the second non-Congress prime minister of India was someone who, like the first (Morarji Desai), had spent the bulk of his political career in the Congress Party.

  The general election of 1989 was the first in which no single party won a majority. That it constituted a watershed is not merely a retrospective reading; some observers had called it so at the time. ‘India was in for a period of political instability’, wrote Vir Sanghvi: ‘The days of strong governments ruled by dictatorial Prime Ministers were over. This election was the inauguration of an era of uncertainty.’ 76

  XI

  Even by the standards of Indian history, the 1980s were an especially turbulent decade. The republic had always been faced with dissenting movements; but never so many, at the same time, in so many parts of India, and expressed with such intensity. Two challenges were especially worrying: the continuing insurgency in Punjab – the first such in a state considered part of the heartland of India (unlike those old trouble spots Nagaland and Kashmir) – and the unprecedented mobilization of radical Hindus across the country, which threatened the identity of the secular state. Adding to the violence, major and minor, was the growing political and administrative corruption, this highlighted but also made more troubling by an alert press. Outside the country’s borders national prestige had been greatly damaged by the bloody nose given to the Indian army by the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

  In the summer of 1985 the Calcutta weekly Sunday, then at the height of its importance and influence, ran a cover story on the ‘uncontrollable wave of violence’ in the country. ‘Tension and frustration everywhere – social, economic and political’, said the weekly, was giving way to sporadic terror and mass protests’. ‘Acts of sabotage, arson, killings and destruction are breaking out all over India like an ugly rash.’ Thirty-seven years after Independence, ‘India finds itself at a crucial point in its history’.

  Posing the question ‘What is happening to the country and why?’, Sunday asked a roster of eminent Indians to answer it. The editor Romesh Thapar remarked that the violence and anger showed that ‘no one is in command at anylevel . . . [T]he fear is growing that we are moving beyond the point of no return, to use a phrase from the jargon of airline pilots. The breakdown is becoming too visible.’ The columnist Kuldip Nayar reproduced a series of newspaper headlines on riots and killings, these recording ‘trouble of varying intensity in areas thousands of miles apart’, the work of people who ‘for along time lived on the edge of disaster’ but whose ‘discontent seems [now] to have reached a bursting point’. The policeman K. F. Rustomji noted grimly that Indian politics and administration were now captive to the ‘fanatic and the demagogue’, who ‘claim the right to organise the deaths of thousands under the guise of democratic dissent’. ‘Forget the dead, count the votes, said Rustomji in a withering but not in accurate characterization of the political purpose of those fanatics and demagogues. Then he added, ‘In a few years even the votes may not be worth counting because we may have killed democracy by then.’77

  These were recurrent themes in the press commentary of the period: that India would break up into pieces, or give up on democracy altogether. Writing in April 1987, Sunday’s own political editor Kewal Verma issued this dire warning:

  If Rajiv Gandhi continues to slip and no alternative emerges (. . .none is in sight yet), it will lead to political destabilisation with disastrous consequences. For, Khalistan could become a reality. Already in the rural areas of Punjab, Sikh extremists are running a parallel administration. Also, the Rama Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue could lead to large-scale communal war in north India. A prolonged state of political uncertainty and instability would be an invitation to adventurous forces to intervene in the situation. For instance, if the President dismisses the Prime Minister, it may be [the Chief of Army Staff] Gen. Sundarji who will decide who should stay.78

  The writers quoted in this section were all Indians in their late fifties or early sixties, who had grown up in the warm glow of the Nehru years and remembered the hopes with which the new nation was forged. Their sentiments were no doubt coloured by nostalgia, at least some of which was merited. For the politicians of Nehru’s day had worked to contain social cleavages rather than deepen or further them for their own interests. But in other ways the nostalgia was perhaps misplaced. The churning – violent and costly though it undoubtedly was – could be more sympathetically read as a growing decentralization of the Indian polity, away from the hegemony of a single region (the north),a single party (the Congress), a single family (the Gandhis).

  One must reserve final comment on whether the gloom was really justified. For as the very many forecasts previously quoted in this book have shown, every decade since Independence had been designated the ‘most dangerous’ thus far. If there was a novelty about these latest predictions, it was merely that they came from Indians rather than foreigners.

  XII

  With the end of the present chapter, this book moves from ‘history’ to what might instead be called ‘historically informed journalism’. Part Five, which follows, deals with the events of the last two decades, that is, with processes still unfolding. Given our closeness to what is being written about, it adopts a thematic rather than chronological approach. To ground the narrative, however, each chapter starts with a prediction from the past that in some way anticipated the future.

  The author of a study of the Assam movement published in 1983 remarked that the book was ‘almost contemporary history and contemporary history will not have the logic, the neatness in understanding, the conformity to patterns, that the passage of years gives to things’.79 The author of a book on Operation Bluestar published in 1994 argued that a decade or so is perhaps the right amount of time to have elapsed before attempting to document contemporary history. It is also the time when one can indulge in the luxury of introspection because events have ceased to colour one’s judgement emotionally’.80

  Most official archives around the world follow a ‘thirty-year’ rule, keeping closed documents written during the past three decades. That seems just about right, for once thirty years have passed any new ‘disclosures’ are unlikely materially to affect the lives of those still living.

  In my experience, to write about events as a historian one also needs a generation’s distance. That much time must elapse before one can place those events in a pattern, to see them away and apart from the din and clamour of the present. Once roughly three decades have gone by, much more material is at hand – not just archives that are now open, but also memoirs, biographies and analytical works that have since been published.

  When writing about the very recent past one lacks the primary sources available for earlier periods. Besides, the historian is here writing about times that are close to him as well as his readers. He, and they, often have strong opinions about the politicians and policies of the day. In the chapters that follow I have tried to keep my own biases out of the narrat
ive, but my success in this respect may be limited – or at any rate, more limited than in other parts of the book. For these decades have been as rich in incident and controversy as any other time in the history of independent India.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  A HISTORY OF EVENTS

  26

  * * *

  RIGHTS

  In India you do not cast your vote; you vote your caste.

  V. N. GADGiL, Congress politician, 1995

  I

  IN THE SECOND WEEK of January 1957 India’s leading anthropologist addressed the annual Science Congress in Calcutta on the subject of ‘Caste in Modern India’. ‘My main aim in this address’, began M. N. Srinivas,

  is to marshal evidence before you to prove that in the last century or more, caste has become much more powerful in certain respects, than it ever was in pre-British times. Universal adult franchise and the provision of safeguards for backward groups in our Constitution have strengthened caste appreciably. The recent strengthening of caste contrasts with the aim of bringing about a ‘caste and classless society’ which most political parties, including the Indian National Congress, profess.

  Srinivas then went on to show how Indian politics was shot through with caste rivalries. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, one major peasant caste, the Kammas, usually supported the Communist Party of India (prompting the witticism that the party’s ideology was really ‘Kammanist’), whereas its rival Reddy caste backed the Congress. In neighbouring Mysore, where the Congress was in power, the Lingayats and Okkaligas fought for control of the party. In Maharashtra and Madras, the main axis of political conflict was Brahmin versus non-Brahmin. In Bihar, the landowning castes, Bhumihars and Rajputs, battled with the literate Kayasths for the top jobs in the Congress organization. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, where the lower castes were better organized, ‘the tussle between the Rajputs and Chamars for political power is likely to get keener in the near future’.