As their common surname indicated, Mulayam and Lalu were from a caste of farmer-herders scattered across north and western India. In colonial times Yadavs had often acted as lathials (strongmen) of upper-caste landlords. After Independence, now with lands of their own, they had steadily gained in economic strength, social prestige, and political power. Both Mulayam and Lalu actively reached out to the Muslims, another very numerous (if much poorer) community in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The arithmetic of this move was electoral, for Yadavs and Muslims were each about 10 per cent of the population. In multi-cornered contests – the norm in India – 40 per cent of the vote was usually enough. So if a party or politician had sewn up both Yadavs and Muslims, and persuaded sections of other ‘backward’ groups to join them, then they had a very good chance of winning an election.7
As India’s most populous states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh together sent 139 members to Parliament. General elections were often decided here. In the first four elections the Congress won a majority of seats in UP and Bihar. In 1977, following the Emergency, the party was wiped out, but in 1980 and 1984 it recovered, winning 81 and 131 seats respectively. The last was an aberration, a consequence of the martyrdom of Indira Gandhi. In 1989 the Congress fared disastrously, winning a mere 19 seats in the two states. When mid-term elections were held two years later, it fared even worse, winning 5 seats in UP and only one in Bihar. The space vacated by the Congress in these crucial northern states was filled in part by the ‘socialist’ parties led by Lalu and Mulayam Singh Yadav, and in part by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose axis of mobilization was religion rather than caste.
II
In 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party, successor to the old Jana Sangh, won a mere two seats in the eighth General Elections. Five years later its tally went up to 86. A major reason for this rise was its involvement in the campaign to have a temple built in Ayodhya, to replace the medieval mosque that stood on the site, itself believed by many to have been the original birthplace of the mythical Lord Ram. The movement to construct the Ram temple was, as we saw in Chapter 25, led by a close affiliate of the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
Anxious to keep the Congress out of power, the BJP now supported V. P. Singh’s National Front without joining the Government. However, Singh’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission report, announced in August 1990, threw the party into a tizzy. Some leaders thought this a diabolical plan to break up Hindu society. Others argued that the extension of affirmative action was a necessary bow to the aspirations of the backward castes. Within the party, and within RSS shakhas, the debate raged furiously – should, or should not, the Mandal recommendations be endorsed?
Rather than take a position, the BJP chose to shift the terms of political debate, away from Mandal and caste and back towards religion and the Mandir/Masjid question. The party announced a yatra, or march, from the ancient temple of Somnath in Gujarat to the town of Ayodhya. The march would be led by L. K. Advani, an austere, unsmiling man reckoned to be more ‘hardline’ than his colleague Atal Behari Vajpayee. He would travel in a Toyota van fitted up to look like a ‘rath’ (chariot), stopping to hold public meetings on the way.
Commencing on 25 September 1990, Mr Advani’s Rath Yatra planned to reach Ayodhya five weeks later, after travelling 10,000 kilometres through eight States. Activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad flanked the van, flagging it off from one town and welcoming it at the next. At public meetings they were complemented by saffron-robed sadhus, whose ‘necklaces of prayer beads, long beards and ash-marked foreheads provided a strong visual counterpoint’ to these armed young men. The march’s imagery was ‘religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim’. This was reinforced by the speeches made by Advani, which accused the government of ‘appeasing’ the Muslim minority, and of practising a ‘pseudo-secularism’ which denied the legitimate interests and aspirations of the Hindu majority. The building of a Ram temple in Ayodhya was presented as the symbolic fulfilment of these interests and aspirations.8
Advani’s march through north-western India was a major headache for V. P. Singh’s government. For the procession ‘posed a provocation that could not be ignored. Growing disorder, riots, and a final destruction of the mosque loomed ahead. Yet there would be serious consequences to stopping it. Not only would Singh have to act against [the revered god] Rama, but he would also bring down his own ruling coalition and risk serious disorder’.9 The yatra reached Delhi, where Advani camped for several days, daring the government to arrest him. The challenge was ducked, and the procession started up again. However, a week before it was to reach its final destination, the van was stopped and Advani placed under preventive detention. The arrest had been ordered by the Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, through whose state the march was then passing.
While L. K. Advani cooled his heels in a Bihar government guest house, his followers were making their way to Ayodhya. Thousands of kar sevaks (volunteers) were converging from all parts of the country. The Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was like his Bihari namesake a bitter political opponent of the BJP. He ordered the mass arrest of the kar sevaks. Apparently as many as 150,000 were detained, but almost half as many still found their way to Ayodhya. 20,000 security personnel were already in the temple town; some regular police, others from the paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF).
On the morning of 30th October, a large crowd of kar sevaks was intercepted at a bridge on the river Sarayu, which divided Ayodhya’s old town from the new. The volunteers pushed their way past the police and surged towards the Babri Masjid. There they were met by BSF contingents. Some kar sevaks managed to dodge them, too, and reach the mosque. One planted a saffron flag on the structure; others attacked it with axes and hammers. To stop a mass invasion the BSF jawans used tear gas and, later, live bullets. The kar sevaks were chased through narrow streets and into temple courtyards. Some of them resisted, with sticks and stones – they were supported by angry residents, who rained down improvised missiles on the police.10
The battle between the security forces and the volunteers raged for three whole days. At least twenty kar sevaks died in the fighting. Their bodies were later picked up by VHP activists, cremated, and the ashes stored in urns. These were then taken around the towns of northern India, inflaming passions wherever they went. Hindus were urged to take revenge for the blood of these ‘martyrs’. The state of Uttar Pradesh was rocked by a series of religious riots. Hindu mobs attacked Muslim localities, and – in a manner reminiscent of the grisly Partition massacres – stopped trains to pull out and kill those who were recognizably Muslim. In some places the victims retaliated, whereupon they were set upon by the Provincial Armed Constabulary, long notorious for its hostility towards the minority community.11
As one commentator put it, L. K. Advani’s rath yatra had, in effect, become a raktyatra, a journey of blood.12
III
Back in 1979, after the Janata Party split, Charan Singh had run a minority government for a few months. However, V. P. Singh was the first prime minister to head a minority government after a general election had thrown up a fractured verdict. He was weak and on unsure ground from the start, as reflected in the haste with which he implemented the Mandal Report to outflank rivals within his own party, and as reflected also in the open challenge to his government offered by L. K. Advani’s rath yatra.
Nor were these the only conflicts V. P. Singh had to deal with. In the winter of 1990–1, a bitter dispute broke out between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The quarrel, over the waters from the Cauvery river, was an old one, now given fresh impetus by the failure of the monsoon and the growing demands for irrigation water among commercial farmers.
The Cauvery originates in Karnataka, flows through the state and into Tamil Nadu, from where it merges with the Indian Ocean. The lower parts of the delta have for centuries had a sophisticated irrigation network, allowing farmers to grow high-value paddy. In contrast, irrigation works in Karnataka
are of recent origin; the first canals were built in the early twentieth century, with a further spurt in canal building after the 1970s.
In 1928, Cauvery waters irrigated 11 million acres of farmland in what is now Karnataka, and 145 million acres in what is now Tamil Nadu. By 1971 the gap had increased; the figures now were 44 million acres in Karnataka and 253 million acres in Tamil Nadu. However, by the 1990s the upper riparian state had virtually caught up with the lower one – the figures now were 213 million acres for Karnataka and 258 million acres for Tamil Nadu. This massive expansion of irrigation facilities had generated much wealth for the farmers of the Mandya and Mysore districts of Karnataka. Once dependent on a single harvest of a low-value crop (usually, millet), they could now enjoy two or even three harvests a year of high-value crops such as rice and sugar-cane.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, the central government convened a series of discussions to work out a mutually acceptable distribution of the Cauvery waters. Twenty-six ministerial meetings were held between 1968 and 1990; all failed to arrive at a consensus. Tamil Nadu feared that the frenetic canal building in the upper reaches threatened its farmers downstream. Karnataka argued that its late start should not preclude the fullest development of the waters in its territory.
In June 1990, by an order of the Supreme Court, a Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was constituted. Three, presumably impartial, judges were its members. On 25 June 1991, the tribunal passed an interim order, directing Karnataka to release 205 billion cubic feet of water per year to Tamil Nadu, pending final disposal of the matter. Ten days later, the Karnataka Assembly passed a unanimous resolution rejecting the tribunal’s order. The Karnataka government then passed its own order, which mandated its officials to ‘protect and preserve’ the waters of the Cauvery for the State’s farmers.
The matter went to the Supreme Court, which held that the Karnataka directive was ultra vires of the constitution. The central government now made the tribunal’s interim order official by publishing it in the gazette. The Karnataka chief minister, S. Bangarappa, responded by declaring a bandh (general strike) in the State. All schools and colleges were closed and, with the administration looking on, protesters were allowed to go on the rampage in Tamil localities of the state capital, Bangalore. The violence continued for days, with an estimated 50,000 Tamils being forced to flee the state.
Karnataka’s defiance sparked angry words from the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa. Her administration, in turn, encouraged the targeting of Kannada homes and businesses in Tamil Nadu. Altogether, property worth more than Rs200 million was destroyed.
While ordering the constitution of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, the chief justice of the Supreme Court noted that ‘disputes of this nature have the potentiality of creating avoidable feelings of bitterness among the peoples of the States concerned. The longer the disputes linger, more the bitterness. The Central Government as the guardian of the interests of the people in all the States must, therefore, on all such occasions take prompt steps to set the Constitutional machinery in motion’.13
However, while the central government could set the machinery in motion, it no longer had the powers to compel the states to accept its recommendations. That there was now a minority government in Delhi added to the problems. Had Nehru or Indira Gandhi been prime minister, they would have convened a meeting of the respective chief ministers, and sought to hammer out a compromise. Lal Bahadur Shastri and even Morarji Desai would most likely have done the same. In that case a lasting solution may yet have been deferred, but at least the dispute might not have spilled over into the streets. This hostility, both official and popular, between two states of the Union was unprecedented in its ferocity, and boded ill for the future.14
IV
From conflicts in the heartland of India we now move to conflicts in the extremities. Pre-eminent here was that old sore spot, Kashmir. After a quiet decade or two, the Valley erupted in the first months of 1989. In November of that year, Rajiv Gandhi was replaced as Prime Minister by V. P. Singh. Singh appointed a ‘mainstream’ Kashmiri politician, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, to the crucial post of Home Minister. This was a gesture meant to please the Muslims of India in general and the Muslims of the Valley in particular. With one of their kind in charge of law and order, surely the police would bear down less heavily than before?
The experiment was very soon put to the test. On 8 December 1989, a young woman doctor was kidnapped as she walked to work in Srinagar. But this was no ordinary medic; the lady was Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the Union home minister. She had been abducted by militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). They demanded that, in exchange for her release, five specified JKLF activists be freed from detention. The chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, did not want to yield to the threat. He was over-ruled by the prime minister in Delhi. On the 13th, the jailed militants were released; a large crowd welcomed them, and marched them triumphantly through the streets of Srinagar. Among the slogans they shouted, one was especially ominous: ‘Jo kare khuda ka kauf, utha le Kalashnikov’ – If you wish to do God’s work, go pick up a Kalashnikov. Later that day, Rubaiya Sayeed was reunited with her family.15
The government’s capitulation was regarded as a major victory by the militants. Further kidnappings followed: of a BBC reporter, of a senior official, of another daughter of a prominent politician. There were also a series of assassinations: those killed included the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and the head of the local television station.16
At this stage, circa 1989–90, Indian intelligence reported as many as 32 separatist groups to be active in the Valley. Of these two were especially important. The first was the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which stood for an independent, non denominational state of Jammu and Kashmir, in which Hindus and Sikhs would have the same rights as Muslims. Its goal was captured in the popular cry: ‘Hame kya chhaiye, azaadi, azaadi’ (What do we want? Freedom! Freedom!). The second was the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, which (as its name suggests) veered more towards an Islamic regime and was not averse to a merger of the state with Pakistan. The Hizb-ul was led by Syed Salauddin, the nom de guerre of a once democratic politician who had contested the 1987 elections but been denied victory by a blatant rigging of the votes. It was then that he turned to the gun, and to Pakistan, taking many other young men with him.17
Both the JKLF and Hizb-ul had collected a wide variety of arms. With these they killed soft and hard targets, looted banks and dropped grenades in front of police posts. Their acts grew more daring; in November 1990, they even launched a rocket at the broadcasting station of All India Radio. The government now decided to take a tougher stance, moving in paramilitary forces and some army units to help maintain order. By 1990, there were as many as 80,000 Indians in uniform in the Valley. Thus, ‘the attempt to find a political solution was put aside in favour of a policy of repression’.18
The situation in Kashmir is tellingly reflected in this series of newspaper headlines, all from the year 1990:
YOUTH TO THE FORE IN SECCESSION BID
BLASTS ROCK KASHMIR
KASHMIRI MILITANTS HANG POLICEMAN IN SRINAGAR
PAKISTAN BLAMED FOR REBELLION IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR
ARMY JOINS BATTLE AGAINST MILITANTS IN KASHMIR
TROOPS CALLED OUT IN ANANTNAG, CURFEW IMPOSED
SECURITY FORCES KILL 81 MILITANTS
3 DIE IN FIRING ON J&K PROCESSION
TOTAL BANDH IN KASHMIR, HEADLESS BODIES FOUND
J AND K TROUBLE CLAIMS 1,044 [LIVES] TILL SEPT[EMBER]
‘PEOPLE POWER’ IN SRINAGAR: CURFEW LIFTED, SHOPS SHUT
TRICOLOUR BURNT AT UN OFFICE
5 LAKH ATTEND J&K ‘FREEDOM’ RALLY
INDEPENDENCE ALONE CAN HEAL KASHMIR’S WOUNDS19
The inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley were caught in the cross-fire, although, as the last few headlines suggest, their sympathies lay more with the militants than the security forces. Those who might have been neut
ral were persuaded to take sides following the murder in May 1990 of the respected cleric Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq. A massive crowd of mourners accompanied his body to the burial ground. Somewhere, somehow – the details remain murky – they got into an altercation with a platoon of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). The CRPF men, in panic, fired on the mourners, killing thirty and injuring at least three hundred others. The Mirwaiz’s assassins were apparently in the pay of Pakistan; but by day’s end the propaganda war had been decisively lost by India.20
The alienation of the Kashmiris was deepened by the behaviour of those sent apparently to protect them. Indian soldiers, and more particularly the CRPF men, were prone to treat most civilians as terrorist sympathizers. Their actions were documented by Amnesty International,21 but also by Indian human rights activists. In the spring of 1990, a team led by the respected jurist V. M. Tarkunde travelled through the Valley, talking to government officials, militants and ordinary villagers. Many cases of police and army ‘excesses’ were reported: beatings (sometimes of children), torture (of men innocent of any crime), extra-judicial (or ‘encounter’) killings and the violation of women. ‘It is not possible to list all the cases which were brought to our notice’, commented Tarkunde’s team:
But the broad pattern is clear. The militants stage stray incidents and the security forces retaliate. In this process large numbers of innocent people get manhandled, beaten up, molested and killed. In some cases the victims were caught in [the] cross-fire and in many more cases they were totally uninvolved and there was no crossfiring. This tends to alienate people further. The Muslims allege that they are being killed and destroyed because they are Muslims.22
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 77