Other American politicians had got into the act before Kerry. In 2002, a computer programmer from Florida ran for Congress on a one-point programme: an end to ‘outsourcing’. The same year, a woman member of the New Jersey Senate introduced a bill forbidding the outsourcing of state contracts to foreign firms. Like her counterpart in Florida, her main complaint was against Indian computer firms and professionals. These politicians were responding sympathetically to the ‘pissed off programmers’, to the Americans who had lost their jobs to Indians and wanted them back.68
In December 2003, the influential Business Week magazine ran a cover story on ‘The Rise of India’. It noted that there were now more IT engineers in Bangalore than in the whole of Silicon Valley. And they were mostly doing work for American clients, for giant corporations like GE who wanted complex engineering problems solved, as well as for Kansas farmers who wished merely to have their tax returns filled out. This ‘techno take-off is wonderful for India’, commented Business Week, ‘but terrifying for many Americans’. The local workers laid off by foreign substitutes would face ‘wrenching change’; few would ever land a job as well paid as the one they had just lost. ‘No wonder India [was] at the centre of a brewing storm in America’. State legislatures were under pressure to ban outsourcing; some succumbed, like Indiana, which cancelled contracts awarded to Indian firms.69
Some commentators on India’s economic rise wrote in paranoid terms; others out of admiration. In April 2004, Newsweek informed its readers that India was no longer a poor, benighted, Third World country; it was now ‘a good place to do business’, indeed, ‘an investment-worthy partner’ for Americans and American business.70
The predictions came thick and fast – that Indians would take away American and European jobs; that India, with China, would become the global superpower of the twenty-first century. Whether they stemmed from fear and paranoia, or from wonder and admiration, it was surely strange, if not a miracle, that such forecasts were made at all. For through most of India’s history as an independent nation it had heard altogether different tunes being sung. With every communal riot it was said that India would break up into many different fragments. With every failure of the monsoon it was predicted that mass starvation and famine would follow. And with every death or killing of a major leader it was forecast that India would abandon democracy and become a dictatorship.
Those earlier prophecies also stemmed from a variety of motives – some were made with concern, others out of pity or contempt. They prompted anger and embarrassment among educated Indians. These newer predictions, however, led to a rising tide of self-congratulation. Indian newspapers and magazines now ran stories captioned ‘Global Champs’ and ‘On the Way to Number One’. One Delhi columnist was so certain that India was becoming the world’s titan that he worried that it would repeat the errors of those it had replaced. Where the West in its heyday had callously exploited its colonies, he urged ‘Indian business to establish a loving and friendly relationship with other countries . . .’. The important thing, he said, was ‘to ensure that India is not seen as a cruel imperial power in the world of tomorrow’. That India would indeed soon be an imperial power was, however, taken for granted.71
Those older anticipations of India’s demise were greatly exaggerated. For the constitution forged by the nation’s founding fathers allowed cultural heterogeneity to flourish within the ambit of a single (and democratic) nation-state. However, these celebrations of India’s imminent rise to power were premature as well. Despite the manifest successes of the new economy there remained large areas of poverty and deprivation. Only purposive state intervention could correct these imbalances; and the Indian state, circa 2000, was too corroded and corrupted to act with much purpose. It was mistaken, then, to see India as swiftly going down the tube; and it was mistaken, now, to see it as soon taking its place among the elect of the earth.
XI
In October 1999, Pakistan’s brief flirtation with parliamentary democracy ended. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deposed in a coup led by the chief of army staff, Pervez Musharraf. The Indians were not best pleased with these developments; for it was Musharraf who was believed to have masterminded the Kargil operations earlier that year.
In March 2000 President Clinton visited South Asia. He spent five days in India and five hours in Pakistan, in a historic reversal of the traditional American bias towards the smaller country. This was an acknowledgement of India’s rising strength, but also a chastisement of Pakistan’s return to military rule.
During the Cold War the United States had tilted markedly towards Pakistan. After the Soviet Union had collapsed, it moved towards a position of equidistance between India and Pakistan. Clinton’s visit suggested that America had now in fact begun favouring India. The reasons for this were chiefly economic; the sense that here was a large market for American goods. In 1990, Indo-US trade was worth $5.3 billion; now it had nearly tripled. Thus, while for many decades Washington was prone to treat India as an ‘insignificant pawn’ in the Cold War, by the end of the twentieth century it had become a ‘natural ally’.72
The day after President Clinton landed in New Delhi, terrorists dressed in Indian army uniforms descended upon the village of Chittisinghpora in Kashmir, pulled out Sikh men from their homes, and shot them. In a village of 300 homes, ‘nearly every house ha[d] lost a relative, neighbour, or friend’. The tragedy was compounded when the security forces shot five men they claimed had committed the crime, but who were later found to be innocent.73
The Chittisinghpora killers were probably freelancers who did not have the sanction of the Pakistani government. Still, there was little question that it was the Kashmir issue which continued to most deeply divide the two nations. President Musharraf issued periodic reminders of Pakistan’s undying commitment to the ‘liberation struggle’ of the Kashmiris. The Indian prime minister chastised his counterpart for adhering to the ‘pernicious two-nation theory that brought about the partition’.74
Neither country was prepared to accept the other’s position on Kashmir. However, a dialogue was recommenced, this motivated perhaps by the need to act as responsible nuclear powers in the eyes of the world. In July 2001 President Musharraf visited Agra at the invitation of the Indian government. He and his wife were put up in a luxury hotel overlooking the Taj Mahal. The general and Vajpayee talked for long hours, with and without aides. The meeting ended inconclusively, when a draft communique left both sides dissatisfied, with India wanting a greater emphasis to be placed on cross-border terrorism and Pakistan asking for a more explicit acknowledgement of the democratic aspirations of the Kashmiri people.
While General Musharraf was in Agra terrorists struck again in the Valley. In a dozen separate attacks at least eighty people were killed. This was becoming a pattern – whenever important dignitaries visited New Delhi the violence in Kashmir would escalate. When the US secretary of state Colin Powell came in October 2001, terrorists launched a grenade assault on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. Two months later, they undertook an even more daring action. Four suicide bombers entered the Indian Parliament in a car and attempted to blow it up. They were killed by the police, who later identified them as Pakistanis.75
The Assembly building in Srinagar was a symbol of the state’s integration with India. The Parliament building in New Delhi was the symbol of Indian democracy itself. Within its portals met elected politicians representing a billion people. The attacks on these two places brought an end to the diplomatic dialogue. India accused Pakistan of abetting the terrorists. Appeals were made to the US government to rein in its old ally. While sympathizing with America after the incidents of 11 September 2001, India added that their sympathy was made the more sincere by the fact that they had long been victims of terrorist violence themselves.
In the spring of 2002 exchanges between Indian and Pakistani troops became more frequent. As spring turned to summer, and the troop build-up intensified, the concerns of 1998 returned – would the
subcontinent be witness to the first ever nuclear exchange? A respected Nepali monthly thought that the region was ‘poised on the cusp of war once again’. A leading American analyst believed that ‘the crisis between India and Pakistan is the most dangerous confrontation since Soviet ships steamed towards the US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962’.76
In the end, war was averted; although perhaps it wasn’t even planned. Within India, attention shifted to the coming assembly elections in Kashmir. The state had, as a Delhi newspaper squarely put it, a ‘long history of rigged elections’, the polls of 1977 being the exception to the rule.77 In the past, the Election Commission had, in Kashmir at any rate, ‘always appeared to be in the company of, and therefore in collaboration with, security forces and partisan state government functionaries . . .’. Now it worked overtime to redeem its reputation. The chief election commissioner ordered a complete revision of the voters’ list, which was unchanged since 1988. An extensive survey of all houses led to a new, comprehensive list, covering 350,000 pages in the elegant but hard-to-print Urdu script. Copies of the electoral rolls were then distributed to all political parties, and displayed in schools and hospitals and government offices across the state. A further precaution was the import of 8,000 electronic voting machines, to prevent booth-capturing and rigging.78
The assembly elections were held in September 2002. The militants killed a prominent moderate just before the polls, and urged the public to boycott them. Despite these threats, some 48 per cent of Kashmiris turned out to vote, somewhat less than was usual in other parts of India, but far in excess of what had been anticipated. International observers were at hand to confirm that the polls were fair. The ruling National Conference was voted out of power; the winners were an alliance comprising the Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party. The 2002 Jammu and Kashmir election, wrote two long-time students of the state’s politics, could ‘be seen as a reversal of [the] 1987 assembly elections which by eroding the democratic space had become [the] catalyst for separatist politics . . . This election has brought about a change in the regime through the popular verdict and to that extent it has become instrumental in providing a linkage between the people and the government’.79 The new chief minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, expressed these sentiments more crisply, when he remarked that ‘this is the first time since 1953 that India has acquired legitimacy in the eyes of the [Kashmiri] people’.80
XII
After the Babri Masjid came down in December 1992, Hindu radicals had 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 at the centre 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’.81
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 conflagaration.
Godhra was a town with a long 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 suggested that it originated inside the bogey, and was probably the result of a gas cylinder or kerosene stove accidentally catching fire.82
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.83
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’.84
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’.85 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 admission 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.86
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 seemed to justify the violence on Muslims by pointing to the burning of the 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 1,000 Muslims were killed, and at least hundred times that number rendered homeless, living in refugee camps whose pitiable condition was noticed by the prime minister and president themselves.87
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, as it were, 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.
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 legimitized and overseen. Rajiv Gandhi’s party won the 1984 general elections by a very large margin. And, in December 2002, Narenda Modi was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat after his party won a two-thirds majority in the Assembly polls.88
XIII
Visiting Gujarat in April 2002, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee announced a rehabilitation package for the victims of the recent riots. At a press conference in Ahmedabad, Vajpayee urged the state’s chief minister to henceforth follow his rajdharma and not discriminate between citizens according to their caste or community.89
The prime minister was upset at the Gujarat government’s mishandling of the riots, and the adverse international publicity that had resulted. He had wanted Modi removed as chief minister, but senior party men (including his deputy prime minister, L. K. Advani) dissuaded him, arguing that a public acknowledgement of this failure would cost the party dearly.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 86