India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

17

  These paragraphs on the Festival of India are based on the clippings and correspondence in Mss Eur F215/232, OIOC.

  18

  Rajni Bakshi, The Long Haul: The Bombay Teytile Workers Strike (Bombay: BUILD Documentation Centre, 1986); Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004). The strike, in effect, killed the city’s textile industry, with most units being declared ‘sick’ by the owners or the state. These mill lands are now the subject of much controversy in Bombay, with citizens asking that they be used for working-class housing or for parks, and property speculators hoping to turn them into luxury apartments and shopping malls.

  19

  Jan Myrdal, India Waits (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984).

  20

  Mahasveta Devi, ‘Contract Labour or Bonded Labour?’, Economic and Political Weekly 6 June 1981.

  21

  Darryl D’Monte, ‘In Santhal Parganas with Sibu Soren’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 8 April 1979, and ‘The Jharkhand Movement’ (in two parts), Times of India, 13 and 14 March 1979. For wider historical overviews of the Jharkhand question, see Sajal Basu, Jharkhand Movement: Ethnicity and Culture of Silence (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1984); Susan B. C. Devalle, Discourses ofEthnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); Nirmal Sengupta, ed., Jharkhand: Fourth World Dynamics (Delhi: Authors Guild, 1982).

  22

  See Shankar Guha Niyogi, ‘Chattisgarh and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India: Seminar Papers (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union, 1982).

  23

  Bertil Lintner, Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1990), pp. 83–4 and passim.

  24

  ‘Report of a Fact-Finding Team’, chapter 21 in Luingam Luithui and Nandita Haksar, eds, Nagaland File: A Question of Human Rights (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1984).

  25

  Personal communication from P. Sainath, who was covering Andhra Pradesh politics at the time.

  26

  Times of India, 30 March 1982; Sunday, 16 January 1983.

  27

  See interview with NTR in Sunday, 12 December 1982.

  28

  Times of India, 10 January 1983.

  29

  M. Ramchandra Rao, ‘NTR – Victim of His Own Charisma?’, Janata, 24 April 1983.

  30

  Indian Express, 15 September 1983.

  31

  Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflictin India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 3; Alaka Sarmah, Immigration and Assam Politics (Delhi: Ajanta Books, 1999); Anindita Dasgupta, ‘Denial and Resistance: Sylhet Partition Refugees in Assam’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 10, no. 3, 2001.

  32

  Amalendu Guha, ‘Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam’s Anti-Foreigner Upsurge 1979–80’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, October 1980.

  33

  Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. chapter 5; Tilotomma Misra, ‘Assam and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India; Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000), chapters 4 and 5.

  34

  Chaitanya Kalbagh, ‘The North-East: India’s Bangladesh?’, India Today, 1–15 May 1980.

  35

  Economic Times, 3 November 1980.

  36

  Quoted in the Times of India, 30 July 1980.

  37

  See T. S. Murty, Assam, the Difficult Years: A Study of Political Developments in 1979–83 (New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1983).

  38

  Devdutt, ‘Assam Agitation: It Is not the End of the Tunnel’, The Financial Express, 8 October 1980.

  39

  A wide-ranging and still valuable collection of essays on Sikh political history is Paul Wallace and Surendra Chopra, eds, Political Dynamics of Punjab (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1981).

  40

  There are various versions of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. I have here used the text as authenticated by Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal and printed in White Paper on the Punjab Agitation (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1984), pp. 67–90.

  41

  This account of the Punjab dispute draws upon the following books and articles: Robin Jeffrey, What’s Happening to India: Punjab, Ethnic Conflict and the Test for Federalism, 2nd edn(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); ChandJoshi, Bhindranwale: Myth and Reality (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1984); Anup Chand Kapur, The Punjab Crisis (Delhi: S. Chand and Co, 1985); Ram Narayan Kumar, The Sikh Unrest and the Indian State (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1997); Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Pan Books, 1985); Satinder Singh, Khalistan: An Academic Analysis (New Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982); Harjot Oberoi, ‘Sikh Fundamentalism: Translating History into Theory’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds, Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Hamish Telford, ‘The Political Economyof Punjab: Creating Space for Sikh Militancy’, Asian Survey, vol. 32, no. 11, November 1992.

  42

  Cf. the suggestive analysis of Bhindranwale’s sermons in Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The Logic of Religious Violence: The Case of the Punjab’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988.

  43

  Ayesha Kagal, quoted in Paul Wallace, ‘Religious and Ethnic Politics: Political Mobilization in Punjab’, in Francine R. Frankeland M. S. A. Rao, eds, Dominance and State Power in India: Decline of a Social Order, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 451.

  44

  See profile of Bhindranwale in India Today, 1–15 October 1981; Murray J. Leaf, Song of Hope: The Green Revolution in a Panjab Village (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), chapter 7, ‘Religion’.

  45

  Clipping in Mss Eur F230/36, OIOC.

  46

  Indian Express, 21 September 1981.

  47

  The verdicts, respectively, of Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, p. 71, and Joshi, Bhindranwale, p. 90.

  48

  For an insightful contemporary account of the pressures on the Akalis to become more extreme, see Gopal Singh, ‘Socio-economic Bases of the Punjab Crisis’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January 1984.

  49

  Interview with MadhuJain in Sunday, 4 September 1983; Rajinder Puri, ‘Remembering 1984’, National Review, November 2003.

  50

  Anne Vaugier-Chatterjee, Histoire Politique du Pendjab de 1947 á nos Jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), pp. 158f.

  51

  On the significance of the Akal Takht, see Madanjit Kaur, The GoldenTemple: Past and Present (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983), pp. 268–70.

  52

  Paul Wallace, ‘Religious and Secular Politics in Punjab: The Sikh Dilemma in Competing Political Systems,’ in Wallace and Chopra, Political Dynamics of Punjab, pp. 1–2.

  53

  M. J. Akbar, Riot after Riot: Reports on Caste and Communal Violence in India (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1988).

  54

  Achyut Yagnik, ‘Spectre of Caste War’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 March 1981; Pradip Kumar Bose, ‘Social Mobility and Caste Violence: A Study of the Gujarat Riots’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 April 1981.

  55

  Quoted in Moin Shakir, ‘An Analytical View of Communal Violence’, in Asghar Ali Engineer, ed., Communal Riots in Post-Independence India,2ndedn(Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1991), p. 95.

  56

  Individual studies of these riots are contained in Akbar, Riot after Riot; Engineer, Communal Riots; in the reports of civil liberties groups and in articles published in the Economic and Political Weekly
during these years.

  57

  The following paragraphs, identifying and enumerating these themes, are based on my own reading of the literature; but see also Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘An Analytical Study of the Meerut Riots’, PUCL Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1, January 1983.

  58

  George Mathew, ‘Politicisation of Religion: Conversions to Islam in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 19 June 1982.

  59

  See M. J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 197ff.

  60

  Cf. Balraj Puri, ‘Who is Playing with National Interest?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 11 February 1984.

  61

  Lt. Gen. K. S. Brar, Operation Blue Star: The True Story (New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1987), pp. 35–7. Since he led the operation, and since all journalists had been evacuated beforehand, Brar’s book is essential in any reconstruction of Operation Bluestar. However, it should be read alongside Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, this based on interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors.

  62

  Brar, Operation Bluestar, p. 91.

  63

  Ibid., pp. 126–7.

  64

  Lt. Gen. J. S. Aurora, ‘If Khalistan Comes, the Sikhs will be the Losers’, in Patwant Singh and Harji Malik, eds, Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation (New Delhi: Patwant Singh, 1985), p. 133.

  65

  J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 227.

  66

  Shahnaz Anklesaria, ‘Fall-out of Army Action: A Field Report’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 July 1984.

  67

  Sten Widmalm, ‘The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Jammu and Kashmir, 1975–1989’, in Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli, eds, Community Conflicts and the State in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); B. K. Nehru, Nice Guys Finish Second (New Delhi: Viking, 1997), pp. 627–41.

  68

  The Week, 26 August 1984.

  69

  Indira Gandhi to Erna Sailer, 20 October 1984, copy in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.

  70

  Pupul Jayakar, ‘31 October’, typescript in ibid.

  71

  This account of the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi is based on two works deservedly regarded as classics: Anon., Who are the Guilty? Report of a Joint Inquiry into the Cause and Impact of the Riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November (Delhi: PUDR and PUCL, 1984); Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1987). I have also drawn upon conversations with friends and colleagues who were active in providing relief after the riots.

  72

  ‘The Violent Aftermath’, India Today, 30 November 1984.

  73

  ‘Indira Gandhi’s Bequest’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 November 1984.

  74

  Daniel Sutherland, ‘India Seen Facing Era of Uncertainty’, New York Times, 1 November 1984; Henry Trewhitt, ‘U.S. Fears Assassination may bring Chaos in India, Rivalry in South Asia’, The Sun, 1 November 1984.

  25. THIS SON ALSO RISES

  1

  Times of India, 4 December 1984.

  2

  Times of India, 14 December 1984.

  3

  Praful Bidwai, ‘What Caused the Pressure Build-Up’, Times of India, 26 December 1984.

  4

  Radhika Ramaseshan, ‘Profit against Safety’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22–29 December 1984; Indian Express, 5 December 1984. The Bhopal tragedy has had a tortured and still continuing afterlife, with the survivors and their families ranged against the government (accused of providing insufficient medical relief) and Union Carbide (accused of paying paltry amounts of compensation).

  5

  Hari Jaisingh, India after Indira: The Turbulent Years (1984–1989) (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1989), pp. 19–20; Business India, 17–30 December 1984.

  6

  Harish Khare, ‘The State Goes Macho’, Seminar, January 1985.

  7

  Mani Shankar Aiyar, Remembering Rajiv (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1992), p. 53.

  8

  Harish Puri, ‘Punjab: Elections and After’, Economic and Political Weekly, 5 October 1985; India Today, 15 September and 15 October 1985.

  9

  India Today,15 September 1985 and 15 January 1986; Sunday, 29 December–4 January 1986.

  10

  See Lalchungnunga, Mizoram: Politics of Regionalism and National Integration (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 2002), Appendix D; report in Sunday, 20–26 July 1986.

  11

  ‘Mizoram: Quest for Peace’, India Today, 31 July 1986.

  12

  S. S. Gill, The Dynasty: A Political Biography of the Premier Ruling Family of Modern India (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1996), pp. 394–5.

  13

  Business India, December 31 1984–January 13 1985.

  14

  Shubhabrata Bhattacharya, ‘Rajiv Gandhi’s Discovery of India’, Sunday, 22–28 September 1985.

  15

  See judgment in Criminal Appeal No. 103 of 1981, decided on 23 April 1985 (Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano and Others), Supreme Court Cases (1985), 2 SCC, pp. 556–74.

  16

  Hutokshi Doctor, ‘Shah Bano: Brief Glory’, Imprint, May 1986.

  17

  See Danial Latifi, ‘Muslim Law’, in Alice Jacob, ed., Annual Survey of Indian Law, vol. 21 (New Delhi: The lndian Law Institute, 1985).

  18

  Lok Sabha Debates, 23 August 1985.

  19

  Ritu Sarin, ‘Shah Bano: The Struggle and the Surrender’, Sunday, 1–7December 1985.

  20

  E.g. editorial in The Statesman, 19 December 1985.

  21

  Indian Express, 21 December 1985.

  22

  Vasudha Dhagamwar, ‘After the Shah Bano Judgement – II’, Times of India, 11 February 1986.

  23

  See Eve’s Weekly, issue of 29 March–4April 1986.

  24

  R. D. Pradhan, Working with Rajiv Gandhi (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1995), pp. 130–1.

  25

  Peter Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), especially chapter 1, and ‘"God Must Be Liberated”: A Hindu Liberation Movement in Ayodhya’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1987. Ayodhya’s sister town, Faizabad, gives its name to the district. The official who passed the verdict was technically the district judge of Faizabad.

  26

  Saifuddin Chowdhury, quoted in Sunday, 9–15 March 1986.

  27

  See articles by Neerja Chowdhury in The Statesman, 20 April and 1May1986, reproduced in A. G. Noorani, ed., The Babri Masjid Question, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003), pp. 260–6.

  28

  Inderjit Badhwar, ‘Hindus: Militant Revivalism’, India Today, 31 May 1986.

  29

  Sant Ramsharaan Das of Banaras, writing in May 1989, quoted in Manjari Katju, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003), p. 73.

  30

  India Today, 15 March 1986; Sunday, 25–31 January 1987.

  31

  Cf. Rajni Bakshi, ‘The Rajput Revival’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 1 November 1987.

  32

  This figure comes from David Page and William Crawley, Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), p. 56.

  33

  Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshapingof the Indian Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 84.

  34

  Sevanti Ninan, Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1995), pp. 6–8.

  35

  Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Ramayan: TheVideo’, Drama Review, vol. 34, no.
2, 1990, p. 128.

  36

  Robin Jeffrey, ‘Media Revolution and “Hindu Politics” in North India, 1982–99’, Himal, July 2001, emphasis added.

  37

  Interview in Financial Express, quotedin Supriya Roychowdhury, ‘State and Business in India: The Political Economy of Liberalization, 1984–89’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Politics, Princeton University, pp. 100–1. Cf. also Stanley A. Kochanek, ‘Regulation and Liberalization in India’, Asian Survey, vol. 26, no. 12, 1986.

  38

  H. K. Paranjape, ‘New Lamps for Old! A Critique of the “NewEconomicPolicy"’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 September 1985.

  39

  Cf. reports in India Today, 15 March and 15 April 1985.

  40

  T. N. Ninan, ‘Rise of the Middle Class’, India Today, 31 December 1985. See also ‘The Rising Affluence of the Middle Class’, Sunday, 29 October–1 November 1986.

  41

  Roychowdhury, ‘State and Business in India’, pp. 73, 122.

  42

  T. N. Ninan and Jagannath Dubashi, ‘Dhirubhai Ambani: The Super Tycoon’, India Today, 30 June 1985; T. N. Ninan, ‘Reliance: Under Pressure’, India Today, 15 August 1986; Perez Chandra, ‘Reliance: The Man Behind the Legend’, Business India, 17–30 June 1985; Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, ‘The Two Faces of Dhirubhai Ambani’, Seminar, January 2003.

  43

  ‘Crony Capitalism’, Sunday, 2–8October 1988; Teesta Setalvad, ‘Pawar, Politics and Money’, Business India, 10 – 23 July 1989; Sankarshan Thakur, ‘How Corrupt Is Bhajan Lal?’, Sunday, 21–27 July 1985.

  44

  Indranil Banerjie, ‘The NewMaharajahs’, Sunday, 17–23 April 1988.

  45

  Niraja Gopal Jayal, Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 46ff.; ‘The Wretched of Kalahandi’, Sunday, 19–25 January 1986.

  46

  R. Jagannathan, ‘Welcome to Hard Times’, Sunday, 6–12 September 1987.

  47

  M. V. Nadkarni, Farmers’ Movements in India (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1987); special issue on ‘New Farmers’ Movements in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1993–4.

  48

  Vijay Naik and Shailaja Prasad, ‘On Levels of Living of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 July 1984.

  49

  Tanka B. Subba, Ethnicity, State and Development: A Case Study of the Gorkhaland Movement in Darjeeling (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1992); ‘Peace in the Angry Hills?’, Sunday, 24–30 July 1988.