Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  In the anonymous self-analysis he published in 1937, Nehru had seen himself as “too much of an aristocrat for the crudity and vulgarity of fascism.” Sanjay Gandhi, an admirer of Ferdinand Marcos and a devoted reader of Archie comics, had no such aesthetic inhibitions. On the day before the declaration of the Emergency, he went about cutting off the power supply to newspaper offices in Delhi and drawing up lists of opposition leaders to be arrested. Later Sanjay personally vetted the daily content of the media, which quickly turned to highlighting his speeches and passed over in silence—what V. S. Naipaul described as the “great silence” of the eighteen-month-long Emergency—the detention without trial of more than 110,000 people and the deaths of hundreds of protesters in police shootings all across India.

  Lumpen young men gathered around Sanjay. They extorted money from small and big businessmen and apparently also dabbled in murders and kidnappings. But Sanjay had larger aspirations. “I firmly believe,” he claimed, “that the best ideology for the people is my ideology.” He wanted to “beautify” India’s cities, make the country “ultra modern”; he wanted India to be a first world player, not just a backward third world country; and his aggressive nostrums—overpopulation? forcibly sterilize and give the poor vasectomies; ugly cities? bulldoze the slums—had much support among middle-class Indians, who were as impatient as Sanjay with the stubbornly destitute majority of India’s population.

  With her son unofficially, if fully, in charge, Indira retreated into her own world; the extraordinary self-centeredness Nehru had noticed now kept all reality at bay. “There is no show of force whatsoever anywhere in the country,” she stated repeatedly. “My family has been very much maligned,” she told a British journalist, “and of course my son is not in politics at all.” Nayantara Sahgal attributes the falsehoods to Indira’s profound craving to be seen as the truest and most principled leader of the Indian masses. This explains why she expected to win, and therefore held, the national elections in 1977, in which the unprotected poor, who suffered most from the violent evictions and the terroristic “family planning” schemes of the Emergency, voted her out of office.

  Difficult times might have then seemed inevitable for Indira. But the coalition of opposition parties began collapsing soon after it ended one-party rule over India. Its leaders, greedy after their long exclusion from the perks of high office, squabbled among themselves. They tried intermittently to arraign Indira for her various excesses during the Emergency, but their clumsiness only made her seem a victim, a role she took to passionately as she toured around the poorer parts of the country, asking for forgiveness and sympathy.

  Soon after she was voted back to power in 1980, Sanjay Gandhi died while attempting some stunts in a light airplane above Delhi. The freak accident—“the best thing that could happen to India,” as one of Indira’s own cousins tactlessly but truthfully remarked—seems to have deepened Indira’s delusions. Throughout her remaining four years in office, she traveled, on government helicopters and planes, from one Hindu guru and temple to another, pleading for divine protection from her “enemies”—the CIA, Sikh militants, the leaders of the opposition, and even Sanjay’s widow, Maneka—who seemed to her to be everywhere, undermining her, personally, as much as the “national interest.”

  In 1982, Indira expelled Maneka from the prime ministerial residence in New Delhi; her assistant tried to search Maneka’s luggage as she left, and Indira herself tried to hold on to Sanjay’s young son, Varun. In Kashmir, in 1984, Indira engineered, through bribes paid to legislators, the collapse of a democratically elected government; it was the first of a series of events that forced Kashmiri Muslims into a full-scale anti-India insurgency in 1990. In Punjab, Sanjay and the Congress Party had promoted an extremist Sikh preacher called Bhindranwale in order to undermine the principal Sikh party, the Akali. In the early eighties Bhindranwale turned against his sponsors and declared war on India. The random killings of Hindus by Bhindranwale’s men in Punjab came as an opportunity for Mrs. Gandhi to stoke up a nationwide hysteria about the various threats to India’s “unity and integrity.”

  Much of the media echoed her insinuations about the “antinational” tendencies of the Sikhs and Kashmiri Muslims. I remember from my own small-town childhood the abruptness with which many lower-middle-class Hindus began to distrust and scorn the Sikh neighbors they had previously lived alongside in perfect amity for decades. The Hindu nationalists owe their rapid blood-strewn progress partly to this antiminority frenzy Indira worked up during her last years in office.

  In June 1984, Indira ordered the army to force Bhindranwale and other Sikh militants from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The illconceived assault upon the Mecca of Sikhism resulted in the massacre of hundreds of innocent pilgrims as well as the desecration of many sacred sites. Barely four months later, on October 31, 1984, Indira was assassinated by two of her own bodyguards; both men were Sikhs seeking revenge for the brutalities in Amritsar.

  But the bigger outrage occurred during the following three days, when mobs led by the Congress “hit men” that Sanjay had once nurtured went around Delhi with electoral rolls that listed Sikh-owned houses. The police stood idly by as over three thousand Sikhs were murdered in Delhi. Altogether five thousand Sikhs were killed across India, and as a whole generation of enraged young Sikhs took up arms against the Indian state, thousands more died in Punjab during the next decade.

  “I do not want to be remembered for anything,” Indira told an interviewer in one of those fits of imperial pique that became more common toward her death. It is not a desire that posterity can honor. The hard-edged realpolitik with which Indira and her son replaced Nehru’s impatient but benign patriarchy seems tailor-made for the BJP and its middle-class constituency. In a 2001 poll in India Today, India’s highest-circulation newsmagazine, a majority of the middle-class respondents made plain their yearning for a “strong leader” like Indira Gandhi.

  The fascistic undertones are unsettling. But this is also what Indira helped create: a widely shared mood among the Indian middle class, compounded equally of fear, aggressiveness, contempt, and apathy; a climate of opinion in which India’s various encircling cruelties—the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of tribal families by big dam projects, the suicides of hundreds of farmers victimized by the economic policies of the last decade—feel far away, in which the deaths of more than fifty thousand people in Kashmir in the last decade incite little debate beyond the narrow parameters of “national interest,” and the pogroms against the minorities can go unpunished, a national mood, Indira’s truest legacy, that now seems almost crucial to the building of a new Indian identity, of which Hinduism, nuclear bombs, beauty queens, and information technology tycoons have, in recent years, become essential, if conflicting, components.

  3. Bourgeois Anxieties

  Most middle-class people I talked to in Allahabad had to think hard when asked about the chances of the four main candidates and were often unable to remember their names; they worried more about the uncollected garbage on the streets, the lack of drainage, the pot holed roads, the power and water breakdowns. They talked about growing corruption and crime in the city, about the recent murder of a young female doctor, the rise of mafia dons, the deteriorating environment outside their homes, and the general atmosphere of insecurity. They did not think that the elections would make much of a difference. Some of them denounced politicians, described democratic politics as being “ill suited” to India, and wished that the army could take over. They said they lived with large fears about their property, their families, and sometimes their lives.

  This subdued fear and foreboding were a curious fate for the middle class, which, created during colonial times, had inherited the British instinct for law and order. After 1859, while the British grew increasingly self-absorbed, a small group of Indians had begun to embrace some of the benefits the British had brought to India while colonizing it. In 1887, the year Kipling arrived in Allahabad, the network of English-st
yle universities was extended to the city. The general British policy was to consolidate their rule over India through exposing an elite class of Indians to European civilization. This elite class of Indians grew fast, each generation building upon the achievement of the preceding one, and for at least six decades after the establishment of the first college in 1873 (where the father of Pandit Nehru was a student) Allahabad was to witness a political and intellectual awakening without precedent or parallel in North India. The Congress Party did not only find a base in the Nehru family mansion but also recruited many important members in the city. There were literary associations and clubs, new magazines and newspapers, libraries and reading rooms.

  Few traces of this sudden flowering now survive. It seems more and more like a freakish episode that nationalist passion and the British, relatively benevolent in their last years, had together brought about, something which eventually worked against, but also required, the order and certainties of colonial rule and which couldn’t have withstood the pressures of poverty and population arising from even a minimally democratic India.

  The scramble for basic livelihood has now undermined colonial institutions built for very different purposes. The most prominent example in Allahabad is the university I went to. It was once known as the Oxford of the East, where much of the intellectual fervor of the colonial period had originated. Soon after independence, it was overwhelmed with students from nearby poverty-stricken areas, who came not for the higher learning the university offered but to improve their prospects for government jobs. However, there weren’t that many government jobs available (opportunities in business and private industry had been further limited by Nehru’s decision to adopt a socialistic economy for India), and most of these students, adrift after acquiring several useless degrees, became part of the floating reserve army of the unemployed, who ultimately found subsistence in the related vocations of crime and politics.

  There had been a police raid on one of the hostels just before I arrived in Allahabad. During my time Hindu Hostel, as it was known, had been much feared for its large population of criminals who had taken refuge there, encouraged by old laws that forbade the police from entering the premises without authorization from the university. Over the years the criminals had driven out most of the students and had come to rely on pure terror to establish their right over the hostel. When the electricity board cut off the power supply after bills remained unpaid for several years, they went in a mob and burned down the local power station. Power was duly restored, and after a student leader from the hostel arranged for the digging of a tube well on the hostel’s grounds, the residents became fully self-sufficient. The hostel was no longer connected to the university, its reputation repulsing even ordinary visitors to the nearby Alfred Park, its very presence suggesting an extreme kind of secession from the city.

  Finally, the university administration, headed by a new man, acted. The local police, bolstered by additions from outside the district, surrounded the hostel early one morning. Roads leading to it were sealed off before the police stormed the building and took the residents by surprise. These elaborate preparations were necessary; the residents, armed with crude country pistols and bombs, had thwarted an earlier police attempt to enter the hostel.

  The police raid on the hostel didn’t excite any fresh hopes for the university or the city. The yellow-painted trucks and dirty canvas tents of the police standing on the hostel grounds were seen as temporary; as soon as the policemen were gone, the criminals were expected to return and throw out any students the university might assign to the hostel in the new academic year.

  Middle-class people learned to live with these little setbacks, which they saw as commonplace, secretly hoping that they would move on without being sucked into the violent world around them, something possible at any time, as I myself found out.

  After a week of living in an empty hotel in Allahabad, I had become used to its silence and was surprised to be woken up one night by noises coming from next door. I checked the time; it was two in the morning. The man at the reception said he would “do some inquiries”; he never called back. I waited for the noises—mobile phone tinkles, hectic shiftings of furniture, room service orders, hollow television baritones—to cease, but they only grew louder. They went on for about half an hour. I wondered if I should call the reception again or get up and ask the new arrivals to pipe down. In the end, laziness kept me in bed, and at some point I drifted back into sleep.

  In the morning, the elevator and lobby were full of young aspiring politicians, recognizable by their white cotton kurta pajamas, mobile phones, and keen-eyed look, three things that often went together as the distinguishing signs of some tainted priesthood. They had come to meet someone—probably, I thought, the film star from Bombay Shatrughan Sinha, who had been campaigning on behalf of the BJP’s candidate, and whose arrival in the city prompted several people to phone me, wanting to know if I was Mr. Sinha’s secretary.

  Silence was restored in the adjacent room the next night, and I didn’t think any more of it. Three days later I was introduced to Piyush, who worked as a local correspondent for The Times of India. He came up to my room, and the first thing he said was that he had met Raja Bhaiyya at the room adjacent to mine three days before. I was startled. Raja Bhaiyya: I knew the name. One of the feudal lords of the region, he belonged to one of the many landed families whose control, mostly by means of terror, of various small principalities had been tolerated by the British as long as the revenues came in on time and who were now sustained in independent India through electoral politics.

  With several cases of murder, kidnapping, extortion, and gunrunning still pending against him, Raja Bhaiyya, like many other scions of pseudoroyal families, had become a politician and secured his victory in elections to the state legislature not by hard-selling good intentions or promises, but by the simple expedient of “booth capturing,” whereby armed men took over voting booths, drove away all legitimate voters, and then filled the ballot boxes at their leisure.

  Unaffiliated at first, Raja Bhaiyya had joined the Hindu nationalists after they promised to make him a minister in the state government. Soon after assuming power, he arranged for the transfer of a police officer who had shown unusual zeal in pursuing criminal cases against him (it had always been hard to prosecute Raja Bhaiyya, for no one dared take the witness stand against him, and he had secured several acquittals in the courts).

  It was then the national press had suddenly taken notice of him. There were accounts of his brutality, a trait he had inherited from his father, who, according to one story, used to feed his opponents to the crocodiles in a nearby lake. The story was probably apocryphal; but the legend had held, and then there were the stories that couldn’t be dismissed. Piyush had researched Raja Bhaiyya’s criminal background and seen the lake, whose large fish population Raja Bhaiyya claimed as his legitimate source of income. He said that it was good I hadn’t gone up to his room that night in my irritated state. Apparently, Raja Bhaiyya didn’t take well to criticism. A Muslim shopowner who had spoken against him had recently been hacked to pieces in the middle of a crowded bazaar by one of his henchmen (the murderer was arrested; but as always there were no witnesses, and later I was to see pictures of decayed unclaimed corpses at the police station notice boards in Raja Bhaiyya’s region).

  Piyush said, “The responsibility of high office has mellowed him only slightly. Perhaps, he now thinks a bit before ordering someone’s murder.”

  Piyush, shy and talkative at the same time, detailed Raja Bhaiyya ’s excesses with sarcastic energy. But behind his eagerness lay boredom. Later, when the talk turned to his own work as a journalist in Allahabad, he asked me about jobs in the Delhi papers. Researching spectacular crime and corruption, chasing after provincial politicians, interviewing minor celebrities from the metropolises: He had done all this for two years, and he now wished to get out of Allahabad.

  I recognized that urge. It was what I had myself felt
, as a student in Allahabad, when the stories of Raja Bhaiyya, and people like him, weighed upon me oppressively, and I longed constantly for a life beyond them.

  That life lay for most people in the British-created refuge from the threatening chaos of India, Civil Lines, whose prestige and glamour after independence were to grow in Allahabad and in hundreds of other towns and small cities across British-ruled India, all with their own Civil Lines. For hundreds of thousands of educated Indians who had just emerged from a background of poverty, a job with the colonial bureaucracy, kept more or less intact after independence, was the chief way to get to Civil Lines. Once there, you inherited the lifestyles of the British almost instinctively. Eighty-five years after Kipling, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India’s finest poets in English, remembered his childhood in the Civil Lines of the 1950s, Indians by then fully installed in the bungalows vacated by the British, and found that same faux colonial world of clubs and new respectability that Kipling wrote about:

  At seven-thirty we are sent home

  From the Cosmopolitan Club

  My father says, “No bid,”

  My mother forgets her hand

  In a deck of cards.

  I sit on the railing till midnight,

  Above a worn sign

  That advertises a dentist.

  I go to sleep after I hear him

  Snore like a school bell.

  I am standing alone in a back alley

  And a face I can never recollect is removing

  The hubcaps of our dull brown Ford.

  The first words I mumble are the names of roads,

  Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton …

  Although the roads, Mehrotra, writes, were later renamed after Hindu nationalists or provincial leaders, the old life of Civil Lines went on for a while. But there had to come a time when it felt the weight of the anarchic world just outside. When I visited Allahabad, a different and ominous resident had just begun to appear in Civil Lines. It was the wife of a judge at the Allahabad High Court who spoke of this to me one evening at her bungalow, her tone altenrating between impatience and sudden gloom. There was no power, and we sat, perspiring, in her candlelit living room, surrounded by framed pictures of her children, one of whom had just got married in Boston, while two servants outside on the dark veranda carefully wiped golf clubs. One bungalow away, a local mafia don had forced out the original landowners and started building a commercial complex called Mak Tower. The building was only four stories high; to the judge’s wife the word “tower” was a menacing sign of the man’s vanity and ambition, a menace she felt extended to the whole of Civil Lines. She said, “There is no opposition from the residents, who in any case fear the mafia man and what he might do to them.”