India

by John Keay

  Mrs Gandhi, and more especially her son Sanjay, made just this accusation, and to discredit the Akalis (literally the ‘Immortals’, otherwise the Akali Dal leaders) with their supporters, began to cultivate divisions within the Sikh community. In 1980 some Sikh students, disillusioned with the gradualism of the Akalis and backed by co-religionists in North America and the UK, actually articulated the demand for a sovereign, independent state. A new partition and a Bangladesh-like breakaway were envisaged. The state was to be called Khalistan and as president-in-waiting a London-based politician was chosen.

  Obviously no deal was possible with such outright secessionists. But there were other contenders. Already a radical young preacher of charismatic appeal was outbidding the Akali leaders in promoting a ‘fundamentalist’ version of Sikh doctrines without actually endorsing political independence. This was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, an Usama bin Laden prototype in both his apostolic appearance and his fierce dedication. Despite a reputation for inciting his followers to murder, it was he on whom Sanjay Gandhi and his henchmen in the central government allegedly pinned their hopes of denting the Akali Dal’s appeal and so shattering its hold on the body that controlled the Sikh places of worship and silencing its Anandpur Sahib demands.8

  Though the Akali-run state government was toppled in Mrs Gandhi’s 1980 digvijaya, its leaders proved more formidable in opposition than in government. One of them took up residence in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikh Mecca, there to organise and incite a campaign of protest while enjoying virtual sanctuary. Bhindranwale followed suit, occupying another part of the temple complex and apparently enjoying a free hand as he pursued his own bloody agenda of terrorising a rival Sikh sect, eliminating his critics and out-Sikhing the Akali Dal. The untimely demise of Sanjay Gandhi – he crashed while performing aerial stunts over New Delhi – made no difference. If anything Sanjay’s Panjab ‘policy’ acquired a momentum of its own as his mother became increasingly isolated in her grief. Meanwhile Bhindranwale operated with impunity, even immunity, disposing of opponents, robbing banks and inciting communal hatred. Though it boosted his following, it dismayed both Sikhs and non-Sikhs and increasingly panicked the state’s large Hindu minority.

  By 1984 Sanjay’s political stunt was judged to have stalled as spectacularly as his aerial acrobatics. Panjab was becoming ungovernable. Bhindranwale had thrown off New Delhi’s traces and was now warming to the idea of an independent Khalistan. Murders and other acts of intimidation attributable to his followers were becoming commonplace; his heavily armed guards infested a Golden Temple that was being brazenly fortified; and Hindus were being massacred just for being Hindus. Powerless and divided, the state government was replaced by President’s Rule, but to little effect. Of the ‘Million Mutinies Now’ chronicled in V. S. Naipaul’s 1980s Indian odyssey, the climactic one was that in the Panjab. Desperate to match Bhindranwale’s radical appeal, the Akali leaders upped the stakes by calling for mass strike action. They were duly arrested. But the bloodletting continued. With Bhindranwale designated a terrorist and the police unable to cope, Delhi’s only recourse was to tear a leaf from the manual of Pakistan’s politics and call in the army.

  Any comparison between Operation Bluestar, as the Indian army’s June 1984 assault on the Golden Temple was called, and Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani army’s 1971 action in East Bengal/Bangladesh, would be grossly misleading. The objective of Bluestar was simply to take out Bhindranwale and his henchmen. It was not directed against Sikhs in general, most of whom were appalled by Bhindranwale’s antics and supported the intervention. Yet such was the clumsy conduct of the assault, such the damage inflicted on the Sikhs’ revered sanctum by the use of tanks and artillery, and such the heroic resistance put up by the martyred Bhindranwale and his men – such too the death toll (officially around 500, unofficially over 3000, many of them non-combatant pilgrims) and the brutality of the subsequent crackdown – that Bluestar, like Searchlight, precipitated a greater crisis than it resolved. Now ‘the anger spread far beyond the orthodox and the Akalis’, noted Tully and Jacob in their first-hand account of the affair. Distinguished Sikhs with nothing but contempt for Bhindranwale handed back their medals and, in ‘the most serious crisis of discipline the Indian army had faced since Independence’, entire Sikh battalions mutinied. One actually marched on Amritsar from its barracks in distant Bihar.9

  While non-Sikhs largely applauded the action taken against terrorists who were mistakenly supposed to enjoy Pakistan’s backing, many Sikhs, not all of them Bhindranwale supporters, now saw his tirades against New Delhi and its anti-Sikh agenda as horribly prophetic. His martyrdom generated a cult of revenge and an atmosphere of intense suspicion. Yet, incredibly given the recent mutinies, Mrs Gandhi continued to entrust her safety to a heavily armed police detail that included Sikhs. When asked about the security risk, her dismissive ‘Are we not all secular?’ positively invited an emphatic response. It came on a bright October’s morning, four months after Bluestar, when Indira Gandhi, while crossing the garden of her New Delhi residence, was calmly greeted with raised weapons and a shower of bullets from the two Sikhs on guard duty. More executioners than assassins, both men then laid down their arms, claimed full responsibility for the murder and were themselves gunned down in custody. One survived to be later tried and hanged along with another accomplice. But in Panjab they were accounted martyrs to the Sikh cause, their dependants being fast-tracked to electoral success and parliamentary seats.

  No less predictable was the hostile reaction among non-Sikhs, especially in the capital. Reports of Sikhs in Panjab rejoicing at the demise of Mrs Gandhi excited a sense of national outrage and brought Hindu mobs on to the streets. Baying for revenge, they torched Sikh homes, massacred their turban-wearing occupants and desecrated Sikh places of worship. Meanwhile the police stood idly by. Political figures offered the mob incitement and rewards, officials circulated the electoral rolls that helped identify Sikh premises, the media afforded irresponsible coverage, and the government sat on its hands.10 Seemingly, when it was a question of protecting Sikhs, the army waited in vain for a summons to intervene. The hospitals overflowed; bodies littered roadways. In the three days following Mrs Gandhi’s assassination 2000–3000 Sikh men, women and children are believed to have perished at the hands of their fellow citizens. Worse still, a quarter of a century later and despite interminable inquiries, those officials who were allegedly responsible had yet to be prosecuted. In the mayhem of 1984 it was not only the horrors of Partition that had been reawakened but the still greater crime of state connivance in officially orchestrated violence. Mrs Gandhi’s ‘Aren’t we all secular?’ rang hollow.

  Sikh extremists would respond with more assassinations and with acts of indiscriminate slaughter like the suitcase bombing of the Air India jumbo. To his credit Rajiv Gandhi, himself a civil aviation pilot as well as Indira’s elder son and successor as prime minister, firmly rejected his brother Sanjay’s interventionism. Agreement was reached with a chastened Akali Dal, the Anandpur Sahib demands were watered down, the Khalistan advocates marginalised and, not without setbacks and a second occupation of the Golden Temple, peace eventually returned to Panjab. But the damage to India’s proud boast of not discriminating against any of its citizens on the grounds of religion remained. The nation’s secularism had been compromised. In an atmosphere of heightened communal tension, any incidents of religious conversion became headline news. Muslims closed ranks and increasingly looked to their co-religionists in the Gulf for reassurance, Sikhs and Christians likewise cultivated their overseas connections, and Hindu activists sensed a long-sought opportunity to assert their own conception of India as a Hindu nation. The floodgates of sectarian antipathy had been opened.

  23

  Midnight’s Grandchildren

  1984–

  COMETH THE KALASHNIKOV

  ALTHOUGH HISTORY, ‘THE essence of innumerable biographies’ according to Thomas Carlyle, ought to be about people, i
t mostly isn’t. Rather few individuals, many of them monsters, make the historians’ cut, leaving countless other lives, often well if obscurely lived, to be swept up like dust by the winds of policy and the gusts of war. Amid all the tallying of events and the telling of dramas the living get lost; humanity eludes one of the traditional humanities. To assert the obvious – that the past is packed with people and that people are not a collective agency but millions of individual individuals – it may take a narrative jolt, like a natural disaster or an unexpected twist of fate.

  For such visitations the third of the South Asian successor states has come to be something of a byword. Cyclones, floods and crop failures assail Bangladesh so frequently as to constitute a feature of its existence. Indeed the higher sea levels associated with accelerated climate change may actually imperil that existence. Beset by inundation, salination, upstream deforestation and seasonal desiccation, Bangladesh could provide a clue to the fate of another deltaic civilisation, that of Harappa with which this book began.

  Just when Bangladeshis think it safe to focus on party politics and GDP, along comes a new tsunami of human destitution to swamp the Dhaka agenda and tug at the foundations of the state. The government totters, NGOs take over more of its functions and the international aid agencies dig in deeper. Yet it is on these surges of distressed humanity that the world’s media seizes and it is from them that the most poignant accounts of individual tragedy and fortitude are culled. In the most densely populated country in the world each life asserts the right to be reckoned with.

  Elsewhere in South Asia such shock reminders are mercifully less frequent. But in the 1980s two events, one in Pakistan, the other in India, both of them catastrophic, did indeed gatecrash the national narratives and might well have derailed the political process. On 10 April 1988 residents in Rawalpindi and neighbouring Islamabad thought their cities were under surprise attack, presumably from India. Explosions rent the morning air, bombs and missiles rained down on densely packed housing, bullets whistled across playgrounds, and smoke and fire billowed into the sky. The resultant casualties ran into the thousands, with the killed in the hundreds. Official estimates tended to be more conservative only because it soon emerged that this was not in fact a hostile attack at all. An underground arsenal in nearby Ojhri, where US ordnance was being stockpiled for onward shipment to the mujahidin in Afghanistan, had mysteriously ignited.

  It could have been sabotage; more acceptably it was an accident. General Zia-ul-Haq took it for the latter and, holding his prime minister Mohamed Khan Junejo ultimately responsible, used it as a pretext to dismiss him. Junejo had lately betrayed ambivalence about the general’s programme of making Pakistan more Islamic, plus a worrying tendency to assert civilian interests. He had to go. Four months later Zia himself died in an aircrash. Again, it could have been an accident or sabotage. The facts would remain obscure because, in both cases, no government would ever see fit to release the findings of the official inquiries into them. Air crashes being an occupational hazard and Zia being little regretted, Pakistanis largely accepted this silence in the case of the general. But it was not so with the arms-dump explosion, especially when, years later, inquisitive schoolboys and incautious contractors were still being blown to bits by undetonated ordnance embedded in the subsoil by the Ojhri eruption.

  Earlier, in 1984, when the assassination of Mrs Gandhi and the retaliation wreaked on Delhi’s Sikh population were still hogging the headlines, far worse befell India. Again it was early morning; 3 December was another unremarkable day and the location another unfancied neighbourhood, this time in the Madhya Pradesh capital of Bhopal. Unlike Ojhri, there were no explosions and pyrotechnics to alert the still sleeping city to impending disaster, just a tangy fog. It eddied from a valve high on the rusting structure of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant and rolled down on to the adjacent sprawl of low-rise housing, stealing under clapboard doors and tracking up the roof timbers of one-room shacks. Those who awoke – those who didn’t never would – experienced a burning sensation in the throat and lungs and an excruciating eye pain that got worse as they fled, coughing, vomiting and dying. Much of the city closed down. The corpses lay unrecovered. It was like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Trains stood backed up on the nearby main line waiting for signals that never changed because the signalmen lay slumped over their levers after the first toxic whiff.

  The gas was 500 times more poisonous than that used in the First World War. Eight thousand men, women and children, most of them impoverished Muslims and ‘untouchable’ Dalits, died within 72 hours, while up to half a million sustained eye damage and internal injuries. Another 12,000 would later succumb to these injuries or to the effects of subsequent contamination. Miscarriages, abnormal births and deformed babies would continue down the generations. It was, and still is, ‘the worst industrial accident ever recorded’ – the worst clinically and then the worst judicially.

  Union Carbide claimed that it was not even an accident; because a disgruntled worker had supposedly sabotaged the plant, the company was not liable. However, accusations of staff cutbacks at the Bhopal plant, negligible maintenance, ignorance of safety procedures and environmental indifference – all of them attributable to corporate cost-cutting – were widely made. Cumulatively they constituted a damning account that seemed to guarantee redress when the Indian government, evading responsibility for its own regulatory failures, took up the case for compensation in the US courts. Yet five years later the government accepted a paltry settlement that precluded the chances of any further action and denied the now jobless victims anything more than a compensatory pittance. Union Carbide, and both its US parent company at the time and its subsequent owner Dow Chemicals, continue to deny responsibility. Meanwhile both the central government and the Madhya Pradesh government signally failed to ensure that the site was made safe, indeed were inclined to deny every report that it represented an ongoing hazard.

  Twenty-five years later the Bhopal survivors were still seeking redress by mounting pathetic protest marches and engaging the sympathy of the media. Despite the Indian economy now enjoying growth rates that were the envy of the world, despite the proliferating shopping malls and the info-tech billionaires, the provision of even uncontaminated drinking water could not be guaranteed to Bhopal’s despised survivors. Their individual tragedies as much as their collective plight may serve as a salutary reminder that lesser lives matter, that democratic formalities are no guarantee of accountablity and that economic miracles may be underwritten by rank discrimination and enduring levels of the most abject poverty.

  Ojhri and Bhopal also raised serious questions about the competence of South Asian states to handle technologies whose volatile nature called for sophisticated safeguards and responsible supervision. Although India had exploded an atomic device in 1974, it was not until 1998, ten years after Ojhri, that both New Delhi and Islamabad would euphorically celebrate the successful testing of battle-ready nuclear weapons. Yet by the late 1980s each was known to have developed or acquired the necessary know-how and materials and to be successfully testing delivery systems. Conducted in defiance of international pressure for non-proliferation, these programmes were vigorously condemned by the existing nuclear powers as inviting armageddon in an already chronically unstable region.

  But whether they in fact made the region more unstable or less so was debatable. The forty-year Cold War between the global superpowers had stayed cold for so long arguably because, with each capable of annihilating the other, neither had dared try. The same could be true of India and Pakistan, especially since, as neighbours, neither could be sure that the fall-out from its nuclear aggression would not affect its own citizens. Indeed it seemed possible that, where all else had failed, the bomb might be the catalyst to fast-freeze Partition once and for all. India saw its nuclear capability as marking its coming of age on the world stage and as a necessary deterrent to further invasion by its neighbours, China as much as Pakistan. Likewise Pakistan
saw its bomb as boosting its standing within the Islamic world and offsetting India’s superiority in conventional weapons, so discouraging any all-out offensive across its borders like those of 1965 and 1971. Both countries denied any hostile intent and undertook to discontinue testing, although they shied away from agreements on mutual disarmament (in the case of India) and on not being the first to use the nuclear option (in the case of Pakistan).

  In so far as no fourth Indo-Pak conflict has yet materialised, these arguments may stand. Yet each of them also had implications for Kashmir. In the light of a potential nuclear holocaust, the international community would be more inclined to resume its efforts to broker a Kashmir settlement; a nuclear-armed India felt more confident about pressing ahead with the integration of Kashmir regardless of Pakistani objections; and beneath its own nuclear umbrella Pakistan felt free to train and arm Kashmiri militants and launch low-level interventions without fear of a disproportionate retaliation.