The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  State security forces begin to chip away at the guerrillas. One by one, senior leaders are killed or imprisoned. In 2010, the Maoists’ national spokesman, who goes by the name Commander Azad (Commander Freedom), is shot dead by police. In 2011, security forces kill Kishenji. His real name is Mallojula Koteshwara Rao; he is a Brahmin and a law school dropout.

  By this time, the senior leaders who are still at large are believed to be staying deep inside in the Abujmarh hills, where the orphan named Manher lost his hearing. Many rank-and-file cadres are killed on the battlefield. Some surrender. Big, dramatic Maoist attacks become less and less frequent.

  The Maoist message may have lost its urgency for now—or maybe forever. But something else could tap into the well of anger just as easily. More important is whether the Indian state will heed the demands of young people in the parched hamlets where the Maoists have flourished all these years. No longer is the idea of democracy just topsoil.

  STRONGMAN

  Aspiration Gets into Politics

  There are moments that shape the political outlook of a generation, and sometimes its moral compass as well. Had my parents been Americans, theirs might have been the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. For me, growing up in the United States, it was the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, culminating with Nelson Mandela’s release from jail in 1990. For many of my contemporaries in India, it was the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, culminating in 1992 with the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque by a group of militant Hindus. If you were my age and growing up in India, chances are the Ram Janmabhoomi movement shaped what kind of future you imagined for your country. It was your fork in the road.

  At the crux of this movement was an item of faith. Since independence, a Hindu militant group that called itself the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had agitated for the right to erect a Hindu temple on the grounds of the mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya.1 They believed that India’s first Mughal emperor, Babur, had erected that mosque on the very site that marked the birthplace of Ram, the protagonist of the epic Ramayana and one of the most revered gods of the Hindu pantheon. They wished to build a temple to mark it (the name of their campaign, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, referred literally to the birthplace of Ram). It had proved to be a potent organizing issue for the Sangh for more than half a century.

  The first flashpoint in independent India came one night in 1949. Small statues, including one that represented the infant Ram, mysteriously appeared inside the Babri Masjid complex. Hindu supporters called it a miracle; Muslims were chagrined.

  No wonder. It was a symbolic, emotionally charged issue for a country born out of a spasm of Hindu–Muslim violence, and it turned the Babri Masjid into something akin to the disputed Temple Mount in the old city of Jerusalem. Hindus are by far the majority faith in India, but since its birth, India had promised to be a secular nation and protect its minorities; Muslims are its largest religious minority.

  The Ram temple movement reached its peak in the winter of 1992. Supporters of the Sangh marched thousands of miles, from the south to the north, chanting Ram’s name. On the morning of December 6, they arrived in Ayodhya. As politicians gave fiery speeches, their foot soldiers climbed on top of the Babri Masjid domes, pounding with hammers and bare hands, until pieces of it came tumbling down.

  When the news trickled out, as an Indian, either you were horrified (How could they destroy a house of worship in a country that had been founded on the principle of respect for all faiths?) or you felt your chest rise (No longer did Hindus have to make concessions to minority Muslims). After December 6, 1992, it was permissible to talk openly about a Hindu nation. A contemporary of mine, growing up in Delhi, remembered it as the first time she heard otherwise polite Hindus maligning Muslims in public conversation.

  Shashi was eighteen years old then, a college student at home in Hyderabad for winter break. That day was as seminal for him as it would have been for me, had I grown up in India. Shashi and I belong to roughly the same generation; we are equally interested in the generation that follows.

  Shashi’s upbringing was different from mine. His father was a life-long activist with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was raised on the Sangh’s convictions, which regarded Hindu civilization to have been beaten down for centuries by Islam and Christianity and, more recently, corrupted by Western modernity. The Sangh was keen to groom young Hindu men to defend it from onslaught. Shashi attended its training camps from a young age.2

  What relief, Shashi remembers thinking when he heard that the Sangh’s followers had finally begun to chip away at the Babri Masjid—but also feeling a sense of dread at the Hindu–Muslim violence that followed in cities across the land. Not least, he found himself wondering: Now what? How would the Hindu nationalists that his family championed actually build the country?

  The storming of the Babri Masjid would be a watershed for the Sangh. Its political affiliate, the Bharatiya Janata Party, would use the Ram temple movement as its principal campaign issue and, with it, win state and national elections throughout the 1990s.

  It would be a crucial moment too in Shashi’s political coming-of-age. He would soon graduate from the IIT campus in Mumbai, get a job in India’s nascent technology industry, and move to Texas like so many Indian techies. But he would not abandon the Sangh. He would return home twenty years later to advance the ambitions of a man who had helped organize that 1992 march for the Ram temple and then proceeded to ascend the ladders of the Sangh to become one of India’s most successful—and certainly most polarizing—politician: Narendra Modi, or NaMo to his fans.

  The value of India’s youth bulge was not lost to either of them. By 2014, nearly half of the electorate was under the age of thirty-five. They had come of age in the period since the economy creaked open in the early 1990s. They were hungry and impatient.

  For this generation, Modi reckoned, the temple was no more the political lodestar. Religion mattered to them, but it wasn’t quite the flashpoint it had been once. This generation, Modi was convinced, wanted politicians who could deliver. They wanted jobs. They wanted prosperity. They wanted a tough, muscular India. Shashi began to refer to them as “aspirational Indians,” and he knew he was in a position to help Modi win their votes.

  And so, in 2012, a full two years before the next national election, in a nondescript office above a lunch counter that served crispy, fresh-off-the-griddle dosas in Bangalore, Shashi and a half-dozen Modi backers launched a political start-up the likes of which had never before been tried in India. It was privately funded. It was independent of the political party to which Modi belonged. Its goal was to use the power of the Internet to make Modi the next prime minister of India—and to do so by retooling the grievances and wants of political Hinduism for an impatient, aspirational generation.

  Modi turned the narrative of aspiration into the dominant political meme of the 2014 election. And it led to a historic victory. His Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, scooped up an absolute majority in the 543-seat lower house of parliament, which meant that for the first time in decades, one single party could form a government without having to link arms with smaller regional and caste-based political parties. Modi needed no coalition partners, which also meant that he needed to make fewer political compromises than his predecessors.

  “Mind-blowing,” Shashi said the morning after the election results were announced.

  Shashi is not one of noonday’s children, but like me, he too had been looking over his shoulder to study them and to win them over, fully aware of how important they were to lifting his candidate to power—and also, how demanding. He understood that his efforts would not be aimed at winning one election to a five-year term. He understood that he would have to be in the long game, because his man, NaMo, was determined to be in the long game—to be in charge for a decade, or more.

  And yet, to turn his country’s demographic shift into a meaningful political dividend, Shashi also knew he had to keep his eyes
squarely on an entirely different kind of political storm—one that captured the imagination of millions of young Indians who were not so sold on Modi, who had found their own voice (mainly on the Internet), and who imagined a new politics for their country. One of those scrappy idealists was a slight, stubborn young man from Bihar named Ankit: a child of noonday. More on him soon.

  On November 25, 1949, just months before the Indian constitution went into effect, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Constitution’s principal architect and a future law minister, delivered his last speech to the Constituent Assembly. The historian Ramachandra Guha says the speech contained “prophetic warnings” about what could happen to India’s experiment in democracy unless radical reforms were made fast. India would face a dangerous contradiction: Its citizens would enjoy political equality—one person, one vote—even as they remained intensely unequal in everyday affairs.

  “How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?” Ambedkar asked. “If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”3

  Remarkably for a country so deeply unequal, the Constitution promised everyone the right to vote, regardless of caste, creed, or gender. It made it illegal to practice the custom of untouchability. To redress centuries of subjugation, it set aside government jobs for Dalits and adivasis—quotas that were extended later to intermediary castes officially called “backward.” In other words, the promise of free India was to radically transform a poor and stratified society into one where all its citizens, regardless of their station at birth, could have a shot at improving their lot. This was to be the end of karma; no more would the deeds of your past life dictate who you could be.

  For generations of India’s lawmakers, the challenge has been to do this through a democratic system, which by definition resists radical transformation.

  When Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, took over as prime minister in 1966, she immediately recognized the political utility of social transformation. She courted the rural poor, who at the time made up the lion’s share of voters. She announced ambitious land reforms, nationalized banks, and ordered financial institutions to serve in remote, underserved areas. She kneecapped the maharajahs, with a constitutional amendment that declared monarchy to be “incompatible with an egalitarian social order.”4

  Her grandson Rahul Gandhi was a baby when she won reelection in 1971 on a campaign manifesto of “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty), along with the latest ambitious five-year plan to accelerate economic growth. Reality quickly got in the way. The rains didn’t come in 1972. The drought forced India to import thirty-three thousand metric tons of food aid from the United States, after the Agency for International Development concluded that “millions of people were faced with near famine conditions.”5 The drought was all the more crippling for the humiliation it heaped on a nation that had promised its people self-reliance.

  Mrs. Gandhi’s troubles worsened. By 1974, inflation soared to nearly 30 percent. Cooking oil fell in short supply. The commercial capital, Bombay, erupted in industrial unrest. The middle class that my parents were a part of started to feel the pinch (this is when Baba got tired of hustling for cooking gas and Horlicks). For the first time in Calcutta, you thought twice about staying out late. You worried about street crime as well as political violence. Federal police rumbled down the streets in open-air trucks, guarding against unruly demonstrations. Reports of corruption fueled public anger. Opposition to Mrs. Gandhi’s regime mounted across the country, as new political opponents from the socialist left joined her longtime right-wing rivals from the Sangh. Both sides sought to oust Congress, which had ruled India since independence, and in particular Mrs. Gandhi.6

  At the height of the summer of 1975 came a devastating blow to her dominion. A court concluded that she had employed illegal tactics to get herself reelected in the parliamentary election—and ordered her to give up her seat. She had no intention of doing so. On June 25, 1975, Mrs. Gandhi persuaded a pliant president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, to issue a declaration of emergency, citing “internal disturbance.” It was understood then—and still is—that this was Mrs. Gandhi’s fiat. The president was carrying out her wishes.

  That summer, my parents began to pack for our departure from Calcutta. The piano was put up for sale; a teak cabinet moved to my grandmother’s house; a silver tea set locked up, as well as a set of lime-green custard bowls and stacks of cotton saris, which would serve no use in Canada. My parents, improbably it seems in hindsight, said they intended to come back.

  Mrs. Gandhi claimed she had little choice but to declare emergency rule. In her view, the stability of the country was at stake. “The state of emergency was proclaimed because the threat of disruption was clear and imminent,” she told the Saturday Review in a remarkable interview in August 1975. She called the Sangh “sinister.”7

  “I do not believe that a democratic society cannot take strong measures to deal with its foes, from within or without,” she went on.

  Mrs. Gandhi banned the Sangh. Shashi’s father, a lifelong Sangh activist but also an employee of a state-owned company, burned Sangh literature in the boiler of their home. To have it lying around at home was to risk being arrested. At the time, Modi was a full-time organizer with the Sangh; he went underground to evade arrest. Several of Mrs. Gandhi’s political rivals were picked up and detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act. Civil servants were told to meet sterilization targets to check what was considered a perilous population boom. Those who appreciated Mrs. Gandhi’s iron hand pointed out that government workers began showing up to work on time.

  My aunt in Delhi made sure to hang a black-and-white portrait of Mrs. G. in the living room. Her husband worked for the government, and the prime minister’s portrait was visible from the front gate.

  Censorship laws were promulgated. In defiance, some newspaper editors left blank spaces on the front pages of their publications to signal the news that had been gagged. The Washington Post’s resident correspondent in India was expelled.8 The New York Times resident correspondent deftly took over the lease of the Post’s sprawling bungalow, the same one that I would come to occupy thirty years later.

  The emergency did not serve Mrs. Gandhi well. In 1977, when she lifted it and India held fresh elections, she and her Congress party were crushed.

  Morarji Desai—he who had boasted of urine-drinking on 60 Minutes during my California childhood—became prime minister. In a burst of populism, he forced Coca-Cola to pull out of India and drew the Indian state into the soda business. The resulting Indian cola was called Double Seven, in homage to ’77, the year democracy returned. The news came to us on a gossamer blue, thrice-folded aerogram.

  The Sangh could once more print its books. It could reopen its shakhas, and so Shashi’s father made sure the boy went to those morning camps before he was old enough to go to school. Shashi dressed in the requisite khaki shorts and white short-sleeved, button-down shirt. He learned to march, military style. He sang Hindu bhajans. He learned about that mosque in Ayodhya, where Ram was born, and why Hindus should build a temple there. The Sangh believed in the grandeur of Hindu civilization and that all Indians, even if they were Muslims or Christian, were really Hindus at heart. The Sangh believed that Hindus had not been strong enough to protect their nation. The Sangh considered their country—they preferred the Sanskrit name Bharat over India—to extend to the countries we now know as South Asia, including India’s neighbors. “Bharat Mata ki Jai,” they chanted. Victory to Mother India.

  There is no holy book in Hinduism, as there is in the Abrahamic faiths. So there is no opportunity for a literal, or fundamental, reading of a religious text, as there is among, say, Christian or Muslim fundamentalists. The Sangh has a distinctly political philo
sophy. It deploys religion to mobilize its ranks. Among its chief convictions is the notion that Hinduism has been under assault for centuries in part because Hindus have been too pliant—and that since independence, the Congress party (the Sangh’s political nemesis) has made too many concessions to religious minorities. If Nehru saw India as a modern republic, proud of its many cultures and beliefs, the Sangh sought to restore what it saw as an ancient Hindu nation. It sought to abolish beef eating and revise school textbooks to reflect its view of history. It made a push into the adivasi belt, where many people, like Mani, had embraced Christianity long ago; Sangh supporters wanted them to convert to Hinduism. There was a spate of attacks on churches.

  The march for a Ram temple at the Babri Masjid site proved to be a powerful organizing tool for the Sangh, enabling its affiliated Bharatiya Janata Party to lead a coalition government for a six-year period starting in 1998.

  Like others of my generation, Shashi was not shaped just by the Ram temple movement. He was also shaped by the political campaign to extend affirmative action quotas to people who were classified as “backward” (like Anupam and his family). Upper-caste Indians—Shashi was born to a Brahmin family, the highest perch on the Hindu caste ladder—were generally revolted by the idea that a greater number of seats would be set aside on the basis of caste. It meant a shrinking share of spots for “forward” caste students in government universities and jobs. Shashi threw himself into those protests. He and his college friends once hijacked a truck in Mumbai and went around the city shutting down campuses. “We were crazy” is how he recalled it many years later.

  In college, he says, he recognized how hard some of the “quota” students had worked to get to where they were. He became friends with some of them. Eventually, he dropped his identifiably Brahmin surname, at least when it came to his political activities. There, it didn’t help to flaunt Brahmin credentials. In politics, the upper castes no longer ruled.