India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  On the 15th of August, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh delivered his Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Speaking from behind a bullet-proof screen, he acknowledged that corruption was ‘a big obstacle’ in the way of the country fulfilling its potential. But, he added, there was no ‘magic wand’ to eradicate it.11

  The next day, Anna Hazare announced that he would go on a fresh fast for a Lokpal Bill that met his and his colleagues’ approval. He was arrested, and taken to the capital’s Tihar jail. He refused to seek bail, and instead began his fast in prison. His incarceration brought thousands of people out into the streets of Delhi, with parallel protests elsewhere in the country. The Opposition refused to allow Parliament to function, demanding Hazare’s release. On the 20th of August, the government released him, whereupon Hazare continued his fast as a free man, albeit in the full glare of the public and the media. He moved to the Ramlila Maidan, where his supporters had erected a stage on which he sat, waving and occasionally speaking to the assembled crowds.12

  Hazare was no Gandhi, but this second fast rivalled the Dandi March in attracting the nation’s attention. That, unlike the Mahatma’s march to the sea, it was conducted in the age of live, satelite, television added enormously to its appeal. Through the day, the people of Delhi – students, workers, and professionals – thronged the Ramlila Maidan, to see for themselves the spectacle as it unfolded. The leaders of India Against Corruption made exhortative speeches, volunteers waving the national tricolour as they spoke. In the morning and again in the evening, Hazare would emerge from behind a screen (where he was fasting, and resting) to promise the flock that he would continue his ordeal for ‘ek aur din, desh ke liye, desh ke liye’ (one more day, for the nation’s sake).

  At home, in Bangalore, I sat in front of the television, one among millions of Indians who had abandoned work to watch and take in this gripping political drama. The contrast between Hazare and the prime minister was particularly striking: two men in their seventies, one willing to stake his life to end corruption, the other unwilling to take action against the corrupt ministers in his government.13

  With every passing hour the legitimacy of the Congress regime further crumbled. As the columnist C. P. Surendran wrote at the time, ‘a party that can’t argue its case against a retired army truck driver whose only strength really is a kind of stolid integrity and a talent for skipping meals doesn’t deserve to be in power’.14

  As Hazare fasted, the government sent emissaries to him, among them ministers and officials from his native Maharashtra. Then on 27th August, with Anna Hazare’s fast well into its second week, both Houses of Parliament decided unanimously to pass a revised Lokpal Bill that would incorporate the ideas of Hazare and his colleagues. The next day, Hazare ended his fast, sipping from a glass of coconut water mixed with honey, offered to him by two little girls, a Dalit and a Muslim, the symbolism most likely not Hazare’s own but chosen for him by his media-smart advisers. Across the country, tens of thousands of Indians poured into the streets, celebrating what India Against Corruption was calling ‘a people’s victory’.15

  As 2011 came to a close, the UPA regime in New Delhi was suffering from a crisis of credibility. And worse was to follow. In February 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the 122 telecom licences issued by the government were illegal as they were handed out without a proper and transparent process. Both the BJP and the Left welcomed the verdict, and said that although the minister who had issued the licences (A. Raja) was already in jail, the prime minister himself could not escape responsibility. There were calls for Dr Manmohan Singh to resign.16

  The Congress was beset by corruption scandals at the centre, as well as in states where it was in power. In Maharashtra, the Congress government had diverted apartments meant for war widows to its own favoured politicians and bureaucrats. When this came to light, the chief minister, Ashok Chavan, was compelled to resign. In July 2012, the CBI filed a charge sheet against Chavan and his associates. The crimes they were accused of included cheating and criminal conspiracy.17

  Perhaps even more so than in other parts of India, politicians in Maharashtra were remarkably quick to skim off government contracts. In 2012, the Union government’s own annual economic survey noted that although some Rs70,000 crores had been spent on irrigation projects in the past decade, the irrigated area in Maharashtra increased by only 1 per cent. The irrigation portfolio had long been held by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), an ally of the Congress in both state and centre, and likewise a party known for its proximity to builders and contractors. Charged with misappropriating funds meant for irrigation, which, if properly used, could have forestalled drought in Maharashtra, a leading NCP politician remarked that he would urinate in the dams to help fill them. His callous remark intensified the criticism his party and government were facing.18

  The next month, August, saw an even more severe blow to the image of the ruling alliance in New Delhi. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), a high constitutional authority charged with overseeing the fiduciary conduct of the central government, tabled a report in Parliament charging that favouritism in the allocation of coal blocks had led to a loss to the exchequer of Rs1.86 lakh crore. These coal blocks were largely in forests owned by the state, which had here (mis)used its discretionary powers to allot them to entrepreneurs close to the Congress or to individual Congress leaders.19

  Many of these (mis)allocations had taken place in the years 2006–9, when the Coal Ministry was directly under the control of the prime minister. Dr Manmohan Singh long had an image of being personally incorruptible; indeed, this reputation had played a part in swaying voters in favour of the Congress in 2009. While he had not personally benefited from these transactions, that they had occurred under his watch was a body blow to his reputation. The calls for the prime minister to resign became even louder.

  III

  In May 2011, the Left Front, which had ruled continuously in West Bengal since 1977, lost power to the Trinamool Congress, a party led, directed and controlled by Mamata Banerjee. Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK, was sworn in as chief minister. With Mayawati in power in Uttar Pradesh, at this point in time three of India’s largest and most important states were run by women politicians. Meanwhile, Sushma Swaraj was Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and, of course, Sonia Gandhi was both president of the Congress party and chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance that ruled at the centre.

  Some women were vastly influential in Indian politics. But on the whole the status of women in India was not something to boast about. The Constitution makers had hoped that in time women would become increasingly visible as workers, managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs. There was some progress in this direction in the first decades of Independence; however, from the 1980s onwards there was a patriarchal backlash. India’s major religions, Hinduism and Islam, placed men in a superior position to women both in scripture and in social practice. Their prejudices clashed or competed with the ideals of the Indian Constitution, with unhappy results. In villages, caste panchayats placed all kinds of restrictions on what women could wear or do – in some places, even mobile phones were banned. Honour killings of girls who chose their own husbands became distressingly common. Meanwhile, in many Muslim families, girls were withdrawn from high school, not allowed to work outside the home and often compelled to wear the veil.20

  Indeed, despite rising education levels among women, the percentage of females in the workforce was declining in India. It fell from 34 per cent to 27 per cent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, at a time of tremendous economic growth. And working women faced a great deal of discrimination in the workplace. Even in professedly forward-looking professions such as the media and the law, there were few women in leadership roles.21

  A study of the six largest Asian economies judged India the worst in terms of biases against women. The age at marriage was the lowest in India. Even when they ha
d well-paid jobs in the organized sector, Indian women were expected to bear the brunt of housework and child rearing, and set aside their own aspirations to please or satisfy their parents and parents-in-law.22

  If the status of women was bad in the cities, in the countryside it was even worse. Over the previous century the sex ratio had been steadily falling – from 972 females to 1,000 males in the year 1901, it had dropped to 947 in 1951 and 933 in 2001. It rose to 940 in 2011, yet it remained adverse, revealing the fact that child mortality was highly variable by gender. In most Indian homes, boys were treated better than girls – provided more nutritious food, better access to health care and sent to school, while their sisters laboured in field and forest. From the 1980s, advances in medical technology had worked to make more lethal an already deadly prejudice. Thus, the new sex determination tests allowed parents to abort female foetuses. Although banned by law, these tests were widely available in clinics throughout India.23

  Clinics aborting female foetuses were especially popular in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, where the sex ratio was well under 900. This had led to what was being called a ‘crisis of masculinity’. According to the traditional rules of marriage, one’s spouse had to be from one’s caste and linguistic group, though usually not from one’s village. As boys grew into men, an increasing number found that brides were simply unavailable in the locality. So they contracted unions with girls from hundreds of miles away, belonging to other states, castes, and linguistic groups. Now, women from the states of Assam, Bihar and West Bengal were being sought – and, occasionally, bought – by men from Haryana and Punjab. These ‘cross-region’ liaisons were sometimes informal, at other times legalized through the rites of marriage. Questions remained about how the offspring of these highly unusual unions would be treated by a society still bound, in most other respects, by the ties of caste and kinship.24

  There was violence against the female foetus, and even more violence against girls once they came into the world and grew into adulthood. There was a great deal of sexual abuse in the home, not just the beating and brutalizing of wives by husbands, but of female cousins by male cousins, of nieces by uncles, even, on occasion, of daughters by fathers. Sexual violence was quite common in the workplace too. The exploitation, threatened or actual, of younger women colleagues by their male bosses was a feature of newsrooms, corporate offices, even progressive, ‘do-good’ think tanks and activist groups.25

  The depths of patriarchal prejudice in modern India were dramatically, shockingly, demonstrated in the gang-rape of a twenty-three-year-old woman named Jyoti Singh in Delhi in December 2012. Ms Singh was travelling with her boyfriend in a bus at night, with only four other passengers, all male, on board. These four men beat up the woman’s companion (with iron rods), and forced themselves on her. The driver and conductor did nothing to stop them. While all this was taking place, the bus drove past several police check-posts. Finally, the men threw the couple out of the bus and on to the highway, where a passer-by saw them and called the police, who took them to hospital.26

  As Jyoti Singh battled for her life, and her story became known, outraged citizens descended on the streets of Delhi. Students from the capital’s universities led the protest, organizing demonstrations and candle-light vigils. The protesters marched on Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace, demanding the death penalty for the rapists. They had to be dispersed by the police. In many other cities in India, similar meetings and protests were held.27

  Responding to the protests, the government constituted a committee, headed by Justice J. S. Varma (a former chief justice of the Supreme Court), to suggest measures for the speedier trial of, and more punitive punishment for, criminals ‘committing sexual assault of extreme nature against women’. Meanwhile the victim (who had been given the name ‘Nirbhaya’, one without fear) had been shifted to Singapore, where she died on the 29th of December. Three weeks later, the Varma Committee submitted its report. It passed strictures on the tardiness of the judicial process and the apathy of civil society. And it had this to say about the professed guardians of law and order: ‘The insensitivity of the police to deal with rape victims is well known. The police respect a patriarchal form of society, and have been unable to deal with extraordinary cases of humiliation and hardship . . .’. The report went on to note that ‘the police are involved in trafficking of children (including female children)’.

  The Varma Committee asked for the police to be made more accountable, for the judiciary to be more vigilant, for the state to provide facilities for the education of abandoned or homeless children, for political parties not to allow candidates with criminal antecedents to contest elections. It also recommended ‘the creation of a new constitutional authority akin to the Comptroller and Auditor General for education [and] non-discrimination in respect of women and children.’

  The last line of the report read: ‘We pay our tribute to the departed soul of Nirbhaya which has occasioned this exercise’.28

  Following the tabling of the Varma Committee report, Parliament passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013, which provided for more stringent punishment for crimes against women. Those who committed crimes such as rape could be sentenced to life imprisonment, while repeat offenders could even get the death penalty. The bill also defined stalking and voyeurism as non-bailable offences, and prescribed a ten-year jail term for those who threw acid on women (a not uncommon crime in some parts of India).29 The law was in place; the more – far more – arduous task of transforming popular attitudes and undermining patriarchy in everyday life remained.

  Indeed, in India, where progress and reaction, tradition and modernity were in complicated and contentious co-existence, one could not always trust the law to show the way to justice and reason either. In July 2009 the Delhi High Court had struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized gay sex. The judgement was challenged in the Supreme Court, with Hindu, Muslim and Christian conservatives coming together in a rare display of inter-religious solidarity. In December 2013 the Supreme Court restored Section 377 and criminalized adult gay sex again. Justices G. S. Singhvi and S. J. Mukhopadhyaya disagreed with the Delhi High Court that Section 377 violated the provisions of the constitution of India. They concurred with those who, back in the nineteenth century, had framed the IPC, and held that gay sex was ‘against the order of nature’.30

  In the court as the judgement was passed were many gays and lesbians. They wept as the judges (one of whom later confessed that he had never met a gay man in his life) read out their order restoring the status quo.31 Those in same-sex relationships, who had begun to breathe freer after the 2009 judgement, would now once more face the threat of police persecution and social ostracism.

  IV

  In most democracies, a party in power gets anxious about re-election roughly a year-and-a-half before its term ends. The anxiety is manifest in, among other things, the things the ruling party’s leader says or does, the concessions or promises she or he makes to the electorate. So it was with Indira Gandhi in 1983, with Rajiv Gandhi in 1987, and so it was with Sonia Gandhi as India entered the year 2013. In January, her son Rahul Gandhi was appointed vice president of the Congress at a party convention in Jaipur, with fireworks lighting up the sky and MPs telling journalists how they were dazzled by the dynamism of this latest member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The sycophancy was not limited to ordinary MPs however; some months later, even the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, told the press that he would ‘be happy to work for the Congress party under the leadership of Rahul Gandhiji’.32

  Even as she supervised the elevation of her son, Sonia Gandhi sought to reinforce her party’s welfarist credentials. The UPA had proposed a food security scheme whereby two-thirds of the population would be provided grains free or at heavily subsidized rates. The scheme had been criticized as a likely drain on the exchequer, and as promoting corruption. There were other criticisms too; that the bill sought to promote an excessive d
ependence on carbohydrates at a time when Indians were moving towards mixed diets and that it pampered farmers rather than consumers.

  The bill mandating the food security scheme had not been passed in Parliament. Yet Mrs Gandhi was determined to see it through. She made the party’s commitment public on 20 August, Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary. While speaking of her husband’s professed commitment to the poor, she told the assembled reporters that the ‘UPA government is following the ideals of [Mahatma] Gandhi and continuously marching forward to bring revolutionary changes in the lives of the aam admi.’33

  In so far it promised more welfare schemes, the Congress strategy for the 2014 elections was akin to that in 2009. This time, however, the party posters had a single face, that of Rahul Gandhi. Their main rival, the BJP, had no strategy in place of their own. Their stalwarts A. B. Vajpayee and L. K. Advani were now too old to be plausible prime ministerial candidates. On the other hand, there were several younger BJP chief ministers in the states, as well as several BJP leaders in Parliament, all experienced enough and plausible enough. Which of these would it be?

  Unlike the Congress, the BJP was a party that took decisions on the basis of discussion and debate, not through the whims of a single individual or family. Indeed, the party’s mentoring organization, the RSS, had long been opposed to ‘vyakti puja’, the worship of individuals. But now, as the party and its councils considered their options, one of its members pressed his claims most forcibly on their attentions. This was Narendra Modi, who had been chief minister of Gujarat for a decade, and who was determined to make his own, independent, bid for prime minister.

  Early in 2013 – with national elections still more than a year away – Narendra Modi began to project himself aggressively on the national stage. Recognizing the power (and numbers) of first-time voters, he spoke to student bodies in several cities. Here he spoke of the successes, real and imaginary, of what he called the ‘Gujarat model’. He told his audiences of how he had nurtured industrial and agricultural growth in his state, of how he had cut down corruption and bureaucratic red tape, and generated hope among the young.34