In 1987 there was another and more serious drought. The uplands of Orissa were once more hard hit, but also suffering were the semi-arid parts of western India, the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan in particular. In desperation, pastoralists ferried their animals by truck to the rich forests of central India in search of fodder not available in their own home range. The drought was believed to be the worst of the century. An estimated 200 million people were affected by it, their suffering vividly captured in press photographs of parched and cracked land with carcasses of cattle strewn across it.46
The scarcities of 1985 and 1987 underlined the continuing dependence of the economy on the monsoon. Yet even in areas of irrigated agriculture there was discontent. This was stoked by two newly formed farmers’ organizations: the Shetkari Sanghatana, active in Maharashtra; and the Bharatiya Kisan Union, based in Haryana and Punjab. The former was led by a one-time civil servant named Sharad Joshi, the latter by a Jat farmer named Mahindra Singh Tikait. According to Joshi, the main axis of conflict was between ‘India’, represented by the city-based, English-speaking middle class, and ‘Bharat’, represented by the villagers. He argued that economic policies had consistently favoured ‘India’ over ‘Bharat’. To reverse this bias, Tikait and he proposed higher prices for farm produce, and lower tariffs for electricity for farm use. Both their organizations commanded a large base; each could rustle up 50,000 or more farmers to march on the state capital to press their demands.47
Although Joshi and Tikait claimed to speak for the rural population as a whole, in truth they represented the middle and rich peasantry, those who used tractors and electrified pump-sets and had a surplus to sell in the market. The poor were mostly outside their purview. As studies conducted in the 1980s once more confirmed, class strongly overlapped with caste in village India, where the truly disadvantaged continued to be the Harijans or Scheduled Castes (SCs). A survey in Karnataka revealed that nearly 80 per cent of SCs living in the countryside, as well as more than 60 per cent of SCs in towns, were below the official poverty line, their monthly expenditure less than Rs50 a month. The picture was much the same in other parts of India.48
VIII
In his first year in office, Rajiv Gandhi had worked to resolve a series of ethnic conflicts – in Assam, in Mizoram, in the Punjab. By the end of his second year, however, his regime was confronted with fresh challenges based on the claims of ethnicity to add to the ongoing challenges based on religion and class.
As ever, a comprehensive coverage of social conflicts in this (or any other) decade in the history of independent India is beyond reach of a single chapter, book or scholar. One can only flag some of the more important ones. To begin with, there were conflicts between different groups in the same state. In Bengal, for instance, the Nepali-speaking population of the Darjeeling hills had begun asking for a state of their own. Their leader was a former soldier named Subhash Ghisingh. Among his cadre Ghisingh commanded total and unquestioning support; at a word from him they could shut down all the schools and shops in the district. His Gorkha National Liberation Front worked within the democratic process and outside it, sometimes petitioning Union ministers, at other times engaging in pitched battles with the police. Through the latter half of 1986 the clashes were particularly intense. Eventually, the prime minister met Ghisingh, persuading him to accept an autonomous hill council rather than a state for Nepali speakers.49
Across the border in Assam, the Bodo tribals were in revolt against the locally dominant Assamese. Their movement, mimicking their adversaries, was led by young men of the All-Bodo Students Union (ABSU). ABSU leaders wanted a separate state to be carved out of Assam, in pursuit of which they blockaded roads, burnt bridges and attacked non-Bodos. When the Assamese radicals retaliated the clashes became violent, claiming dozens of lives.50
In Tripura, meanwhile, tribal activists had launched a struggle against the Bengalis who had migrated in large numbers to the state after Partition. By some definitions the Tripura National Volunteers (TNV) qualified as ‘terrorists’, murdering and kidnapping civilians and ambushing police parties in pursuit of their ends. In 1986 TNV guerrillas killed more than a hundred people. In the next year their tally was even higher. However, in August 1988 the TNV leader Bijoy Hrangkhawl came out of hiding to sign an accord with the government. His volunteers laid down their arms in exchange for more seats for tribals in the local legislature and the provision of rice and cooking oil at subsidized rates in tribal villages.51
A second set of conflicts pitted residents of individual states against the Union government. Thus in Punjab, the euphoria generated by the Rajiv Gandhi–Longowal accord proved to be a highly temporary phenomenon. The sant’s assassination was a harbinger of things to come, with a new generation of terrorists taking up the struggle for Khalistan. The injuries caused by Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi had brought many fresh recruits to the cause. So had the failure of the central government to honour its commitment to transfer Chandigarh to Punjab. Militants were once more making their home in the Golden Temple. Statements in favour of Khalistan were being made by priests and, on occasion, by members of the ruling Akali Dal itself.52
To tackle the resurgence of terrorism the police force in Punjab was now 34,000 strong. To stiffen its morale a new chief was brought in: a plain-speaking Bombay policeman named J. F. Ribeiro. Also recruited, a little later, was K. P. S. Gill, a Sikh by extraction who had experience fighting extremism in the north-east. Ribeiro and Gill adopted a carrot-and-stick policy; meeting Sikh peasants in an extensive ‘mass contact’ programme on the one hand, forming vigilante groups to eliminate terrorists on the other. Police parties fanned out into the countryside, mounting search operations, firing at men on the run. Dozens of extremists were killed in these searches, but there was also much harassment of ordinary villagers.53
But the acts of terror continued. Buses were stopped on the highway, Hindu passengers separated from Sikhs and killed. In 1986 there were twice as many killings as there had been in 1984, when Bhindranwale was alive. In panic, many Hindus began fleeing across the border to Haryana.
To get rid of the minorities in the Punjab was indeed one of the terrorists’ aims. Another aim was more sinister; to instil fear in Sikhs who lived outside the Punjab. To this end a series of bombs were set off in markets and bus terminals in Delhi and other towns of northern India. These were intended to provoke a fresh round of revenge killings against the Sikhs. Then the Sikhs who survived might come back to the Punjab, there to form a consolidated, unified, homogeneous community, the better to fight the battle for Khalistan. The model, apparently, was the successful struggle for Pakistan back in the 1940s, which had likewise been helped by creating panic among Muslims living outside the holy land.54
In a major operation in May 1988 commandos flushed out some fifty terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple complex. Unlike Operation Bluestar, this assault was launched in daylight, so that the adversaries could be pinpointed more clearly. In any case, these militants were not as well prepared or as motivated as Bhindranwale’s men. They retreated into the Temple’s sanctum sanctorum; denied access to food and water, they surrendered seventy-two hours later.55
The revival of terrorism in the Punjab coincided with renewed trouble in another border state, Jammu and Kashmir. Back in 1984, Mrs Gandhi had Sheikh Abdullah’s son Farooq removed from office; now her son Rajiv restored the ties that once bound the two families and their respective parties, the Congress and the National Conference. In November 1986 they together formed a caretaker government in the state. Justifying the alliance, Farooq Abdullah said that ‘the Congress commands the Centre. In a state like Kashmir, if I want to implement programmes to fight disease and run a government, I have to stay on the right side of the Centre.’56
In 1987 fresh elections were held to the Jammu and Kashmir assembly. To fight them, Kashmiri politicians seeking autonomy from the centre – rather than dependence or subservience – formed an umbrella grou
ping named the Muslim United Front (MUF). MUF workers were harassed by the administration; and the polls themselves were anything but free and fair. Although the National Conference–Congress alliance would probably have won anyway, their margin of victory was made much greater by the rigging of votes in their favour. Even the Intelligence Bureau conceded that as many as thirteen seats were lost by the MUF owing to ‘electoral malpractice’.57
The way the 1987 elections were conducted led to deep disenchantment among political activists in Kashmir. Despairing of being treated fairly by New Delhi, they began looking to Pakistan for succour. Groups of young men crossed the border, joining training camps run by the Pakistani army. A year later they crossed back, to put into practice what they had learned. In the spring of 1989, the Kashmir Valley was witness to a series of shootings, bomb blasts and grenade attacks. This lovely valley was now home to ‘Kalashnikovs, detonators, Molotov cocktails, gelatine fuses, mortars [and] masked militants’. Ninety-seven separate incidents of violence were recorded in the first half of 1989, in which at least 52 people were killed and 250 injured. Kashmir, commented one reporter grimly, ‘appears to have the makings of another Punjab’.58
IX
Even as the Indian government was trying – with mixed success – to contain secession at home, it had embarked on an ambitious attempt to end ethnic strife in neighbouring Sri Lanka. That little island – as beguilingly beautiful in its own way as mountainous Kashmir – was caught in a bloody civil war between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority. The causes of the conflict were wearyingly familiar, to Indians at any rate, for they involved rival claims of language, ethnicity, religion and territory.
A detailed history of the Sri Lankan conflict would take us too far afield.59 Suffice it to say that it really began when Sinhala was imposed as the sole ‘official language’ of the island nation. The Tamils asked for parity for their own tongue and, when this was denied, took to the streets in protest. Over the years, non-violent methods were thrown over in favour of armed struggle.
Of the several Tamil resistance organizations, the most influential and powerful were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Led by a brutal fighter named Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE had as its aim a separate nation, to be constituted from the north and east of the island, where the Tamils were in a majority. Throughout the early 1980s they mounted raids on Sri Lankan army camps and committed atrocities on civilians. The Sinhala response was, if anything, even more fierce. This was, in other words, a conflict of an almost unspeakable brutality and savagery.
LTTE fighters had long used the Indian state of Tamil Nadu as a safe haven. Their activities were actively helped by the state government, with New Delhi turning an indulgent blind eye. However, in the summer of 1987 Rajiv Gandhi was asked by the Sri Lankan President, J. R. Jayawardene, to help mediate in the conflict. Under an agreement signed between Colombo and New Delhi, an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) would be flown into the island. The Sri Lankan army would retreat to the barracks, and the LTTE militants persuaded – or forced – to disarm.
In late July 1987 Indian troops began going to Sri Lanka in batches of a few thousand. (Eventually, as many as 48,000 soldiers of the Indian army would be stationed there.) Their presence was unpopular among Sinhala nationalists, who saw it as an infringement of sovereignty, and among the Tamils, who had always thought that India was on their side. When asked to surrender their arms, the LTTE insisted on a series of preconditions, including the release of all Tamil prisoners in government custody and a halt to Sinhala colonization in the east of the island. Until October an uneasy peace held, broken when the IPKF moved against the militants. The LTTE headquarters in Jaffna was stormed and captured, but at an enormous cost. Popular opinion turned decisively against the Indians, who were now seen as an occupying force. The LTTE took to the jungles, from where they would snipe and harry the Indians. They made particularly effective use of land mines, blowing up convoys of soldiers as they travelled on the roads.
By the end of 1987 the press was writing of Sri Lanka as ‘India’s Vietnam’. For ‘the Indian army had never seen a war like this: in an alien land, against a foreign enemy that wore no uniforms, knew no Geneva Convention on ethics of war, yet carried deadly modern weapons and fought routinely from behind the cover of women and children’.60 An Indian commander was slightly more generous: while deploring the LTTE’s ‘senseless, mulish, destructive insistence’ on armed struggle, he nonetheless saluted their ‘discipline, dedication, determination, motivation and technical expertise’.61
As the bodies of dead soldiers were returned in bags to the mainland, pressure mounted to recall the living. From the summer of 1989 they began coming back, although the final pull-out was not accomplished until the spring of 1990. More than 1,000 Indian soldiers had died in the conflict.
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 a more 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 2 November. 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
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
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