Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  How, after this, could India call upon Muslims to believe that they were of India, that India was theirs? I could scarcely object when Murad told me he was leaving the country.

  A few days before he went away, we drove to the place where we had first met as children. The madrassah was gone: the ground it once stood upon was now prime real estate. The mosque remained, but what had appeared so sublime to me as a child now looked squalid. The dome was a shrunken mound. I expected to find a grand building. This was a ramshackle affair of brick and concrete. We couldn’t find our names on its walls.

  Earlier in the day, Murad had invited me for a meal of authentic beef biryani. I demurred; I had been a vegetarian for most of my life. Now, sitting on plastic chairs under the shade of a tree in the deserted courtyard of the mosque where we first celebrated Divali, refreshing my memory of those days when he taught me to pray and took me to his house, he advanced a theory. I was mutinying, he said, against my ‘secular’ upbringing with my belated obeyance of Hindu dietary laws. I wanted to reply, in a spirit of mischief, that I’d gladly eat beef if he would eat pork. But he was the wrong audience for such a joke. So I told him the truth. My time at the madrassah, though fleeting, had become a formative experience for me. I had over the years been to more mosques—Badshahi in Lahore, Al Aqsa in Jerusalem, Umayyad in Damascus, the Tatar mosque in Minsk—than Hindu temples, and I never felt like a stranger in any of them. I felt strengthened now by my perforated memory of this place.

  Beyond the compound of the mosque, the city proliferated; the rebars and heavy construction machines for as far as the eye could see were evidence of Hyderabad’s new wealth and importance. On the horizon, buildings were draped in sheets of white scaffolding. A huge billboard next to them displayed a poster of Narendra Modi. The sound of the traffic grew louder as the nearby construction work stopped. The smell of burned diesel wafted in the breeze. We heard snatches of conversation. Then the small rusty gate opened and boys in neat white kurta-pyjamas and prayer caps with gold embroidery acknowledged our presence with a nod and walked into the mosque. That’s when Murad said: ‘I seriously thought about becoming a terrorist.’ He could have, he said. The old city swarmed with agents fishing for recruits. And there were times when he wanted to join them.

  More than his own torture, he told me, it was the torment of others that made him restless. He could not for some reason expunge from his mind the face of a little girl in the documentary about Gujarat who reminded him of his own sister. He could not make sense of the lack of remorse among Gujarati Hindus. He felt deceived. ‘I never thought I could, but I really hated all Hindus. I wanted to kill them all. I had no emotions left inside me.’ But memories intruded. What I let myself forget in London, he, who grew up without being befriended by another Hindu, held on to in Hyderabad. ‘I remembered that your father sent you to this school to study with us.’ There must be other Hindus who are like me, he thought to himself. ‘Aap ki yaad ne mujhe rok diya,’ he said. ‘It is the memory of you that stopped me.’

  I did not have a response.

  We’d met as unformed children, strangers to prejudice, open to difference. Now we were men with asymmetrical dispositions.

  Having entered and retreated from his world as if it were an adventure, I thought he had come all these years later to ask for help. This is what he had come to tell me. India had irreparably smashed his innocent faith in it. It violated his elemental humanity. He had somehow pulled himself from the depths of despair. But he was done with India: he was not of it, and it was not his. He was leaving with the hope that he would never have to return.

  The sun had almost disappeared when the muezzin’s melancholy call to prayer suffused the air. Murad pulled up his jeans and folded his shirt sleeves and washed his hands and feet and went inside. I sat outside in the chair. It was dark when we walked to the car. The billboard displaying Modi’s poster was now lit up brightly with floodlights. The caption in bold lettering next to his smiling face said: ‘Good days are about to come.’

  Part One

  ANTECEDENTS

  1

  Erosion

  India is Indira, Indira is India.

  —Dev Kant Barooah

  ‘Save your penis.’ That was the cry heard across northern India during the darkest months of dictatorial rule that engulfed the world’s most populous democracy between 1975 and 1977. The man who suppressed a country as diverse as India, dislodged entire communities and condemned millions of men to surgical mutilations was then just twenty-eight years old. Measured purely by his excesses, Sanjay Gandhi was in many respects India’s Ceausescu. Emotionally bruised, intellectually arid, a failure at everything he attempted in a family that typified success, Sanjay effectively took over the Indian government for two years as his criminally indulgent mother suspended the Constitution, declared a state of internal emergency, terminated civil liberties, censored the press, banished her political opponents to prison and presided over the protracted detrition of the republic founded by her own father.

  When Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, died on 27 May 1964, the ground shifted beneath Delhi. Buildings swayed. An earthquake was registered on the seismograph.1 Where blood always attended the end of great epochs, there was sorrow but no savagery in sight. The tranquil transition that ensued in Delhi, occurring against the backdrop of almost universal anxiety about India’s fate, was perhaps the truest measure of Nehru’s achievement.

  Within two hours of Nehru’s death, Gulzarilal Nanda was sworn in as his interim successor. And possibly for the first time in living memory, the Indian who wielded the greatest clout was not a priest or a sage or a prince or a soldier, but a lower-caste Tamil politician called K. Kamaraj Nadar. Leaders with large constituencies and lofty lineages lined up for his attention and favour. The source of Kamaraj’s king-making authority was his job. He was the president of the Congress Party. And he who controlled Congress controlled India.

  Originating in 1885 as a forum for the airing of native political aspirations in British India, Congress metamorphosed, under Mahatma Gandhi’s supervision, into the engine of India’s agitation for independence from British rule. Claiming to speak for all of India, it spread its presence to the remotest regions of the subcontinent: by the 1930s, Congress was the only organisation that could match the British administration’s reach. A decade later, when the British transferred power to India and left, it was the largest political machine in Asia. As its leaders entered their inheritance—the elaborate apparatus of governance constructed over two centuries of Indo-British collaboration—Congress established itself as the paramount power in India, its unrivalled organisational capability burnished by its undisputed claim to being the party that led India to freedom. Mahatma Gandhi, repelled by the authoritarian temptations supplied by the exalted position it occupied in the Indian imagination, called for Congress’s immediate disbandment after Independence. He was ignored.

  After Gandhi’s exit, untrammelled authority was Nehru’s for the taking. But Nehru had long displayed a profound awareness of power’s potential to deform idealists. In 1937, a year after he was elected president of Congress for a second time, a Calcutta magazine carried a widely-circulated article urging Indians to be wary of Nehru. ‘Men like Jawaharlal,’ it warned, ‘are unsafe in democracy.’ Nehru, the piece cautioned, ‘calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy.’ The author of this remarkable essay, published under a pseudonym, was none other than Nehru himself.2

  As India’s first prime minister, Nehru saw himself as a preceptor and strove to become a model of democratic leadership in a post-colonial landscape yielding rapidly to dictatorships. He dutifully attended parliament, conferred with the
cabinet as first among equals and deferred unfailingly to the judiciary. On the day of Nehru’s demise, Congress under Kamaraj conducted itself with a maturity that cloaked the extreme youth of the republic it governed: it was not yet twenty.

  In less than two weeks of his death, a full-time successor to Nehru was installed in the prime minister’s office. Lal Bahadur Shastri, an experienced member of the cabinet, was not an instantly arresting figure. When Zulfi Bhutto, Pakistan’s ambitious foreign minister, flew to Delhi as Islamabad’s representative at Nehru’s funeral, so unimpressed was he by Shastri that he returned home and pressed his boss, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, for mischief in Kashmir. Nehru had come so thoroughly to define India to outsiders that without him, Zulfi felt, India was ready for conquest.3

  Incidents along the border quickly escalated. A few months later, Shastri flew to Karachi for an informal meeting with Ayub. As difficult discussions ranged, the mighty dictator, dressed in evening suit, considered his democratic counterpart—sandal-strapped, dhoti-clad, diminutive, frail, vegetarian—and concluded that Shastri was a weakling incapable of putting up a fight.4 It was a big mistake. When Pakistani troops stormed Kashmir in 1965, Shastri went for the jugular. He ordered the Indian Army to seize Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s most important province. Ayub, crippled by the absence of reliable intelligence in a dictatorial dispensation devoid of honest deliberation, was staggered.5

  Shastri was aggrieved for other reasons. The characterisation of the war in the foreign press as a clash between Muslims, apparently represented by Pakistan, and ‘Hindu’ India wounded him. He regarded such a depiction as a disgraceful denial of Indian secularism, which, along with democracy, socialism and non-alignment in foreign affairs, constituted the essence of Congress’s—and, therefore, the country’s—ideological self-conception. Mobilising Indians in the name of religion, when memories of India’s dismemberment to accommodate the demands of Muslim nationalism were still tender, would probably have been easier and politically more rewarding. But Shastri, like Nehru before him, believed in and subordinated himself to the higher ideals of the republic. Addressing a large public meeting in Delhi, he emphatically affirmed India’s ecumenical character, reminding everyone that the ongoing conflagration between India and Pakistan was an international, not an interreligious, matter. ‘This is the difference between India and Pakistan,’ Shastri told the crowd, name-checking luminaries of the country’s numerous religious communities who were in attendance: ‘Whereas Pakistan proclaims herself to be an Islamic State and uses religion as a political factor, we Indians have the freedom to follow whatever religion we may choose … So far as politics is concerned, each of us is as much an Indian as the other.’6

  Pakistan eventually sued for peace. Bhutto, not for the last time in his baleful career, detected the hidden hand of the Jews behind the outcome.7 For India, which under Nehru had failed to thwart a Chinese invasion, the war with Pakistan afforded an opportunity for redemption and self-renewal. As Ayub landed in Uzbekistan to parley with Shastri under Soviet auspices for the return of precious Pakistani territory seized by India, the world’s largest democracy demonstrated, to itself more than to the world, that its institutions—Congress, parliament, cabinet, military—and ideals could do more than merely survive epochal change of guard at home. They could withstand and prevail against foreign belligerence. After magnanimously relinquishing control of Pakistani lands, Shastri—an abler and more decisive administrator than Nehru whose best years lay ahead of him—died unexpectedly. Ayub had come to venerate the Indian premier’s integrity and despise his own foreign minister. Remorseful, he offered himself as a pallbearer.

  This moment of poignant vindication for India, containing within it the seed of reconciliation in South Asia, was tragically fleeting. A battle for succession began in Delhi before the plane carrying Shastri’s body took off from Tashkent. Kamaraj, overlooking a host of more qualified candidates, decided to back Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and a junior minister in Shastri’s cabinet. The methuselahs in Congress, in what must rank among history’s costliest misjudgements, considered her a ‘dumb doll’. A year after becoming prime minister, Indira had a revealing exchange with an American journalist. ‘Do you think any of them,’ she said, referring to her colleagues in Congress, ‘could hold this thing together?’ By ‘this thing’, did the prime minister mean the Congress Party, inquired the interviewer. ‘I mean India,’ she replied.8 In her haughty self-regard and easy contempt for others, Indira was typically Nehruvian.

  Before they became Indian nationalists, the Nehrus were perfect specimen of prosperous anglophile natives in British India. Governesses imported from England tended to the children in Anand Bhavan—house of happiness—the palatial Nehru residence in Allahabad. Motilal, the Nehru paterfamilias, had his suits tailored in London. His heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and called to the Bar in London. On the subject of marriage, however, Motilal proved to be obstinately orthodox in outlook: his heir would have to endure an arranged match. Kamala Kaul, the bride selected for Jawaharlal, was exquisitely beautiful but possessed none of the refinement prized by her in-laws. It was a disastrous union. Immersed in nationalist politics, Jawaharlal cruelly neglected her. His sisters mercilessly mocked her. Indira, the only child Kamala bore, grew up bitterly resenting her father’s family.

  Once the Nehrus, magnetised by the saintly spell of Mahatma Gandhi, started renouncing their material comforts for the country’s sake, Anand Bhavan, ceasing to be a private residence, morphed into an informal headquarters of the Congress Party. Kamala, lonely in the crowded palace, found comfort in the companionship of a young freedom fighter called Feroze Gandhi. Their closeness sparked rumours of an affair. Nehru felt injured, but was scarcely in a position to demand fidelity from his wife. Kamala, in any case, soon died of tuberculosis and Feroze transferred his affections to Indira. Repressing his own personal feelings and disregarding the vitriol of Hindu chauvinists who pressed him to reject Feroze because of his Parsi faith, Nehru blessed their marriage. Feroze’s peculiar family name, suggesting a link to Mahatma Gandhi that did not exist, certainly did not injure his prospects.

  Celebrities in the freedom movement, the Nehrus came increasingly to regard themselves as a native nobility. ‘The Nehrus had become so much a part of our national history,’ Indira’s aunt, Krishna, wrote in her memoir, ‘that the Indian people seemed to feel that we belonged to them, which in a sense we did.’9 Indira’s father, for all his obvious detachments, was not immune to this peculiar family conceit. For much of his life, Nehru believed that he was fated to lead India to its destiny. His own ascendancy in Congress was studiously choreographed by his wealthy father, with a helping hand eagerly extended by Mahatma Gandhi who, exuding a fatherly affection for the young socialist, deployed his moral authority to decapitate Nehru’s more accomplished rivals. Trailed by a phalanx of liveried workers, Nehru rode a white horse to the Congress Party’s 1929 convention in Lahore, where his elderly father, incumbent president of the organisation, stepped down and placed his son on the throne. ‘Long live Jawaharlal Nehru, the uncrowned king of India,’ screamed the crowds.10

  The Nehrus injected dynasticism into the Congress Party’s genetic makeup decades before the advent of the Indian republic. And Jawaharlal Nehru—the original beneficiary of the custom of hereditary succession in colonial India’s pre-eminent democratic movement—can hardly be absolved of the charge of instituting dynasticism in democratic India’s ruling party. Nehru’s closest colleagues in Congress, from Kamaraj to Shastri, openly acknowledged that he was grooming Indira to be his successor.11 Yet Nehru, posthumously divinised by establishment intellectuals, received no reproval on this subject from his contemporaries. When the prominent editor Frank Moraes asserted in 1960 that ‘there is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own’, Indira had already spent a year as president of the Congress Party.12 What exactly qualified her for the job once held by Mahatma Gandhi
, Abdul Kalam Azad, Sarojini Naidu and Dadabhai Naoroji? Nobody asked. But if Nehru, in deference to whom more competent candidates refrained from challenging his daughter, believed that it was anything other than her connection to him, he was in the grip of a delusion.

  The man who in the colonial period had observed that ‘logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person’ was, in the republican era, capable of rationalising frequent departures from his avowed beliefs. The principled anti-imperialist and acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi, who never tired of dispensing prelections about peace to foreign leaders, had few misgivings about utilising disproportionate force against people he claimed as his own. In Kerala in the south, he engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected Communist government. In Kashmir in the north, he presided over an anti-democratic farce. In Nagaland to the east, he authorised the bombing of Christians who had had the temerity to demand from India what India had sought from the British. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation enacted by parliament in 1958 to grant impunity to agents of the state dispatched to stamp out insurgencies in India’s peripheries, embodied Nehru’s ruthless resolve to preserve the Indian union at any expense.