Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  Which raises the question: why is it that the poor in the most marginalised regions of India keep migrating into the arms of the Maoists? Is it purely because they cannot resist the sirenic appeal of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary exegesis of the historical contradictions of dialectical materialism? Or might it be because India has so remorselessly molested them? Singh evidently did not ponder such questions, or the implications of his actions, when he declared Maoism the greatest internal threat to the Indian state. A year after he became prime minister, Congress constituted a militia called Salwa Judum—‘purification hunt’—to strike down tribals suspected of harbouring Maoist sympathies in one of the most destitute parts of central India. Two of India’s top corporations had paid billions to extract the mineral wealth buried under the homes of the inconvenient aboriginals. The state’s official literature portrayed them as sub-human: they were not ‘cleanly in their habits’, resembled ‘cattle’ when they drank water from streams, practised ‘free sex’, led a generally ‘savage life’ and refused to ‘mingle with the modern civilisation’.13

  Singh’s administration took modern civilisation to them. Armed with police licences, weapons, and total impunity, members of the Judum, tribals themselves, were enjoined to enforce order. It is believed that they torched entire villages and corralled villagers at gunpoint into concentration camps, where the captive women, men and children became material for abuse of every variety. Police forces raped the ‘savage’ women they were sent to liberate from the spell of Maoism.14 Children were conscripted as soldiers into the Judum.15 Men were slaughtered.

  When this civilised alternative to Maoism failed to win converts among the tribals and instead intensified reprisals by the Maoists, Singh’s government retaliated by launching, in November 2009, Operation Green Hunt. Some of the most sophisticated weapons were transported to one of the most wretched regions on the planet. The prospect of innumerable collateral deaths of aboriginals did nothing to deter the government, which contemplated using air power against its own citizens.16 Maoism was the one bugbear that dissolved differences among middle-class Indians. If you questioned the government’s actions, you were a fifth columnist, an enemy of democracy. (‘Anti-development’ was the most-used slur in India before ‘anti-national’ usurped its position.)

  As Green Hunt got underway in India, Barack Obama hosted a sumptuous state dinner, his first, for Singh, where the US president paid rich tribute to the ‘enduring bonds shared by the US and India’, ‘the world’s largest democracies … speaking out and standing up for the rights and dignity to which all human beings are entitled’. Witnessing the two leaders together, the New Yorker was moved to praise Singh, ‘a seminal figure of India’s transformation from socialism … to managed capitalism and rising power status’, as ‘one of those … admirable figures that India’s independence movement and democracy have managed to produce regularly’.17 Reality could not easily ruffle a fantasy bomb-proofed by such self-cherishing certitudes. In those desolate places that rarely occupied the minds of those besotted with ‘growth’, Singh was not the soft-spoken economist feted in the councils of the world. He was the sub-continental Pinochet.

  The prime minister’s stock in Washington rose in part because he could be leaned upon. A year before Obama toasted Singh, terrorists from Pakistan had besieged Mumbai for four days. Acting on instructions relayed in real time by their handlers in the military-intelligence camorra of Pakistan, they brought India to its knees. A hundred and seventy people were slaughtered. For the first time in India’s immemorial history, Jews were killed for being Jews.

  Singh cut an abysmal figure. He placed a call to his counterpart in Islamabad and demanded that Pakistan send the chief of its intelligence agency to India. Pakistan agreed, and then reneged on the agreement. Singh’s ultimatum had yielded nothing but sniggers.18 The man who was willing to use the might of the Indian Air Force against his own impoverished compatriots shrugged and moved on. He had no contingency plan. A grateful Washington—worried all along that escalation by India might further deteriorate its own faltering war of choice in Afghanistan by diverting the attention of its perfidious ally, Pakistan, away from its western front—sprang into action. It spun Singh’s capitulation, catastrophic in the long term, as a heroic act of statesmanship. But by amplifying the self-exculpating lie that the choice before India was inaction or nuclear war, Singh effectively conveyed to Pakistan’s military overlords that they could get away with murder—and invited yet more bloodshed by their henchmen. And by failing to appear tough against Pakistan, he created an opening for Hindu nationalists at home to paint ‘secularists’ as weak on national security and accelerated the dissolution of what remained of the secular state.

  Those who profited from Singh’s abjectness, in the long run, were Muslim extremists in Pakistan and Hindu supremacists in India. But if his actions were anything to go by, what mattered most to Singh was a pat on the back from Washington: he chose to spend the first anniversary of the worst terrorist atrocity on Indian soil in the twenty-first century not with the victims of Mumbai but among his admirers in the White House. The Americans, for all their florid proclamations of friendship, neither halted their sale of weapons to Pakistan nor granted India extensive access to the Pakistani-American double-agent in their custody whose knowledge was instrumental to piecing together the planning behind Mumbai. Nobody could blame them: they were serving their own interests—to India’s misfortune, so was India’s prime minister.

  Singh’s star began to fade after the Congress-led coalition, bleached of the communists who had objected to Singh’s pro-American lurch, won a second term in 2009 as a result largely of the disarray in the ranks of the opposition and the welfare schemes steered by Sonia Gandhi. It didn’t take long for the scams—and the hideous nexus between politics, finance, journalism—to come to light. Phone calls between Niira Radia, a political lobbyist on the payroll of India’s billionaires, and some of the country’s most distinguished journalists, intercepted by the tax office, were aired on television networks in 2010. Men and women who would go on to reinvent themselves as the resistance under Modi were heard energetically pimping themselves to the rich. They were willing to convey Radia’s employers’ choice of politicians for key ministries to the Congress Party’s leadership—or make the case for them in their columns. ‘What kind of story do you want?’ Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of Hindustan Times, was heard asking Radia. ‘Because this will go as Counterpoint [the title of Sanghvi’s column], so it will be, like, most-most read, but it can’t seem too slanted, yet it is an ideal opportunity to get all the points across.’19

  Corruption, of course, has a hoary history in India. As early as 1964, the ministry of home affairs reported that corruption had ‘increased to such an extent that people have started losing faith in the integrity of public administration’.20 In the decades thereafter, graft become a quotidian fact of life: in an ordinary citizen’s interaction with the agents of the state, there were few transactions unaccompanied by a demand for bribe. India’s command economy served as a catalyst for malfeasance in the state’s high offices. It spawned a culture of patronage in which senior politicians and bureaucrats showered favoured individuals with lucrative business permits and licences. But the scams of the time seemed almost trivial in comparison to the scandals that began erupting on Singh’s watch in 2011, the twentieth anniversary of his original market reforms. One senior Congress leader, Suresh Kalmadi, was placed in judicial custody at Delhi’s Tihar jail on charges of pocketing millions in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Billed as the coming-out party for ‘superpower’ India, the games cost ten times the estimate and were a national embarrassment. Another inmate at Tihar was Singh’s communications minister, Andimuthu Raja—the man promoted by Radia—who stood accused of defrauding the national treasury of US$ 40 billion by selling bandwidth spectrum at grossly undervalued rates. Raja was subsequently found not guilty, and the integrity of the comptroller general whose audi
t implicated him is now in question.21 But what remains beyond doubt is the pernicious inroads made by big business into the highest offices of the state.

  As always with Congress, squalid corruption flourished against the percussion of heavy moral rhetoric by the party’s proprietors. The cult of the dynasty was perpetuated with the same ruthlessness with which its interests were protected. According to an analysis carried out in 2009, some 450 government projects, schemes and institutions, worth hundreds of billions of rupees, carried the names of members of the Gandhi family. From breakfast programmes for the poor to the national nursery scheme for children, from drinking-water projects in rural India to food-security missions, from housing programmes to roads, buildings, universities, airports, national parks, sanctuaries, sports stadiums, sporting championships, museums and even neighbourhoods—almost everything of any value in India bore the name of one family. You could go for a stroll in Mumbai’s ‘Sanjay Gandhi National Park’ and drink milk bottled by the ‘Indira Gandhi Calf-Rearing Scheme’.22

  ‘Our economy may increasingly be dynamic, but our moral universe seems to be shrinking,’ Sonia bemoaned at the ‘Indira Gandhi Conference’ in 2010.23 Two years after her high-minded speech on the ravages of corruption, Ashok Khemka, a senior civil servant with a hard-earned reputation for integrity, was banished by the government to some barren district days after ordering a probe into the land dealings of Sonia’s son-in-law, Robert Vadra. Khemka—who found the whole affair ‘demoralising [and] dehumanising’—had failed to grasp that, in the universe run by Congress, certain areas were no-go.24 Five years before Khemka became persona non grata, India’s premier investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, had allowed Ottavio Quattrocchi—the Italian businessman long wanted in relation to the Bofors scam that brought down Rajiv years ago—to escape extradition from Argentina, before dropping the case altogether.25

  Despite retaining the worst habits of her in-laws’ family, Sonia was also a figure of deep Nehruvian convictions and Indira-like political savvy. It is because of her that the government enacted landmark legislation enshrining rights to information, work and education. And it is she, the conscience of Congress, who held the coalition together. Her authority meant that, in spite of her decision to remain outside the cabinet, her constant supervision was indispensable to the survival of the government. In 2011, she briefly marooned herself in secrecy in New York to receive treatment for an undisclosed ailment.

  This was the moment when the growing anger against corruption erupted into a massive protest in Delhi. It was an urban explosion, lit by the frustrations of the middle class, and covered extensively by the media that catered to it and functioned as its bullhorn. Calling the movement India’s own ‘Arab Spring’ was a measure of the vanity of its organisers: their predicament was very far removed from the plight of the Tunisians under Ben Ali or, for that matter, the suffering of Indian tribals under Manmohan Singh.

  The figure who gave the movement wings was a seventy-four-year-old former soldier called Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare. The old man went on a hunger strike for ten days and threatened to starve himself to death if an anti-corruption bill drafted by his team was not voted post-haste into law by parliament. The law would create an anti-corruption agency, Jan Lokpal—a supra-constitutional super-committee of eleven citizens vested with sweeping powers over the executive, legislature and judiciary. India’s expanding middle class, exhausted by the contrast between its own rapid economic rise under Singh and the slow-moving democratic politics of the country at large, passionately backed it. Their grievance had merit. Yet questions abounded about the wisdom of Hazare’s demand. Hazare and his associates—who branded themselves ‘Team Anna’—were easily exasperated by questions, however. Invited by the government to talk, their side of the negotiation amounted to a reiteration of their original demand: if you don’t pass the plan into law, Anna will kill himself. How about we ask a parliamentary standing committee to scrutinise it, proposed the government. Hazare will die if you do, replied Team Anna. In desperation, the government made a counter offer: we’ll try to pass the bill, but how about we make some changes: keep parliament, which is the elected sovereign of India, outside the scope of Jan Lokpal? Anna will die, came the reply.

  Unanswerable to parliament, above the Constitution, beyond the traditional checks and balances of democracy, and its incorruptibility apparently assured because its functionaries were to be drawn primarily from a pool of distinguished prize winners, Jan Lokpal as devised by Team Anna was a crystallisation of the emergent Indian middle class’s yearning for a benign dictatorship. Coming on the heels of what then looked like pro-democratic revolutions in the Arab world, the assault on democracy in Delhi seemed strange. But there was an internal rationale to this clamour for authoritarianism. The Indian middle class experienced democracy primarily as an impediment to its progress. It spared them the ignominy endured by people in nearby dictatorships and gave them bragging rights in other third-world countries, but it did not enhance their standard of living. They worked hard, eschewed politics and retreated into a private world of their own. Recession of the government in the 1990s was the cause of their emergence as a globally potent consumer class in the twenty-first century. Now they had money, influence and power. They mattered—and this agitation was the first major national platform that brought them together. Its purpose, unsurprisingly, was to insulate governance from the demands of democracy. What it demanded was disciplined expediency—no matter the cost.

  The politician who typified the style of efficient governance followers of Hazare yearned for was Narendra Modi. Many of the movement’s architects eventually migrated to Modi’s camp. It didn’t trouble them that he had presided over a pogrom of Muslims in his state only a decade before. Hazare himself, it turned out, was quite a fan of Modi’s. And Modi, laying the groundwork for the top job, wrote an open letter to Hazare, telling him that ‘a prayer … came quiet [sic] naturally’ when he learnt of the old man’s fast, and revealing that ‘my respect for you is decades old’—dating back to Modi’s days as an RSS propagandist.26 Hazare, cast by the media as an heir to Gandhi, was a crotchety reactionary who, as a self-anointed social reformer in his village, had a record of tying up with barbed wire and administering public floggings to men who flouted his rules against the consumption of alcohol.27

  Faced with an uprising by the children of his revolution, Singh was flummoxed. The man who had dealt so brutally with tribal populations approached his bourgeois blackmailers in Delhi with a cap in hand. It was too late. The beneficiaries of his reforms had already begun ditching him. The robber barons spawned by Singh, seeing Modi as a more dogged champion of their interests, regrouped in Gujarat.

  The free rein Singh allowed capital is today credited with lifting millions of people out of poverty. A more accurate description would be that millions of people moved out of dire poverty and into barely tolerable destitution. Viewed in isolation this is an achievement that justifies every plaudit that has been hurled at Singh. Seen in conjunction with the wealth accumulated during Singh’s premiership by the top 1 per cent—who now own more than half of the national wealth—it is an indictment of his trickle-down economics. So much was generated at the top: India became a trillion-dollar economy in 2007, added 42,000 new members to its ranks of dollar millionaires in 2009, and was home to eight of the world’s richest people in 2010.28 Yet so little seeped down: more than 400 million Indians lived below the international poverty line in 2010, and 46 per cent of all children were malnourished in 2011.29 In one of his last public speeches, P.V. Narasimha Rao, the man who had plucked Singh out of bureaucratic obscurity, offered a public atonement by bewailing his successors’ rush to sell national assets and counselled Indians that ‘trickle-down economics—the practice of cutting taxes for the rich, hoping it would benefit the poor—does not work’.30

  Unable to eradicate poverty, Singh’s regime attempted to redefine poverty. In 2012, Singh’s planning commissi
oner, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, pegged the poverty line at Rs 32 per day: anyone earning more than that was not poor. Asked if he could survive on Rs 32 a day, Ahluwalia was candid enough to admit he could not.31

  Embattled and desperate to look tougher than Modi, but unable to arraign the criminal masterminds behind Mumbai, Singh’s government executed in 2013 a Kashmiri man who had been on death row for nearly a decade. Singh’s cabinet, joined by a callous middle class whose self-restraint vanished in the 1990s, celebrated the pre-dawn legal murder of a defenceless man. The family of the man was not even notified. All the repressed rage of the prime minister was directed at a broken inmate cut off from his family for years.32 That execution will always be a stain on India. It pleased Pakistan, too, because it drove Kashmir further away from India. For three decades, Kashmiri bodies have been the canvas for India’s impotent indignation at Pakistan. Singh’s action reminded Kashmiris yet again that this was their reward for choosing secular India over Islamic Pakistan in 1947.

  In his first speech to parliament in 1991, when he unveiled his austerity budget, Singh had affirmed that he would ‘not in any way renege on our nation’s firm and irrevocable commitment to the pursuit of equity and social justice. I promise that in dealing with the people of India I shall be soft hearted.’33 Two decades on, it fell to the Supreme Court to upbraid him for pushing the poor ‘to the wall’ and unleashing violence in the countryside with ‘predatory forms of capitalism, supported by the State’.34