Indians who happened to be socialists were branded enemies of the state and dispatched post-haste to the torture chamber. When the trade unionist George Fernandes made a patriotic ‘appeal’ from hiding ‘to the people in the north to get rid of this dictatorship if they want to preserve the unity of this country, because a situation is bound to arise where people from the south are going to say that we are part of a democratic India, we are not a part of an India that is ruled by a dictator from Kashmir’, his brother, Lawrence, was picked up by the police and brutally tortured for weeks.
Socialism, like much else, was a meaningless catchword camouflaging the gangsterisation of Indian politics, initiated by Sanjay, at the very highest levels. Until his takeover, the prime minister’s closest advisers were led by a cast of generally scrupulous Kashmiris. With Sanjay in command, the upper and middle ranks of Congress became saturated with racketeers and ruffians, mostly from Punjab, with a chilling penchant for ‘getting things done’. ‘They are the kind of people,’ an Indian insider told the journalist J. Anthony Lukas in 1976, ‘you always find near the top of an authoritarian regime: cool, pragmatic men uninhibited by many scruples.’43 One of these henchmen was inducted into the cabinet as defence minister. Others continued to thrive in Indian politics long after their benefactor had left the scene. Zail Singh, a Punjabi politician who distinguished himself by once sprinting to pick up Sanjay’s sandals when they slipped from the crown prince’s feet, went on to serve as India’s president.44 Kamal Nath, one of Sanjay’s conscripts, was in 2018 inaugurated as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Pranab Mukherjee, brought in from Bengal to the chancellery by Sanjay, retired as president of India in 2017.
The Congress leadership, consumed with the solitary obsession of self-perpetuation, extended Indira’s term in office and began seriously toying with the idea of discarding parliamentary democracy and adopting a presidential form of government. Potentially combustible exigencies that could sunder the union in the long run were given only passing attention. In Punjab, Sanjay and Indira patronised an illiterate Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. His extremism, they believed, would neuter the Akali Dal, an ethno-religious party. Instead, their sponsorship of the obscurantist sant, generating a climate ripe for radicalism, spawned a crisis that destroyed Punjab and devoured Indira. But concerned above all with keeping power, the pair was incapable of turning down a fix that was quick. Divide and rule, the doctrine imputed to the British by Indian nationalists, was now the animating philosophy of the party that succeeded them.
Sanjay, appointed leader of the youth wing of Congress, was on the threshold of taking over the party—one of the largest political machines in the world—when Indira abruptly revoked the Emergency and announced fresh elections. Her decision to call the vote has posthumously been ascribed to some vestigial commitment to democracy lurking in her Nehru blood. In reality, she was driven to it by the report of a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory.45 Re-election would instantly purge the taint of dictatorship attached to her name in the West. Her intelligence officers endorsed the think tank’s message. Sanjay was sceptical, but Indira was sold.46
The opposition—socialists, conservatives, capitalists, religious nationalists—scrambled to form a united front against Congress. Even the most upbeat among them did not really believe that their unwieldy coalition stood a chance. But as Indians delivered their verdict at the ballot booth in 1977, thirty years of uninterrupted rule by the Congress Party came to a crashing end. Indira lost her own seat. Sanjay lost his deposit. Just as Pakistan’s Ayub had been misled by his terrified minions into misreading India, so Indira was duped into misestimating the Indian electorate. She had expelled Krishan Kant from Congress for warning her in parliament that ‘when you stifle the flow of information to the people in this country, you are blocking the channel of information to yourself’.
One of the blessings of learning history, say historians, is that it prevents us from likening every atrocity to the crimes of the Nazis. And yet the newsmagazine India Today, surveying the wreckage of the Emergency, was far from being obtuse when it wrote that the torture that inmates endured in the Emergency months was ‘of a kind that would make the Nazi interrogators lick their lips in approval’. The only distinction was that the horrors in India were perpetrated by a ‘sovereign democratic government which had pledged itself to the dignity of the individual’.47 Sanjay superintended the sterilisation of 6.2 million people—fifteen times the number of people sterilised by the Nazis.48 It is difficult to think of a personality in modern South Asian history who distributed such intense agony among so many of his own people. Nor was the New Yorker exaggerating when it wrote that Indira was on the threshold of ‘ushering in an Indian version of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, with private ownership of industry, farms, and service enterprises’ before her defeat.49
It was India’s forsaken multitudes—whose suitability for democracy was repeatedly questioned and whose disenfranchisement high-mindedly rationalised away by the country’s post-colonial elite—who resuscitated the republic. But Indira’s dictatorship had by then ravaged the conventions by which politics was conducted in India. Self-restraint, constitutionalism, institutional autonomy, deliberative governance: everything that made Indian democracy more than an exercise in balloting was left severely bruised. One of the first major acts of the ideologically kaleidoscopic regime that replaced Indira was to pay the defenestrated prime minister the compliment of imitation by dismissing a series of Congress-ruled state governments by invoking emergency provisions in the Constitution. Nehru and Shastri had also used such powers, but reluctantly, acknowledging that they were carrying out a necessary evil. The necessity vanished under Indira.
‘Fratricide,’ Krishna Menon once wrote, ‘is part of our national heritage’. The Indian state made citizens of a people who throughout history had brutalised their own with the same efficiency with which they served foreign rulers for centuries. The Constitution adopted by the republic placed prohibitions on rulers and conferred privileges on peoples: guarantees of dignity, equality, protection from exploitation in the form of inviolable rights. By repurposing what began as a source of hope into an instrument of oppression, Indira and Sanjay shattered the republican dream and bequeathed a ruinous blueprint. In a plaintive letter to the prime minister before the elections, Jai Prakash Narayan, the Gandhian freedom fighter thrown in jail for leading protests against her, had pleaded with Indira: ‘Please do not destroy the foundations that the fathers of the nation, including your noble father, had laid down. There is nothing but strife and suffering along the path that you have taken. You inherited a great tradition, noble values, and a working democracy. Do not leave behind a miserable wreck of all that. It would take a long time to put all that together again.’50
The new government, a ramshackle affair beset by infighting from birth, collapsed long before it could find its feet. Internal democracy had vanished completely from the Congress Party, still one of the most vital institutions in India, when it was returned to office in 1980. You could go to the Kaaba and doubt the omnipotence of Allah, but you could not be a member of Congress and question the paramountcy of the Gandhis. When Sanjay, poised for a sinister comeback, died in a freak plane crash in 1980, Congress reflexively fielded Indira’s elder son, Rajiv, as the party’s candidate in his brother’s seat. And in 1984, when Indira was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for the military assault she had ordered on their religion’s holiest shrine earlier in the year, the party turned spontaneously to Rajiv. The leadership of 750 million people was thrust, without any discussion, into the hands of a forty-year-old career commercial airline pilot whose sole claim to the highest political office in the largest democracy in the world was his surname.
2
Surrender
Frankenstein stares us in the face…
—P.V. Narasimha Rao1
In liberal lore Rajiv Gandhi is the redeemer prime minister. He was
handsome and young, forty when he took office. Touring Bengal when news of his mother reached him, he flew to Delhi and was prime minister by the evening. The established convention of appointing a caretaker was discarded without a hint of a discussion. Indira was gone, leaving India incorrigibly mired in the miasma of her legacy.
Dynastic succession is ordinarily pre-ambulated with effusive puffery designed to warm the subjects to the incoming monarch. Rajiv’s public persona was constructed after his investiture. Congress’s public-relations mavens publicised the new prime minister as ‘Mr Clean’. His halo, powered by the family name, was cleansed of the family’s excesses. His demeanour, they said, was pleasantly different from his brother’s and mother’s. He was said personally to walk guests to the door and address even his subordinates as ‘sir’.2 This exceedingly courteous personality was hard, for many in Congress, to reconcile with the Rajiv they knew. Who could forget his visit to Andhra Pradesh, in 1982, soon after being installed by his mother as the party’s general secretary? The chief minister of the state, Tanguturi Anjaiah, a Dalit, went to receive him at the airport. In this, he was following the custom instituted by Sanjay. But Rajiv, who considered himself ‘modern’, took great umbrage and exploded with invective. The chief minister had endured a lifetime of vicious abuse at the hands of upper-caste Hindus, many of whom still considered physical contact with him spiritually defiling. But being berated in late life by a man half his age broke him. He began to shed tears. Rajiv called him a ‘buffoon’ and drove away.3
Rajiv was not motivated by any palpable prejudice. India’s hatreds were dormant presences in the world in which he grew up. The sophistication of the students at the elite boarding school he attended as a child with Sanjay was measured by their distance from the India they were being trained to lead. After school, Rajiv was sent up to Cambridge, but returned home without a degree and took a job flying domestic routes on the national carrier. Politics was Sanjay’s fixation. Draped in designer denims, Gucci shoes and a Cartier wristwatch, Rajiv was mostly to be found at Delhi’s chicest restaurants with his Italian wife, Sonia: a private man, decent and generous by all accounts, living a rich and fulfilling life away from the public eye. But secluded from Indians who were unlike them, and without the vocabulary to comprehend them, Rajiv—and the school friends he surrounded himself with upon becoming prime minister—struggled with India. They thought of themselves as modern democrats, but oligarchy was the condition of their supremacy.4
Only strongmen, the British had suggested, could bring order to India. Congress internalised that lesson. It functioned as the British did, with this difference: no British Viceroy dressed down a native leader of Congress the way Rajiv denigrated the Dalit leader of his own party. Rajiv’s behaviour, enraging the Telugu-speaking people of Andhra who felt collectively belittled, resulted in the formation of a powerful sub-national party that swept Congress out of power in the largest state in southern India. Northern India went up in sectarian smoke the day Rajiv was sworn into office.
Perhaps the only redeeming quality in Indira’s political career was her unwavering adherence to the most important component of Congress ideology: secularism. After Sanjay’s demise, Indira fell into the unpleasant habit of touring Hindu temples and consulting with swamis. Yet she also personally ordered the reinstatement of a pair of Sikh officers relieved from her protection squad because their faith came to be seen as a disqualifying factor for proximity to the prime minister. ‘Aren’t we secular?’ she asked the aides responsible for their transfer.5 The two Sikhs, returned to their sensitive posting on the prime minister’s personal instructions, riddled Indira with bullets on the morning of 31 October 1984. They were avenging, they said, her decision to send the army into the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s most sacred site.
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the preacher sponsored by Sanjay and Indira in the hope of undercutting the organised Sikh party in Punjab—the Akali Dal—had grown over the years into an untameably lethal beast. The strife in Punjab originated in the demand of the Akalis for a Sikh state within the Indian union. For Delhi to relent would have been to confer legitimacy on religious reconfiguration of territory consolidated under the banner of non-confessional nationalism. It would reduce non-Sikhs within the Sikh state to second-tier citizens, institute a religious hierarchy of citizenship within the union, threaten the rights of non-Hindus in other states, prod other ethno-religious communities to demand what the Sikhs had, and lead ultimately to the Balkanisation of India. So Indira met the Akalis halfway. Using the accepted convention of reorganising India along linguistic lines, she carved out portions of Punjab to create the state of Haryana on the somewhat dubious grounds that most people in the new state were not speakers of Punjabi. Haryana’s birth left a Sikh majority in Punjab, but with a substantial non-Sikh minority.6
This compromise, rather than pacifying the Sikh ethnocrats, emboldened them to clamour openly for secession. Indira and Sanjay had hoped that Bhindranwale would eclipse the Akalis to the advantage of India. Instead, he rebelled against his masters and became a born-again evangelist for Khalistan, a puritanical Sikh state modelled on Pakistan. He incited violence by describing Sikhs in his sermons as a ‘historically separate’ nation toiling away as ‘slaves’ of Hindus in India.7 As history, this was drivel. Sikhism was founded as an egalitarian brotherhood by a great Hindu reformer, its theology borrowed from Hinduism, and for centuries it was regarded, like Buddhism and Jainism, as a highly autonomous branch of Hinduism. But upon being enjoined to ‘smash the heads’ of Hindus, a community with which the Sikhs had never before been in conflict, Bhindranwale’s acolytes—mostly unemployed young men—proceeded to gun down a busload of Hindus. Journalists covering the terror were slain, and Sikh officers in Punjab’s police department were branded collaborators of the state and shot dead.8
The violence ceased to be viewed by Delhi as a simple police matter when support for Bhindranwale’s terror in the form of weapons and training began pouring in from across the porous border.9 Bhindranwale, anticipating a response from the government, moved into the Akal Takht, the seat of temporal authority in Sikhism, and began fortifying the complex. At the end of May 1984, Indira ordered in the military to extract him from the temple. Kuldeep Singh Brar, the officer leading the mission—code-named ‘Operation Blue Star’—was a Sikh who abhorred Bhindranwale for ‘converting the House of God into a battlefield’.10 Tanks rolled into the Golden Temple compound on 4 June. When the firing stopped, several days later, Bhindranwale was dead, as, by some estimates, were 5,000 civilians and 700 army personnel. The building’s library, which housed the original scripts of the Sikh holy book, lay in ruins.
Blue Star was a disaster. Hasty in conception and reckless in execution, it canonised a psychopath as a martyr in the minds of once-vacillating Sikhs by the manner in which it dispatched him. Before the assault on the Golden Temple, the Khalistan project appeared destined to disintegrate because an overwhelming majority of Sikhs in Punjab rejected secession and favoured unity with India. At the summit of Bhindranwale’s terror, Andrew Major, a scholar of Punjab, emphasised that ‘genuine commitment to the creation of a separate Sikh state is still rare within the Punjabi Sikh community’.11 Khalistan always was the obsession of ‘overseas Sikhs’, who, fattening themselves in the cosmopolitan havens of the West, financed violent sectarianism in the land they had left behind. It was in Canada that Air India Flight 182 was hijacked and blown up by Sikh terrorists, killing more than 300 passengers from nine countries. It was in Britain that the self-appointed president of the ‘Republic of Khalistan’, Jagjit Singh Chauhan, headquartered his operations for many years. He flew to Pakistan from London, issued his own currency and expressed the gentle hope on the BBC that Sikhs would soon ‘behead’ the Gandhi family.12 Untiring advocates of ‘multiculturalism’ and minority rights in the foreign lands they had inveigled themselves into, chauvinists such as Singh sought remorselessly to incinerate the historic pluralism of Punjab to engender yet anot
her procrustean state consecrated to preserving the ‘purity’ of a ‘people’ defined exclusively by their ethnicity and religion.
Indira, like Benazir Bhutto, was devoured by the ogre she fostered. Unlike Benazir Bhutto, Indira was secular to the marrow. She married outside her faith and forced through an amendment to insert the word ‘secular’ into India’s self-definition in the Constitution’s preamble. It is possible that Indira might have deployed religion in the future if her hold on power appeared to be in peril (she had also smuggled ‘socialist’ into the Constitution, and she was self-servingly flexible about what that word implied). Yet her obstinate refusal to allow the men fated to become her killers from being discharged from their jobs because of their faith betrayed an undeniably valiant commitment to secularism. For a generation of Indians shaped by India’s Partition in the name of religion, her resolute undoing in her final days of what she perceived to be discrimination on religious grounds raised her up in their hearts and minds when she was gone. (My own father, among the thousands of activists imprisoned and tortured during her dictatorship, flew to Delhi upon hearing of her death on the radio and reverently touched her feet as she lay in state.)
Malevolent Republic Page 5
