India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In the last week of June the American President, Bill Clinton, received an unexpected phone call from the Pakistani prime minister. The two countries were close allies, and now the junior partner was asking to be bailed out of a jam of its own creation. More than 2,000 Pakistanis had already lost their lives in the conflict, and Nawaz Sharif was in search of a face-saving device to allow him to end hostilities. Clinton granted him an appointment on 4 July, American Independence Day. In that meeting Sharif promised to withdraw Pakistani troops if America would put pressure on India to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Clinton agreed to take an ‘active interest’ in the question. With this assurance, Sharif returned to Islamabad and formally called off the operation.33

  Approximately 500 Indian soldiers died in the Kargil conflict. They came from all parts of the country, and when their coffins returned home the grief on display was mixed with a large dose of pride. The bodies were kept in public places – schools, colleges, even stadiums – where friends, family and fellow townsmen came to pay their last (and often first) respects. A cremation or burial with full military honours followed, this attended by thousands of mourners and presided over by the most important dignitary on hand – often a state chief minister or governor. The men being honoured included both officers and soldiers. Many hailed from the traditional catchment area of the Indian army (the north and the west of the country), but many others were born in places not previously known for their martial traditions, such as Ganjam in Orissa and Tumkur in Karnataka.34 And some who died defending India came from regions long thought to be at odds with the very idea of India. A particularly critical role in recapturing the Kargil peaks was played by soldiers of the Naga regiment. Their valour at the other end of the Himalaya, hoped one army general, would allow the ‘brave Nagas [to] finally get their Indian identity’. Their bravery was certainly saluted by their kinsmen; when the body of a Naga lieutenant was returned home to Kohima, thousands thronged the airport to receive it.35

  The Kargil clashes also furthered the reintegration of the Punjab and the Punjabis. Farmers along the border insisted that if the conflict were to become a full-fledged war, they would be at hand to assist the Indian army, providing food and shelter and even, if required, military help. ‘We shall fight with the jawans’, said one Sikh peasant, ‘and teach the Pakistanis a bitter lesson for violating our territory.’36

  Across India the conflict with Pakistan unleashed a surge of patriotic sentiment. Thousands volunteered to join the lads on the front, so many in fact that in several places the police had to fire to disperse crowds surrounding army recruitment centres.37 The war with China had likewise fuelled a similar response, with unemployed youth seeking to join the forces. Yet there was a significant difference. On that occasion, the intruders had overrun thousands of square miles before choosing on their own to return. This time they had been successfully thrown out by the use of force.

  In this respect the Kargil war was a sort of cathartic experience for the men in uniform and, beyond that, for their compatriots as a whole. The Indian army had finally redeemed itself. It had removed, once and for all, the stigma of having failed to repulse the Chinese in 1962. At the same time the popular response to the conflict bore witness to the birth of a new and more assertive kind of Indian nationalism. Never before had bodies of soldiers killed in battle been greeted with such an effusion of sentiment. It appeared as if each district was determined to make public its own contribution to the national cause. The mood was acknowledged and stoked further by reporters in print and on television, whose competitive jingoism was surprising even to those familiar with that profession’s hoary record of making truth the first casualty of war.

  VII

  In October 1999, Pakistan’s brief flirtation with parliamentary democracy ended. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deposed in a coup led by the chief of army staff, Pervez Musharraf. The Indians were not best pleased with these developments; for it was Musharraf who was believed to have masterminded the Kargil operations.

  In March 2000 President Clinton visited South Asia. He spent five days in India and five hours in Pakistan, in a historic reversal of the traditional American bias towards the smaller country. This was an acknowledgement of India’s rising economic strength, but also a chastisement of Pakistan’s return to military rule. The day after Clinton landed in New Delhi, terrorists dressed in Indian army uniforms descended upon the village of Chittisinghpora in Kashmir, pulled out Sikh men from their homes and shot them. In a village of 300 homes, ‘nearly every house ha[d] lost a relative, neighbour, or friend’. The tragedy was compounded when the security forces shot five men they claimed had committed the crime, but who were later found to be innocent.38

  The Chittisinghpora killers were probably freelancers who did not have the sanction of the Pakistani government.39 Still, there was little question that it was the Kashmir issue which continued to divide the two nations most deeply. President Musharraf issued periodic reminders of Pakistan’s undying commitment to the ‘liberation struggle’ of the Kashmiris. The Indian prime minister chastised his counterpart for adhering to the ‘pernicious two-nation theory that brought about the partition’.40

  Neither country was prepared to accept the other’s position on Kashmir. However, a dialogue was recommenced, this motivated perhaps by the need to act as responsible nuclear powers in the eyes of the world. In July 2001 President Musharraf visited Agra at the invitation of the Indian government. He and his wife were put up in a luxury hotel overlooking the Taj Mahal. The general and Vajpayee talked for long hours, with and without aides. The meeting ended inconclusively, when a draft communiqué left both sides dissatisfied, India wanting a greater emphasis to be placed on stamping out cross-border terrorism and Pakistan asking for a more explicit acknowledgement of the democratic aspirations of the Kashmiri people.

  While General Musharraf was in Agra terrorists struck again in the Valley. In a dozen separate attacks at least eighty people were killed. This was becoming a pattern – whenever important dignitaries visited New Delhi the violence in Kashmir would escalate. When the US Secretary of State Colin Powell came in October 2001, terrorists launched a grenade assault on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly. Two months later they undertook an even more daring action. Four suicide bombers entered the Indian Parliament in a car and attempted to blow it up. They were killed by the police, who later identified them as Pakistanis.41

  The assembly building in Srinagar was a symbol of the state’s integration with India. The Parliament building in New Delhi was the symbol of Indian democracy itself. Within its portals met elected politicians representing a billion people. The attacks on these two places brought an end to the diplomatic dialogue. India accused Pakistan of abetting the terrorists. Appeals were made to the US government to rein in its old ally. While sympathizing with America after the incidents of September 11 2001, India added that their sympathy was made the more sincere by the fact that they had long been victims of terrorist violence themselves.

  In the spring of 2002 exchanges between Indian and Pakistani troops became more frequent. As spring turned to summer, and the troop build-up intensified, the concerns of 1998 returned – would the subcontinent be witness to the first ever nuclear exchange? A respected Nepali monthly thought that the region was ‘poised on the cusp of war once again’. A leading American analyst believed that ‘the crisis between India and Pakistan is the most dangerous confrontation since Soviet ships steamed towards the US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962’.42

  In the end, war was averted, although perhaps it had never even been planned. Within India attention shifted to the coming assembly elections in Kashmir. The state had, as a Delhi newspaper bluntly put it, a ‘long history of rigged elections’, the polls of 1977 being the exception to the rule.43 In the past the Election Commission had, in Kashmir at any rate, ‘always appeared to be in the company of, and therefore in collaboration with, security forces and partisan state government functionaries’. Now it worked overtime t
o redeem its reputation. The chief election commissioner ordered a complete revision of the voters’ list, which was unchanged since 1988. An extensive survey of all houses led to a new, comprehensive roll, covering 350,000 pages in the elegant but hard-to-print Urdu script. Copies of the electoral rolls were then distributed to all political parties and displayed in schools, hospitals and government offices across the state. A further precaution was the import of 8,000 electronic voting machines, to prevent booth-capturing and rigging.44

  The assembly elections were held in September 2002. The militants killed a prominent moderate just before the polls, and urged the public to boycott them. Despite these threats, some 48 per cent of Kashmiris turned out to vote, somewhat less than was usual in other parts of India, but far in excess of what had been anticipated. International observers were at hand to confirm that the polls were fair. The ruling National Conference was voted out of power; the winners were an alliance comprising the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party. The 2002 Jammu and Kashmir election, wrote two longtime students of the state’s politics, could ‘be seen as a reversal of [the] 1987 assembly elections which by eroding the democratic space had become [the] catalyst for separatist politics . . . This election has brought about a change in the regime through the popular verdict and to that extent it has become instrumental in providing a linkage between the people and the government.’45 The new chief minister, Mufti Mohammed Saeed, expressed these sentiments more crisply when he remarked that ‘this is the first time since 1953 that India has acquired legitimacy in the eyes of the [Kashmiri] people’.46

  In the summer of 2003 tourists from other parts of India flocked to Kashmir for the first time in more than a decade. Fifty thousand pleasure-seekers came in the months of May and June, filling hotels across the Valley and houseboats on Srinagar’s Dal Lake. Indian Airlines announced an extra daily flight from Delhi to Srinagar. Provoked by these developments, terrorists launched a series of strikes, throwing grenades in shopping centres, kidnapping civilians, suicide-bombing the chief minister’s house.47 But even more tourists came the next year, and more airlines announced flights to Srinagar.

  In January 2005 civic polls were held in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in almost three decades. A handsome 60 per cent of voters cast their ballots in these local elections, despite intimidating threats by terrorists and the assassination of several candidates. Those who voted said they wanted the new councillors to provide new roads, clean water and better sanitation. A shopkeeper in the town of Sopore – a stronghold of pro-Pakistani militants – was quoted as saying, ‘We can’t wait for civic amenities till azaadi [independence]’.48

  According to official figures, the number of ‘violent incidents’ in Jammu and Kashmir decreased from 3,505 in 2,002 to less than 2,000 in 2005.49 The state could by no means be said to be at peace. But, for the first time in many years, the claim of the Indian government over this territory did not seem altogether hollow. In talks with Pakistan, New Delhi could urge a series of ‘confidence-building measures’, such as a bus service linking the two halves of Kashmir. The first bus was scheduled to leave from Srinagar for Muzaffarabad on 7 April 2005. On the afternoon of the 6th, terrorists stormed the tourist complex where the passengers were staying. They were repulsed, and the next day two buses left as planned. A reporter who travelled on one of the vehicles wrote of how, when it crossed the newly built Aman Setu (Peace Bridge) and entered Pakistani territory, ‘divided families were reunited, tears and rose petals flecked their faces. The significance of this extraordinary moment lay perhaps in the ordinariness of the backdrop: two buses with 49 passengers had crossed over – and blurred a line that has divided Kashmir for over five decades in blood and prejudice.’50

  There were, however, some who would rather that the prejudice persisted and the blood continue to be spilt. On 11 July 2006 there were two terrorist attacks on tourists in Kashmir. Eight Bengali visitors were killed. On the same day deadly bombs went off simultaneously in seven different commuter trains in Mumbai (as Bombay had become known). The toll here was far higher – with more than 200 innocent civilians killed, and more than 1,000 injured. It was one of the worst terrorist incidents in history. While the perpetrators remain to be identified, their aims needed no clarification – these were to pit Hindu against Muslim, Kashmir against the rest of India, and India against Pakistan.

  VIII

  The great German sociologist Max Weber once remarked that ‘there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives “for” politics or one lives “off” it’.51 The first generation of Indian leaders lived mostly for politics. They were attracted by the authority they wielded, but also often motivated by a spirit of service and sacrifice. The current generation of Indian politicians, however, are more likely to enter politics to live off it. They are attracted by the power and prestige it offers, and also by the opportunities for financial reward. Control over the state machinery, they know, can bestow glittering prizes upon those in charge.

  Political corruption was not unknown in the 1950s, as the cases of the Mundhra scandal and the Kairon administration in the Punjab demonstrate. But it was restricted. Most members of Nehru’s Cabinet, and even Shastri’s, did not abuse their position for monetary gain. Some Congress bosses did, however, gather money for the party from the business sector. In the 1970s politicians began demanding a commission when contracting arms deals with foreign suppliers. The money – or most of it – went into the party’s coffers to be used in the next elections. By the 1980s, however, political corruption had shifted from the institutional to the personal level – thus an increasing number of ministers at the centre and in the states were making money from government contracts, from postings of officials and by sundry other means.

  The evidence of political corruption is, by its very nature, anecdotal rather than documentary. Those who take or give commissions rarely leave a paper trail. However, in the 1990s the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) laid charges against a number of prominent politicians for having assets ‘disproportionate’ to their position. The leaders so charged included the chief ministers of Bihar and Tamil Nadu, Lalu Prasad Yadav and J. Jayalalithaa. Each was accused of amassing hundreds of millions of rupees from the allocation of government contracts. In another case, the CBI raided the house of Sukh Ram, the Union minister for communications, and found Rs36 million in cash. It was alleged that this represented the commission on licences awarded to private telecom companies.

  In all these cases the charges were not converted into convictions, sometimes because of lack of evidence, at other times because of the timidity of the judiciary. There is also a sense of honour among thieves. In the run-up to an election the Opposition makes a hue and cry about corruption in the ruling administration, but if it is elected it does not pursue cases against the previous regime, trusting that it will be similarly rewarded when it loses power.52 Indeed, politicians from different parties and different states often exchange favours. In one documented case, a Haryana chief minister sanctioned the sale of a plot of public land to the son of a Punjab chief minister – while the market value of the land was Rs500 million, the price actually paid was Rs25 million.53

  In the words of the political scientist Peter deSouza, corruption is Indian democracy’s ‘inconvenient fact’. Governments in power in New Delhi take kickbacks on purchases from abroad, on defence deals especially. The cut taken on foreign contracts is in the region of 20 per cent. In most states the majority of ministers are on the take, skimming money off licences to companies, postings of top officers, land deals and much else. The Planning Commission estimates that 70–90 per cent of rural development funds are siphoned off by a web extending up from the panchayat head to the local MP, with officials too claiming their share. One reason that city roads are in such poor shape is that the much of the money allocated to them is spent elsewhere. Of every 100 rupees allocated to road building by the Bangalore City Corporation, for example, 40 go into the pock
ets of politicians and officials with another 20 being the contractor’s profit margin. Only 40 rupees are spent on the job, which is done either badly or not at all.54

  Because being in power is so profitable, there is now an increasing trade in politicians. To makeup the numbers and obtain a majority, legislators are bought and sold for a (usually high) price. In the era of minority and coalition governments the trade is especially brisk. Legislators routinely cross the floor and change parties. This has become so common that, in times of political instability, it is not unknown for the MLAs of a particular party to be taken en masse for a ‘holiday’ in Goa, lest they defect to the other side. Here these men – sometimes up to fifty of them – are kept in a hotel, drinking and playing cards, while armed guards watch out for furtive phone calls or unknown visitors. The holiday extends until the crisis has passed, which could take several weeks.

  Because politics is such good business, it has also become a dirty business. In 1985 the weekly Sunday ran a cover story on ‘The Underworld of Indian Politics’, which spoke of how, in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar especially, candidates with criminal records were contesting elections, sometimes winning them, and sometimes being made ministers as well. Among the crimes these men were charged with were ‘murder, abduction, rape, molestation, gangsterism’.55 Over the next decade a greater number of criminals entered politics, so many in fact that a citizens group filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court demanding that parties release details of their candidates. In May 2002 the Court made it mandatory for those contesting state or national elections to make public their assets and their criminal record (if any).