India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  This animosity and hatred was perhaps not unexpected. For the jihadis, India was the land of the kafirs, or unbelievers. But as it happened their wrath was being visited on some co-religionists as well. There were killings of activists from the National Conference, which wanted autonomy within India, of the JKLF, which wanted independence rather than merger with Pakistan, and of the People’s Conference, which advocated non-violence.44 The fundamentalists also came down hard on the pleasures of the people. Cinema halls and video parlours were closed, and drinking and smoking banned. Militant groups distributed leaflets ordering women to cover themselves from head to toe by wearing the long black veil, or burqa. The burqa was contrary to Kashmiri custom – here many women did not even wear headscarves. Besides, they cost Rs2,000 a piece. Cynics suggested that tailors and cloth merchants were behind the move. There were, withal, savage attempts to enforce the ban, with acid being thrown on women who disregarded it.45

  The main target of fundamentalist ire, however, was the Indian state and its symbols. Scarcely a week passed without a suicide attack on an army post or police camp, to stop or stem which even more troops were moved into the Valley. There were now bunkers on every street corner in Srinagar. The Indian army had become ‘an imposing and ubiquitous presence’ in Kashmir, a ‘parallel government’ even. It was charged not merely with the maintenance of law and order, but also with running hospitals, airports, bus stations and tourist centres. The state government had abdicated most of its duties. By 1995 or thereabouts, there were only two functioning institutions in Kashmir – the Indian army on the one side and the network of jihadi groups on the other.46

  As the Valley came to resemble a zone of occupation, popular sentiment rallied to the jihadi cause. Terrorists mingled easily with the locals, and were given refuge before or after their actions. When their men were killed in bomb attacks, the reprisals of the Indian security forces could be murderous. Soldiers dropped in unannounced in remote villages, searching for terrorists – when they did not find them, they beat up the peasants instead. A large number of custodial deaths were also reported.

  The costs of this apparently unending war were colossal. According to government figures, between January 1990 and August 2001 some 12,000 civilians died unnatural deaths – three-quarters at the hands of militants, the rest in the cross-fire. Security forces claimed to have killed 13,400 militants, while losing 3,100 of their own. Given the low population densities, so many deaths in Kashmir was the equivalent of 4million Indians being killed in the country as a whole.47 The casualties were spread all across this lovely if increasingly desolate Valley. However, they were mostly of young men, of Kashmiris who came of age in this cursed decade. The journalist Muzamil Jaleel, who almost became a militant himself, later visited a graveyard near his native village, where he found twenty-one tombstones recording the deaths of his friends and classmates.48

  As James Buchan has written, in the years since 1990,

  the Kashmiri Muslims and the Indian government conspired to abolish the complexities of Kashmiri civilization. The world [it] inhabited has vanished: the state government and the political class, the rule of law, almost all the . . . Hindu inhabitants of the valley, alcohol, cinemas, cricket matches, picnics by moonlight in the saffron fields, schools, universities, an independent press, tourists and . . .banks. In this reduction of civilian reality, the sights of Kashmir . . . are redefined: not the . . .lakes and Mogul gardens . . . or the storied triumphs of Kashmiri agriculture, handicrafts and cookery, but two entities that confront each other without intermediary: the mosque and the army camp.49

  Throughout the 1990s, as Hindu fundamentalism gathered strength in the rest of India, Islamic fundamentalism was on the ascendant in Kashmir. The two processes began independently, yet each legitimized and furthered the other. With every communal riot sparked by the Ayodhya movement, radicals in the Valley could more easily portray India as a state run for and by Hindus. With every killing of innocent civilians or Indian soldiers in the Valley, the RSS could point to the hand of Pakistan in fomenting trouble within India. There were two critical events that, as it were, defined this epoch of competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Would one trust a state that could not honour its commitment to protect an ancient place of worship? Would one trust a community that so brutally expelled those of a different faith? Such questions resonated across the subcontinent, asked by countless Indians not previously known to think along lines of religion and faith.

  VII

  After the Babri Masjid came down, Hindu radicals hoped to build a grand temple in its place. Architects were commissioned to design an edifice in marble, and craftsmen engaged to cut the stone and polish it. However, the site itself remained in the custody of the state. Cases were being heard in the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court, to decide whether a Ram temple had ever existed here, and whether the VHP had (as it claimed) the legal rights to the land surrounding the old mosque. Attempts were also made to find a solution outside the courts. The influential Shankaracharya of Kanchi met with the Babri Masjid Action Committee, and urged them to hand over this one site, in exchange for which no further demands would be made on the Muslims.

  The BJP remained committed to the construction of a temple in Ayodhya. When it came to power in 1998, it said it would forge a national consensus on the issue, failing which it would enact enabling legislation. The prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, said that ‘Rama occupies an exalted place in Indian culture’, and claimed that ‘the entire country wants a Rama temple at Ayodhya’ , the issue being ‘how to make it and where’.50

  However, at the site itself the status quo prevailed. The courts took their time disposing of the matter, and no compromise could be reached outside them either. Meanwhile the Vishwa Hindu Parishad organized tours of Ayodhya by kar sevaks from all over the country. They also held religious ceremonies in anticipation of the building of the temple. One such yagna, held in the last week of February 2002, was attended by hundreds of volunteers from the state of Gujarat. On their way back home by train, these kar sevaks got into a fight with Muslim vendors at the Godhra railway station. The vendors were asked to chant slogans in homage to Lord Ram; when they refused, their beards were pulled. Word of the altercation spread; young men from the Muslim neighbourhood outside the station joined in. The kar sevaks clambered back into the train, which started moving even as stones were being thrown. However, the train stopped on the outskirts of the station, when a fire broke out in one of its coaches. Fifty-eight people perished in the conflagration.

  Godhra was a town with along history of communal violence; it had experienced serious riots in 1949, and again in 1981. That Hindus and Muslims had not always been on the best of terms, and that the Ayodhya problem had strained relations further, is clear. It is also beyond dispute that the incident at the station was sparked by kar sevaks taunting Muslim vendors. What remains unclear is the cause of the fire afterwards. The VHP claimed that it was the handiwork of a Muslim mob. On the other hand, forensic evidence suggests that it originated inside the carriage, and was probably the result of a gas cylinder or paraffin stove accidentally catching fire.51

  Word that a group of kar sevaks had been burnt to death at Godhra quickly spread through Gujarat. A wave of retributory violence followed. This was at its most intense, and horrific, in the cities of Ahmedabad and Baroda. Once known for their philanthropic industrialists and progressive intellectuals, once centres of technical innovation and artistic excellence, both places had experienced a prolonged period of economic decline. With this came a deterioration in inter-community relations. Hindus and Muslims now rarely worked or played together, a separation that had in the recent past expressed itself in bouts of communal violence.52

  These latest riots in Baroda and Ahmedabad were unprecedented in their savagery. Muslim shops and offices were attacked, mosques torched and cars vandalized. Muslim women were raped, Muslim men killed
and bonfires made of their bodies. The mobs were often led by activists of the VHP, with the local administration in collusion. Their weapons ranged from swords and guns to petrol bombs and gas cylinders. The vandals had voter lists, which allowed them to identify which homes were Muslim and which were not. Ministers of the state government were camped in police control rooms, directing operations. The police had been instructed to give ‘free run of the roads to VHP and Bajrang Dal mobs’.53

  Beyond Baroda and Ahmedabad, the violence also reached out into smaller towns and rural settlements. In the district of Sabarkantha, mobs roamed the countryside in tractors and jeeps, targeting properties owned by Muslims. The numerical record of their activities is available: ‘altogether, 2161 houses, 1461 shops, 304 smaller enterprises . . . 71 factories, 38 hotels, 45 religious places and 240 vehicles were completely or partially destroyed’.54 What was true of Sabarkantha was broadly true of the state as a whole. The VHP had made it clear that it wanted to render the Muslims hopeless as well as homeless. Thus in Ahmedabad, weeks after the riots had subsided Muslims still found it difficult to get loans from banks, gas and phone connections and enrolment in school for their children. Muslims who had fled their villages were told they would have to drop charges against the rioters if they wished to return. Sometimes their safety was made conditional on their conversion to Hinduism.55

  The chief minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots was Narendra Modi, a hard-line Hindutva ideologue who had grown up in the unforgiving school of the RSS. Now, he justified the violence on Muslims by pointing to the burning of the railway coach in Godhra, which, he said, had set in motion a ‘chain of action and reaction’. In truth, the reaction was many times that of the original action. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed, and at least fifty times that number rendered homeless, living in refugee camps whose pitiable condition was noticed by the prime minister and president themselves.56

  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘pogrom’ as ‘an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group’. By this definition, while there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. There are some striking similarities between the two. Both began as a response to a single, stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community. Both proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole. The Sikhs who were butchered were in no way connected to the Sikhs who killed Mrs Gandhi. The Muslims who were killed by Hindu mobs were completely innocent of the Godhra crime (which may anyway have been an accident).

  In both cases the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The prime minister in Delhi in 1984, and the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings. And serving ministers in their government went so far as to aid and direct the rioters.

  The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the violence they had legitimized and overseen. Rajiv Gandhi’s party won the 1984 general election by a very large margin, and in December 2002 Narendra Modi was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat after his party won a two-thirds majority in the assembly polls.

  VIII

  The rise of the Hindu right in general, and the events at Ayodhya in particular, prompted afresh wave of gloomy forebodings about the future of India. ‘The secular fabric of the country has been seriously damaged’, wrote the Madras fortnightly Frontline, adding: ‘India will never be the same again’. For the ‘events of December 6 and 7 gave India a taste of what things would be [like]if and when the Hindutva combine’s Hindu Rashtra [Hindu State] comes into existence. It became clear . . . [that] the minority communities would have no right to live, not to speak of social interaction; that freedom of expression would be non-existent; and that truth would be only what the rulers perceive. ‘In the week that followed [6th December 1992], India changed, perhaps forever’, commented the Calcutta weekly Sunday. With the breakdown of authority and the rule of law, ‘in the eyes of the world, India moved one step closer to being perceived as a tinpot African “republic”’. The ‘forces let loose by the vandalism at Ayodhya’ , lamented the New Delhi magazine India Today, ‘have begun not just to take a ghastly toll of human lives, but also to reduce to rubble the edifice of our hopes and aspirations as a people and as a nation.57

  These worries were shared by the Western press. ‘Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque’, wrote Time magazine, ‘the three pillars of the Indian state – democracy, secularism and the rule of law – are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism’.58 The day after the mosque came down, The Times of London carried a story with the headline ‘Militants Bury Hope of Harmony in Rubble of Indian Mosque’. The next day’s paper quoted the views of the Labour politician Jack Straw, then on a visit to Bombay. Straw thought that there was a real danger that India would slide ‘into the abyss of sectarianism’. The same issue carried a leading article by the Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien, which confidently proclaimed that ‘India’s history as a secular state appears to be coming to an end’. O’Brien anticipated a mass flight of Muslims into Pakistan, and the emigration of educated Hindus into Europe and North America.59

  These were the immediate, so to say knee-jerk, responses of excitable journalists and professional cynics (O’Brien had previously predicted that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the revival of a cult of Hitler and of a party based on Nazi ideals). But writers trained to take the long view also echoed these fears. A British author who had written many affectionate books about the subcontinent remarked that ‘all who care about that country must tremble for the future of its secular democracy’.60 And an American scholar who had spent a lifetime studying India went so far as to compare the Sangh Parivar to the Nazis: ‘It is past time to note’, wrote Paul Brass, ‘that Indian politics and society display many of the symptoms of a murderous pre-fascist stage which has already produced a multiplicity of localized Kristall-nachts in numerous urban sites.’ The ‘spread of violence, lawlessness and disorder at the local level, thought Brass, might prompt the central government (then controlled by the Congress) into ‘another venture into authoritarian practices’ . And so the ‘Indian state may yet disintegrate in this clash between secular opportunists and chauvinist nationalists equally tied to the pursuit of illusions and chimeras, “symbols and shadows” of national unity and greatness pursued by all the tyrannical regimes of the twentieth century .61

  At the time of writing (2008), these dire predictions have not come to pass. In theory, if less assuredly in practice, India remains a secular state. The rule of law is not what it might be, but the writ of the central government still runs over most of India. India has not (yet) become either a tinpot dictatorship of the African kind or a fascist one modelled on European examples.

  28

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  RULERS

  I know that most members of Parliament see the constitution for the first time when they take an oath on it.

  PRAMOD MAHAJAN, Union minister, 2000

  The current resurgence of identity politics, or the politics of caste and community, is but an expression of the primacy of the group over the individual. It does not augur well for liberal democracy in India.

  ANDRÉ BÉTEILLE, sociologist, 2002

  I

  IN JULY 1958 INDIA’S leading journal of public affairs carried an anonymous essay with the intriguing title ‘After Nehru . . .’. At the time, Jawaharlal Nehru had been prime minister of India for a full eleven years. He was pushing seventy, and the last representative of the old guard within the Congress Party. Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Azad were dead, Govind Ballabh Pant was ailing and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was sulking in retirement in Madras. The party, and the nation, were being willed along by the moral
authority of the prime minister. There was no obvious successor among the next generation of Congress politicians. What would happen after he was gone?

  The essay that posed the question in July 1958 provided this answer:

  The prestige that the party will enjoy as the inheritor of the mantle of Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru will inhibit the growth of any effective or healthy opposition during the first few years. In later years as popular discontent against the new generation of party bosses increases, they will for sheer self-preservation, be led to make increasing attempts to capture votes by pandering to caste, communal and regional interests and ultimately even to ‘rig’ elections.

  In this situation, argued the essayist, the Congress Party would find it hard to resist the allure of commerce. For

  in a politico-economic system of mixed economy, in which the dividing line between mercantilism and socialism is still very obscure and control over the State machinery can give glittering prizes to the business as well as the managerial classes, the moneyed interests are bound to infiltrate sooner or later into the ruling cadres of the party in power.