India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In most of India the elections were moderately free. In parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, however, where roads were poor and telephone lines non-existent, the Election Commission was unable to monitor or check the capturing of booths by armed gangs. Here, there was a ‘free enterprise militia’ operating, such that ‘adult franchise ha[d] been replaced by vicarious franchise’, where the candidate with the most guns at his command could ‘perform the function of “mass voting” on behalf of the electorate’.8

  II

  Not long after Mrs Gandhi returned to power, a veteran political scientist with Congress sympathies advised the prime minister to remake the party as ‘the palpably real institution that the Congress was under Nehru’. For it was ‘essential that a sharing of power replace its personalisation, that a leadership drawing its power from the grassroots rather than above should be allowed to emerge’. Mrs Gandhi’s ‘restored charisma’ could then be used ‘in the service of shoring-up and reinforcing the institutions of an open polity before it dissipates again as in the past’.9

  These sentiments were at once noble and naive. For it was not just the Congress Party that Mrs Gandhi believed she embodied, but the Indian nation itself. In May 1980 she told a visiting journalist how, ‘for many long years, I have been the target of attack [from] individuals, groups and parties’, these either ‘Hindu and Muslim fanatics’, or ‘old feudal interests’, or ‘sympathetic to foreign ideologies’. Where she stood ‘for India’s unfettered independence of action, self-reliance and economic strength’, those ‘who are against self-reliance, or secularism or socialism find some reason or other to malignme’.10

  ‘Paranoia’ may be the most appropriate word here. Anyway, in this frame of mind Indira Gandhi was in no mood to share power except with her son Sanjay, who was now both a member of Parliament and the general secretary of the Congress Party. Indeed, as one Delhi journal remarked, Sanjay was once more ‘the most vital factor in Indian politics’. When Mrs Gandhi dismissed nine state governments after the 1980 elections it was Sanjay who allotted the Congress tickets for the assembly seats, Sanjay who decided who would be chief minister when and if Congress won. The newly appointed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, spoke for many when he told the press that ‘Sanjay is a leader in his own right and he is my leader too’.11

  Mrs Gandhi was now sixty-three, and thoughts of the succession were not far from her mind. However, on 23 June 1980 Sanjay was killed while flying a single-engined plane for fun, as he was wont to do. He did three loops in the air, tried a fourth but lost control. The plane crashed a mere 500 yards from the home he shared with his mother. Both Sanjay and his co-pilot died instantly.12

  Mrs Gandhi returned to work four days later. She was desperately lonely, one reporter remarking on her ‘total and inviolable aloofness’.13 By the end of August she had persuaded her elder son to fill the breach. Rajiv Gandhi had shown little previous interest in politics. He was a family man, devoted to his Italian wife Sonia and their two small children. He worked as a pilot with the sole domestic carrier, Indian Airlines. He flew Avros to Luck now and Jaipur, and his main professional ambition was to be allowed to pilot Boeings between Delhi and Bombay.

  Now, however, there was increasing pressure on him to enter politics, most of it coming from the prime minister herself. Speaking to an interviewer in August 1980, Rajiv Gandhi said that there was ‘no question of my stepping into [Sanjay’s] shoes’. Asked whether he would take up a party post or contest elections, Rajiv answered that he ‘would prefer not to’. He added that his wife was ‘dead against the idea of my getting into politics’.14

  Nine months later Rajiv Gandhi was elected an MP from his brother’s old constituency, Amethi. When asked why he had changed his mind, Rajiv answered: ‘The way I look at it is that Mummy has to be helped somehow.’ His entry into politics, wrote one very sympathetic journalist, surreptitious though it is, may be Mrs Gandhi’s concept of giving India stability in leadership and continuity in government’. With the ‘lack of leadership of any kind on the horizon’, being a member of the Nehru family gave him a ‘high identification quotient’ and ‘a head start’.15

  Recognizing the signs – or bowing to the inevitable – Congress members and ministers all across the country queued up to salaam Rajiv. He was asked to lay foundation stones for medical colleges, open plants generating electricity for Harijan colonies and give speeches to Congress clubs on Nehru’s birthday.16

  As Rajiv Gandhi took his first steps in Indian politics, his mother was at work on the world stage, rebuilding bridges torn down during the emergency. Mrs Gandhi was deeply concerned about the battering her image had taken in the West. Now that she had been returned to power via the ballot box, she was determined to repair the damage. For a full eight months in 1982 the United Kingdom hosted a Festival of India, featuring exhibitions of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, concerts by Ravi Shankar and M. S. Subbulakshmi at the Royal Festival Hall and much else. The performers ran the gamut from the high and classical to the earthy and folk. Thus a high school in Worcestershire was turned into a ‘miniature Rajasthan’, with dancers and storytellers from that state camping for a week, their performances repaid in kind by the school putting on a performance of Kipling’s Jungle Book.

  The festival was promoted and part-funded by the government of India. The Indian prime minister visited the UK at its beginning and end, emerging as the ‘star of the show’. During the emergency, sections of the British press had portrayed Mrs Gandhi as an ogress; now, commented one columnist, ‘she must welcome the somewhat more flattering attention she is receiving’. At one function, where she and the British prime minister were the chief guests, Mrs Gandhi said that ‘India was committed to democracy and socialism’, adding that ‘in respect of the latter we differ from Mrs Thatcher’. Meeting a group of newspaper editors, she tartly remarked: ‘I hope you will give up calling me Empress of India now’.

  The Festival of India was deemed a great success by its organizers; encores were to follow in the United States, the Soviet Union and France. The last word on the tamasha might rest with the cartoonist R. K. Laxman, who portrayed two half-naked men on an Indian street, with one reading a newspaper and saying to the other: ‘But for such a festival we wouldn’t know how great we and our achievements are!’17

  III

  Cartoonists are professionally obliged to mock the mighty, but in Laxman’s case his comments might also have had something to do with the fact that he lived in Bombay, a city where the extremes of wealth and poverty were more strikingly manifest than anywhere else in India. As it happened, the festival in London coincided with an indefinite strike by the textile workers of Bombay. They were led into action by Datta Samant, a medical doctor whose political ideology was uncertain but who possessed sufficient charisma to allow him to supplant the socialists and communists who had hitherto led the city’s trade unions.

  Datta Samant’s career in Bombay began with a unit called Empire Dyeing, where he was able to get the workers a salary increase of Rs200 a month. His success encouraged him to move into other factories; soon, the bulk of the workers in Bombay’s vast textile industry owed their allegiance to him. Their wages had grown incrementally over the years; inadequately protected against inflation, they sought an overhaul of the salary structure. Samant asked that the minimum wage be increased from Rs670 to Rs940 a month; when the demand was rejected out of hand, he called for astrike. Beginning on 18 January 1982, the strike was to last almost two years. More than 200,000 workers participated, and more than 22 million man-days of work were lost.

  This was a genuine mass movement, the ripples from which were felt throughout the city and beyond. Thousands of workers courted arrest; others clashed with blacklegs seeking to break the strike. The truculent mood affected other sectors of the city’s labour force. Underpaid police constables sought to form a union of their own; their protests spilled out into the streets. Eventually, the policemen had to be di
sarmed and jailed by the paramilitary Border Security Force.18

  In the countryside too there were stirrings along class lines. Naxalite activists, detained during the emergency but released afterwards, were making their presence felt in the tribal areas of Andhra Pradesh among communities oppressed by the state’s forestry department and by Hindu moneylenders. Other Naxalite groups were at work in the plains of central Bihar, organizing Harijan labourers against their upper-caste landlords. Some sympathizers, such as the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal, saw in these stirrings the possibility, and hope, that the Chinese revolution might one day find its Indian counterpart.19

  The early 1980s saw fresh mobilization on the lines of ethnicity as well. The movement for atribal state of Jharkhand had taken new and more militant forms. By official figures, some Rs30,000 million had been spenton ‘tribal development’ in the Chotanagpur plateau. Where this money had gone it was hard to say, for the people still lived in ‘a primeval darkness’; without schools, hospitals, roads or electricity, with their lands seized by outsiders and their forests closed to them by the state. ‘The jharkhand demand is set against such a background’, reported the writer Mahasveta Devi. ‘Tales of woe and exploitation on the one hand; the pulse of resistance on the other.’20

  The protests in jharkhandwere ledbyShibu Soren, a young man with long black locks who quickly became a folk hero. He organized the forced harvest of paddy in lands ‘stolen’ from the adivasis by dikus (outsiders), as well as the invasion of forest lands that they claimed as their own. In September 1980 the police fired on a crowd of protesting tribals at Gua, killing at least fifteen people. The incident served only to intensify the demand for Jharkhand.21

  There were also demands, if not as actively expressed as in Jhark-hand, for two new states: Chattisgarh, to be carved out of the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, constituting the Himalayan districts of Uttar Pradesh. These too were regions rich in timber, water and minerals, in resources increasingly exploited by and for the benefit of the larger national economy, yet dispossessing the local inhabitants in the process.22

  The 1980s also saw a renewal of Naga militancy. During the emergency the government of India had been able to persuade many members of Phizo’s Naga National Council to lay down their arms and come out of hiding. Some in the administration hoped that this ‘Shillong Accord’ (named for the town where it was signed) would signal the end of the rebellion. However, the accord was seen as a sell-out by Naga radicals such as T. Muivah. Muivah was a Thangkul Naga who, in the 1960s, had been one of the first to seek the help of China. Muivah had stayed four years in Yunnan, being trained by the People’s Liberation Army. Deeply impressed by the Cultural Revolution, he sought to blend its ideals with the faith he was born into, thus to combine evangelical Christianity with revolutionary socialism.

  In 1980 Muivah and Isaak Swu setup the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN). By now Chinese aid had dried up, so Muivah instead built up links with other insurgent groups in India’s north-east and in Burma. A journalist who met him in his jungle hideout reported Muivah’s view that ‘the only hope the Nagas had to achieve their independence would be if India itself broke up’. The Naga leader had his contacts among Sikh militants and Kashmiri separatists, and ‘he fervently hoped a similar movement would emerge among the Tamils of southern India – which would indeed plunge the country into the anarchy he desired’.23

  Muivah’s strongest following was among his fellow Thangkuls, who lived in the upland areas of Manipur. Were an independent Naga nation ever formed these hills would be part of it, but as things stood the Thangkuls were less than happy to be ruled by the Meitei Hindus who were Manipur’s dominant community. Worried by the birth of the NSCN, the Indian government increased troop deployment in the Ukhrul district of Manipur. On 19 February 1982 the insurgents ambushed a convoy on the Imphal-Ukhrul road, killing twenty-two soldiers of the Sikh Regiment, some officers among them. The army’s answer was to go on a rampage, searching every village in the district, abusing the men and attacking the women. A civil liberties team visited the area, recording the testimonies of the victims. They found that ‘even though only a few people supported the underground they were all suspects in the eyes of the army’.24

  IV

  There were movements for separate or new states within or outside the Union, and movements for greater autonomy within existing states. In the old Congress stronghold of Andhra Pradesh there was growing resentment at the centre’s tendency to ‘impose’ chief ministers. Between 1978 and 1982 Mrs Gandhi changed the state’s chief minister no fewer than four times. In February 1982 the new incumbent, T. Anjaiah, went to Hyderabad airport to welcome Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by a huge posse of supporters with garlands. Rajiv chastised the chief minister for bringing a crowd, and in such strong words that there were tears in Anjaiah’s eyes.25

  The humiliation was felt personally, and collectively, with the Telugu media portraying it as an insult to the pride of the Andhras. Among those provoked into action was the great film star N. T. Rama Rao, who was to Telugu cinema what M. G. Ramachandran had been to its Tamil counterpart – its acknowledged hero and superstar. (By one reckoning he had acted in 150 movies; by another, 300. A third source chose to be much more precise, putting the number at 292.)

  Unlike MGR, ‘NTR’ had no political past. Nor did his films usually carry a social message (they were mostly based on mythological themes). Now, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, he formed a new regional party, Telugu Desam, which stood for the ‘honour and self-respect of the 60 million Telugu speaking people’. No longer, he said, would the great state of Andhra Pradesh be treated as a ‘branch office’ of the Congress Party.26

  The new party was formed in March 1982; elections to the state assembly were due at the end of the year. In preparation for the polls, NTR toured the districts of the state, speaking out against the ‘corrupt’ administration of the Congress. He travelled in a van remodelled to look like a chariot. At public meetings he would emerge dramatically from the vehicle, atop a platform raised with the help of a generator. He usually wore saffron, the colour of renunciation, indicating that he had given up his film career to serve the people. He was the mythological hero made real, come to rid the world of greed and corruption and bring justice for all. Women flocked to his meetings – he, in turn, offered them universities of their own and the preferential allotment of jobs in the state sector.27

  While the national press was sceptical of NTR’s chances, the major Telugu daily Eenadu threw its considerable weight behind him. Its confidence was rewarded when the Telugu Desam won a comfortable two-thirds majority in the assembly. In the second week of January 1983 Rama Rao was sworn in as chief minister at the Fateh Maidan in Hyderabad, with 200,000 cheering Andhras crowded into the grounds.28

  One of NTR’s first acts on assuming power was to instruct his food department to sell rice at two rupees a kilogram, to redeem a promise made before the polls. In general he acted as if he was the party as well as government, in this respect emulating his friend MGR as well as his rival Indira Gandhi. ‘If the Prime Minister thinks that she is India’, commented one socialist, then ‘NTR behaves as if he is the sole representative of six and half crores of Telugu people. Telugu Desam MLAs have no voice in shaping the policies and programmes of the Government. NTR runs the show both as Chief Minister and also as the President of hisparty.’29 Like Mrs Gandhi again, NTR was prone to nepotism, as when he allowed a film studio to be built by his son on unauthorized land.30

  V

  Another, more serious, movement for autonomy was taking shape in the state of Assam; ‘more serious’ because it was driven by a groundswell of grass-roots opinion rather than by individual charisma, and because this state was located not in the Indian heartland but in its long-troubled extremities.

  Assam shared borders with West Bengal and several states of the north-east, as well as with the countries of Bangladesh and Bhutan. Assamese was the state language
, but Bengali was also widely spoken. There was a long history of hostility between the speakers of the two languages. Bengalis had dominated the middle and lower rungs of the colonial administration. As officials, teachers and magistrates they exercised great authority and power over the local Assamese, treating them with condescension and even contempt. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, land-hungry Bengali peasants had begun to move into the forests and lowlands of Assam. After Independence this migration continued, accelerating whenever political instability or economic crisis affected East Bengal or, as it later became, Bangladesh. In the decade of the 1970s, for example, the number of registered voters in Assam jumped from 6.2 million to almost 9 million, the increase accounted for chiefly by immigrants from Bangladesh.31

  The Assamese feared cultural subordination at the hands of the Bengali middle class, and demographic conquest at the hands of the Bengali peasantry. There were episodic riots in the 1950s and 1960s aimed at driving the immigrants back to where they came from. However, it was only from the late 1970s that these sentiments were transmuted into a widespread social movement.32

  The key organization in this transformation was the All-Assam Students Union (AASU). Its network extended throughout the state; all student unions in schools and colleges were affiliated to it. Beginning in 1979 and carrying on over the next five years, the AASU led hundreds of strikes and processions intended to press the central government to clear their homeland of the infiltrators.

  Assamese nationalists had based their arguments on culture and demography. AASU added a third leg to the stool: economics. The economy of Assam was manifestly dominated by outsiders. The rich tea plantations of the state were mostly owned by firms based in London or Calcutta. Assam had India’s most productive oil fields, yet the liquid was pumped up by public-sector firms that employed few locals (and none at the top level of management). Worse, the oil was then sent to refineries located in other states. Local trade and commerce was controlled by Marwaris from Rajasthan. All in all, Assam was an ‘internal colony’, supplying cheap raw materials for metropolitan India to process and profit from.