V
As a rule, the Muslims in India were poorer than the Hindus, as well as less educated. There were a few Muslim entrepreneurs, but no real Muslim middle class. They continued to be under-represented in the professions, and in government service. Forty per cent of Muslims in cities lived below the poverty line; the situation in the countryside was not much better. The literacy rate for Muslims was well below the national average, and the gap between them and the other communities was growing. Few Muslim girls were sent to school, while the boys were often placed in madrasas (Islamic schools) whose archaic curricula did not equip them for jobs in the modern economy. Meanwhile, the taunts of the Sangh Parivar had inculcated a defensive, almost siege-like mentality among the Muslim intelligentsia. The young men, especially, sought succour in religion, seeing in a renewed commitment to Islam an alternative to poverty and persecution in the world outside. Nor was this turn to faith always quietist. A Students Islamic Movement of India had arisen, whose leaders argued that threats from the rival religion could only be met through force of arms.23
The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s put an already vulnerable minority further on the defensive. In the border state of Jammu and Kashmir, however, the roles were reversed. Here, the Muslim majority was increasingly expressing its aspirations in religious terms, with the Hindu minority suffering as a consequence.
The popular revolt that broke out in the Valley in 1989 was at first led by the JKLF. Within a year, however, the JKLF had ceded ground to the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, whose own commitment to a multi-religious Kashmir was much less certain. The cry of azaadi (freedom) was being replaced by the call of jihad (holy war). As a popular slogan of the Hizb-ul cadres went: ‘Na guerilla jang, na qaumi jang: al jihad, al jihad’. (This is neither a guerilla war nor a national liberation struggle; this is jihad, jihad.)24
One consequence of this turn to religion was that the community of Kashmiri Pandits became suspect in the eyes of the militants. They were Hindus, but in other respects akin to their Muslim brethren; speaking the same language, eating the same kind of food, partaking of the same syncretic culture of the Valley. In the past, there had been economic rivalry between Hindus and Muslims. Sheikh Abdullah, for example, had resented and then brought to an end Pandit control of cultivable land and of the state administration. But the social harmony was more-or-less complete. Even in the Partition riots of 1947 Kashmir was untouched, an oasis of peace lauded by Mahatma Gandhi himself.
In the winter of 1989–90, as the Hizb-ul supplanted the JKLF, the Pandits became a target of attack. Because they were Hindus, and for no other reason, they were seen as agents of a state that had for so long oppressed the Kashmiris. Several hundred Pandits were killed in 1989–90, and killed in ways that made the ones who survived deeply insecure. As a reporter who documented these murders later wrote:
These women and men were not killed in the cross-fire, accidentally, but were systematically and brutally targeted. Many of the women were gang-raped before they were killed. One woman was bisected by a mill saw. The bodies of the men bore marks of torture. Death by strangulation, hanging, amputations, the gouging out of eyes, were not uncommon. Often their bodies were dumped with notes forbidding anyone – on pain of death – to touch them.25
In panic, Pandit families began leaving the Valley for the Hindu-majority Jammu region. Others fled further afield, to Delhi, and even to Bombay.
There were an estimated 200,000 Pandits living in the Kashmir Valley. By the summer of 1990, at least half had left. They lived in refugee camps, some run by the government, others by the RSS. At first, the state’s hope, and their own, was that the migration was temporary, and that once peace returned they would return to the Valley. In the event, they stayed on, and on.26
Through the 1990s, there were further attacks on Pandits who had chosen to remain. Sometimes entire hamlets were set on fire. By the end of the decade, less than 4,000 Pandits were left in the Valley, a melancholy reminder of the centuries in which they had lived cheek-by-jowl with their compatriots.27
The growing militancy in Kashmir was actively aided by Pakistan. That country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ran camps where terrorists were trained in the use of arms and provided maps of the region. With the ISI’s help, Kashmiri activists moved freely across the border, into India to kill or bomb, then back to Pakistan for rest and replenishment. By now, indigenous militants had been joined by foreign mercenaries – Arabs, Chechnyans, Uzbeks – who had cut their teeth in the war against the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanisthan. When that war ended, and Russian troops had returned, defeated, to their homeland, these fighters found another holy cause in the liberation of Kashmir.
VI
Among the casualties of L. K. Advani’s rath yatra was Prime Minister V. P. Singh. In November 1990 he resigned, unable to sustain his minority government in the absence of BJP support. As in 1979 – when Morarji Desai demitted office – the Congress allowed a lame duck Prime Minister (in this case, Chandra Shekhar) to hold charge while they prepared for mid-term elections. These were held in the summer of 1991. In the middle of the campaign Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, while speaking in a town in Tamil Nadu. The assassin, who was also blown up by the bomb she was carrying, was later revealed to be a representative of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The killing was an act of vengeance, for the LTTE had not forgiven Rajiv Gandhi for sending troops against them in 1987.
Notwithstanding the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, the elections went ahead on schedule. Pollsters had predicted a hung Parliament, with no party anywhere near a majority. However, the sympathy generated by the killing allowed the Congress to win 244 seats. With support from independents, they were in a position to form a majority government. P. V. Narasimha Rao, a veteran Andhra Congressman who had held important positions in Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet, was sworn in as prime minister.
Although he had been chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Narasimha Rao was far from being a mass leader. A scholar and linguist, he was a loyal Congressman, who had faithfully served both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. He had not fought the Lok Sabha elections in 1991, and may even have been contemplating retiring from active politics. But the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi changed everything. Rao was now nominated by the Congress as a compromise choice for prime minister, winning out over his ambitious rivals, Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar.
On taking office, Narasimha Rao was immediately confronted with a major crisis, this linked to the growing external debt of the government. India had long taken aid from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank. In Rajiv Gandhi’s regime borrowings from the market also increased rapidly. In the summer of 1991 the debt had reached $70 billion, of which 30 per cent was owed to private creditors. At one stage, foreign exchange reserves were down to two weeks of imports.
Apart from profligate borrowings by previous governments, two other factors had contributed to this crisis. The Gulf War had massively increased the price of oil, a key component of India’s import bill. And the political uncertainty in India had led many non-resident Indians to withdraw dollar deposits from Indian banks.28
Till he became prime minister, Rao was known as a quiet, understated man who had lived and served in the shadow of Indira Gandhi and her elder son. But now he revealed a boldness altogether at odds with what was previously known of his character. He appointed as his finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh, an apolitical economist whose previous jobs included finance secretary and governor of the Reserve Bank. Moreover, Rao gave Singh the freedom to carry out economic reforms as he saw fit.
Before he became a public servant, Manmohan Singh had written an Oxford DPhil suggesting that India move towards a more open trade regime. His thesis was written in the 1960s; now, three decades later, he seized the chance to put its recommendations into practice. The rupee was devalued, quotas removed for imports, tariffs reduced, exports encouraged and foreign direct investment welcomed in. The domestic market was also freed; the ‘licence-p
ermit-quota-raj’ was substantially done away with, and the public sector discouraged from expanding. Finally, the reforms sought to curb the profligacy of the government. Measures were introduced to reduce the fiscal deficit, which was running at an alarming 8 per cent of gross domestic product.29
One of the first acts of the new Government was to devalue the rupee. As someone who had been in the Congress during the abortive 1966 devaluation, and seen a novice prime minister (in that case, Indira Gandhi) vilified for the act, Narasimha Rao was nervous about a fresh move in that direction. However, it was deemed necessary, and the rupee was made to depreciate by some 18 per cent of its value to encourage exports. This bold, not to say controversial, move was vigorously defended by the finance minister, who told the press that socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China had recently devalued their currencies, while Pakistan and South Korea (among other Asian nations) had also followed aggressive exchange rate policies to enhance their competitiveness. ‘Our people – the economists, the journalists, the politicians’, remarked Manmohan Singh, ‘somehow believe that devaluation is sinful and dishonourable. It is nothing of the sort’. If the rupee was left as it was, the balance of payment situation, already precarious, would further worsen.30
Meanwhile, a new Industrial Policy, framed in July 1991, made it clear that ‘industrial licensing will henceforth be abolished for all industries, except those specified, irrespective of levels of investment’. The exceptions were industries critical to the country’s defence, or hazardous to the environment and to human health, such as cigarette and alcohol manufacture. This was a dramatic reversal of the existing policy, which had reserved many industries to the state, and many others to the small-scale sector.31
There was also a liberalization of the services sector, with private players being encouraged to invest in insurance, banking, telecommunications and air travel sectors previously under more or less complete state control. Some economists thought that the reforms did not go far enough, noting, for instance, that the labour laws remained rigid (making it almost impossible for managers to fire workers), and that, while barriers to entry had been removed, barriers to exit remained (thus, entrepreneurs still needed government permission to close down unprofitable units). The bureaucratic regime had been undermined but not completely dismantled. It still took weeks or months to start a business in India, where in China or Malaysia it took a matter of days.32
In supervising these (overdue) reforms Manmohan Singh was helped by some capable civil servants, but especially by his prime minister. The Congress Party was historically committed to the state occupying the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. Both Nehru and Indira Gandhi saw themselves as socialists. How would the party rank and file, and of course its senior leaders, take to this radical overthrowing of this legacy? While giving his finance minister a free hand, Narasimha Rao assured him that he would persuade the party to come around. As Manmohan Singh was to later recall, ‘there was a lot of opposition in the country and within the [Congress] party. But Prime Minister Rao’s political management made it possible to overcome all that.’33
In fact, in the 1980s itself the government of India had lost some of its antipathy towards business. Greater encouragement was given to private enterprise, with key sectors being delicensed. These were ‘pro-business’ policies that enabled Indian industry to become more productive and profitable. However, they stopped short of being ‘pro-market’ policies that removed impediments to entry and exit by Indian or foreign firms, thus encouraging competition and expanding consumer choice.34
The changes introduced by Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in 1991 constituted a major departure from past policies. Even a year or two before they were undertaken, such reforms were considered unlikely or even impossible. In a book published in 1989, a professor at the Harvard Business School identified the vested interests which kept the command economy going. They included politicians, bureaucrats and indigenous entrepreneurs. The apparently permanent hold of this alliance of interests, wrote the Harvard professor, had ‘served to diminish prospects for fundamental reforms of the nation’s economic policies’. In countries like South Korea, the discipline of the market and the openness to foreign capital had led to a surge of wealth and productivity. In India, however, the state was ‘paralyzed’, and local entrepreneurs ‘blind’ to the need for reform. The prospect was grim, namely, that ‘the “miracle” growth achieved by these other industrializing countries will continue to elude India’.35
For years together, the Indian economy had expanded at what was derisively termed the ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’. The pro-business reforms of the 1980s had increased the growth rate, and the pro-market reforms of the 1990s was to augment it further. The steadily improving performance of the Indian economy is captured in the following table:
Table 26.1
Period
Growth in Gross Domestic Product
Growth in Per Capita Income
1972–82
3.5%
1.2%
1982–92
5.2%
3.0%
1992–2002
6.0%
3.9%
SOURCE: Vijay L. Kelkar, India: On the Growth Turnpike, K. R. Narayan Oration, Australian National University, Canberra, 2004.
VII
When V. P. Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Report the Congress, then in Opposition, was lukewarm. The elections of 1991 then saw the party return to power at the Centre, despite its poor showing in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this compensated for by a strong performance in the South. But were the Congress ever to regain ground in the North, it had to woo back the backward castes. Accordingly, the new Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, issued a fresh government order on 26 September 1991, endorsing the Mandal Report but adding the rider that in allotting 27 per cent of jobs to OBCs ‘preference shall be given to candidates belonging to poorer sections’ among them.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continued its hearings on the petition placed before it. It finally gave its verdict on 16 November 1992. Seven judges dismissed the petition, upholding the Constitutional validity of the Mandal Commission and the orders which sought to implement it. Three others dissented. The judgements were characteristically prolix, filling nearly five hundred closely printed pages. The dissenting judges argued that ‘caste-collectivity’ was ‘unconstitutional’; that in deciding on who was disadvantaged, impersonal criteria like income should be used instead. On the other side, speaking for the majority, Justice Jeevan Reddy referred to past judgements where caste had been used as a proxy for backwardness. He argued that
it goes without saying that in the Indian context, social backwardness leads to educational backwardness and both of them together lead to poverty – which in turn breeds and perpetuates the social and educational backwardness. They feed upon each other constituting a vicious circle. It is a well-known fact that till independence the administrative apparatus was manned almost exclusively by members of the ‘upper’ castes. The Shudras, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and other similar backward social groups among Muslims and Christians had practically no entry into the administrative apparatus. It was this imbalance which was sought to be redressed by providing for reservation in favour of such backward classes.36
In upholding the government orders the Supreme Court added two caveats: that reservations should not in any circumstances exceed 50 per cent of the jobs in government; and that caste criteria would apply only in recruitment, not in promotions.
It was the Janata Party that had constituted the Mandal Commission in 1978; it was its new avataar, the Janata Dal, that implemented its recommendations in 1990. Its enthusiasm was not at first shared by rival parties. For the CPI and CPM traditionally saw class, not caste, as the major axis of political mobilization. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accorded pride of place to (the Hindu) religion. As for the Congress, it presumed to speak for the nation as a whole. However, by
the time the Supreme Court passed its judgement in November 1992, these parties were all prepared to endorse it. For they very quickly realized the political implications of the Mandal Commission Report, and the political costs of opposing it.
The controversy surrounding the Mandal Commission is reminiscent in some ways of the debate, conducted back in the 1950s, around the report of the States Reorganization Commission. As a marker of identity, caste was as primordial as language – as likely to be deplored by modernizing intellectuals, as prone to be successfully used for social and political mobilization. Then, as now, the force of argument was found powerless when faced with the logic of numbers. Then, as now, what began as a contentious and many-sided debate ended with an all-party consensus.
Most reports commissioned by the government of India are read by few people and discussed by even fewer. The reports of the States Reorganization and Mandal Commissions were altogether exceptional. They were read by many, debated by many more, and actually even implemented. They may even be – if only because of the number of people they affected – the two most influential reports ever commissioned by a government anywhere in the world.
The influence exercised by the States Reorganization Commission was direct: it led to the redrawing of the administrative map of India on linguistic lines. The Mandal Commission’s influence, however, was mostly indirect. By its terms only a few thousand government jobs came up for allotment to OBCs. But the debate the report sparked, and its eventual acceptance, provided a tremendous fillip to OBC pride and solidarity. Among the beneficiaries were the two Yadavs, Lalu and Mulayam. Both left the Janata Dal and set up their own parties, and very successfully too. Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal stayed in power in Bihar for more than a decade (until 2005); it is again, as I write, the leading party in a coalition government in the state. Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party was episodically in power in Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s; it is once again in power as I write, with Mulayam’s son Akhilesh Yadav serving as chief minister.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 78