by John Keay
A lengthy appeal process ensued. Pleas for clemency and offers of asylum came from all over the world, including from the US, which Bhutto had accused of supporting Zia. But, true to his conceit about being the embodiment of the nation, he refused to tone down his defiance or forswear his destiny. Only death could be guaranteed to silence his peculiar brand of self-centred populism (and not even that if allowance be made for its dynastic aftermath). Zia, busy with an agenda of his own by the time the final appeal was rejected in April 1979, had little choice. On the morning of 4 April, after fond farewells with his wife and his twenty-five-year-old daughter Benazir, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was led to the gallows and hanged as a common criminal.
In a parting shot from his death cell in late 1978, Bhutto had linked Zia’s recent self-appointment as president of Pakistan with the assassination of the Afghan royal family in a communist coup earlier in the year. Zia’s action and its ‘downright burial’ of the 1973 constitution had turned Pakistan into what Bhutto called an Orwellian ‘Animal Farm’. On the other hand, the communist bloodbath in Kabul seemed to Bhutto a ‘tonic’.6 The Great Game, that long-standing Anglo-Russian tussle for control of Afghanistan and beyond, was ‘over’. The Afghans had finally dispensed with their Western-backed monarchy and the imperialists had been sent packing. By implication there was hope for Pakistan yet.
But if Bhutto was looking to the day when Zia too would be overthrown by Marxist revolutionaries, he was whistling in the wind. The Kabul coup did lead, a year later, to Soviet troops being invited into Afghanistan as auxiliaries, then staying on as occupiers. But far from this occupation destabilising Zia’s neighbouring regime, it would prove its salvation. Overnight Pakistan was restored to front-line status in Washington’s frantic ring-fencing of the new communist breakout. Arms shipments to Pakistan were resumed, its nuclear transgressions were overlooked, so were its postponed elections, and the Great Game entered a new and more lethal phase. With the active involvement of a markedly more Islamic Islamabad, Washington would turn to the bearded exponents of an uncompromising Islamism for its proxy jihad against Afghanistan’s godless communists. The ‘tonic’ had turned out toxic. Bhutto had got it wrong again.
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POLITICAL SUCCESSION IN INDIA, PAKISTAN AND BANGLADESH
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1984 AND ALL THAT
Ironically the one person who had unwittingly anticipated these developments was Indira Gandhi. For though the dangers of inflaming sectarian sentiments were nowhere better appreciated than in India itself, it was her government’s confrontation with India’s Sikhs, an emphatically non-Muslim community, that first introduced South Asia to the horrors of supranational terrorism. From 1977, by antagonising communal sentiment among the Sikhs and involving the army in its suppression, Mrs Gandhi set in motion a pendulum of violence and retaliation. As a sanctuary and source of arms, Pakistan became implicated in the Sikh conflict, and when in 1989 the pendulum’s deadly swing was extended to a still-contested Kashmir, Pakistan would prove an eager source of guerrilla support and training. Sectarian tensions throughout India and Pakistan would be excited and their bilateral relations further distorted. By the 1990s the baleful throb of bomb-for-bomb, bodies-for-bodies, would be echoed still further afield as the litany of state violence and terrorist outrage extended along the Afghan frontier in a jihadist arc from Kashmir to Baluchistan.
As early as 1984 sectarian butchery returned to the heart of the Indian capital, Mrs Gandhi herself being the first victim. The retaliatory carnage awakened memories of Partition; and the state’s complicity in it revived the explosive issue of India’s commitment to secularism. Then, in the following year, the deadliest ever terrorist attack on a civil airliner prolonged the cycle of violence. The downing by Canada-based Sikhs of Air India’s flight 182 over the eastern Atlantic killed all 329 on board, most of them South Asians of Canadian nationality – and it could have been worse. Had another suitcase-bomb not prematurely exploded at Tokyo airport, a second Air India jumbo would have been simultaneously blown to smithereens over the western Pacific. Concerted terrorist attacks, later regarded as the hallmark of the most ‘sophisticated’ Islamist cells, were being perpetrated by non-Muslim South Asians long before 9/11. In sum, Mrs Gandhi’s provocative interventions in Panjab in the 1980s anticipated, as to both their manner and their consequences, those of the US and its Pakistani surrogate a decade later in Afghanistan. And though of far greater consequence than her short-lived Emergency, in that failed experiment in extra-constitutional rule lay their genesis.
Back in 1975, when Bhutto still ruled supreme in Pakistan and Mujib headed a one-party state in Bangladesh, Mrs Gandhi had made her own lurch towards authoritarian rule. By declaring a state of ‘general emergency’ on 26 June that year she stunned the nation and sent shockwaves round the globe. As the beacons of personal freedom and liberal opinion went out all over the world’s largest democracy – quite literally so in the case of New Delhi’s newspapers where publication was halted by turning off the power supply – the murky extinction of Mujib-ur-Rahman amid the chaos in Dhaka passed almost unnoticed.
It was to India’s rebuff of democratic decorum that elected regimes everywhere took exception. For Nehru’s daughter, of all people, to be ordering the detention without trial of thousands – elected politicians, ex-maharajas, respected academics, social workers, labour leaders, senior journalists, student activists, placard-waving workers – almost beggared belief. It was just like one of those British crackdowns during the freedom struggle. State governments were being toppled, while a cowed parliament rubber-stamped a host of constitutional amendments, among them one prolonging its own existence indefinitely (so cancelling the elections due in 1976) and others legitimising the prime minister’s quasi-dictatorial powers. Then came rumours of these powers being exercised for crude social engineering. To beautify the urban environment, entire slum colonies were being bulldozed, while to tackle the population growth fathers en masse were being forcibly sterilised. Not even Mao had done that. World leaders protested, leader writers pontificated and friends of India bombarded the prime minister with missives.
Yet, for all the outrage, the crackdown lacked coherence or conviction. Mrs Gandhi left it to others, most notably her impatient younger son Sanjay, to conduct the more draconian campaigns while she herself trundled out a programme of tired placebos and conducted a rearguard defence of the whole action. Not unreasonably she did so on the grounds of national expediency. Over the preceding months the country had descended into near-chaos. As in Bhutto’s Pakistan, price increases triggered by the oil crisis had ignited massive protests leading to police shoot-outs and strikes that brought major industries to a standstill. The national rail network closed down; students barricaded their colleges. In some of the states, Congress (I) governments bore the brunt of the attacks as opposition parties quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Hauled aboard in Bihar was the seventy-two-year-old Jayaprakash (‘J.P.’) Narayan, a figure from the Gandhian past, half socialist half saint, with impeccable credentials as a champion of worthy causes. Nehru had been devoted to J.P., the whole country revered him. The disparate protests acquired a focus and a moniker as the ‘J.P. Movement’.
Demanding the people’s swaraj (self-rule) and an end to the misgovernment and corruption supposedly responsible for the nation’s ills, J.P. took to the road. After invoking the hallowed traditions of satyagraha and the salt marches, his cavalcade headed for Delhi. Three-quarters of a million turned out to hear him; the capital was brought to a standstill. With counter-demonstrations by Mrs Gandhi’s supporters contributing to the chaos, the state elections pending in Gujarat came to be seen as a trial of strength. There, to the government’s chagrin, the ‘J.P. factor’ proved a vote-winner as well as a crowd-puller; and just as the Gujarat results were coming in, another skeleton limped from the cupboard of Mrs Gandhi’s past. With devastating timing, a long-awaited decision of the Uttar Pradesh High Court upheld the action brought against her f
or electoral malpractice back in the 1971 ballot. Five years on, Raj Narain, her doughty opponent for the Rae Bareli seat, had been vindicated. Albeit for minor infringements, her election was belatedly declared null and void.
She quickly lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court in Delhi. What had begun as a law-and-order crisis had now acquired a constitutional dimension. The stakes were rising. Across the city, opponents bayed for her resignation while supporters bellowed for her to stay. She could still have defused the situation by calling for national elections. With a good case based on her prompt constitutional compliance, with the southern states little affected and with all the advantages enjoyed by any incumbent administration, she might well have turned the tide. Instead she turned off the lights.
Over the next nineteen months India’s gaol population climbed by 100,000. Litigants found the courts unusually quick to convict, and the black market collapsed as profiteers joined the celebrities behind bars. The ferment of protest subsided. Strikers went back to work and the trains ran on time. But rumour fuelled as much fear as compliance. State governments protested at their peril, and the papers, resuming publication, did little to dispel it. Some advertised their censorship by leaving precious chunks of newsprint blank. Others merely parroted the government’s press releases and printed such news as the newly nationalised news agency released. A credibility gap opened. The prime minster and her advisers, lapping up their own optimistic reports, lost touch with reality; the public and her opponents, doubting every word they read, ignored her protestations of good faith.
For once it was India that was in the political doghouse, while in Pakistan Bhutto proudly upheld the banner of democratic freedom. Yet in India, though the police were everywhere, there was no sign of the army; it was not needed and Mrs Gandhi would scarcely have countenanced it. All along she had insisted that the Emergency was just that, a temporary suspension of civil and political rights while an outbreak of extra-constitutional protest was contained and the issues underlying it addressed. It was no more illegal, she maintained, than the imposition of President’s Rule at the state level; she was acting in defence of democratic freedoms, not in defiance of them. Yet, perhaps because this refrain echoed so closely those trotted out by Ayub, Yahya, Zia-ur-Rahman and imminently Zia-ul-Haq, few took her at her word.
There was thus general disbelief when in January 1977 she sounded the all-clear. Those still detained were released, censorship was ended, party politics reactivated and national elections announced for March. India was democratic again. Because it looked to her critics like a climbdown, they claimed victory; and because it looked to her supporters like the redemption of a pledge, they felt vindicated. Either way, self-congratulation was in order. The Emergency was now portrayed as a test less of Mrs Gandhi’s commitment to democracy than of the nation’s; ‘and there is no doubt that the Indian people passed the test with distinction if not full marks’, says a standard history of the period.7
The promised elections appeared to reinforce this confidence in the democratic process. Mrs Gandhi and her Congress (I) were opposed by all those party leaders who had been associated with the J.P. movement, who had been imprisoned for it and who now formed a kaleidoscopic grouping rather like the Pakistan National Alliance that was oppposing Bhutto. The two countries went to the polls almost simultaneously; but whereas Bhutto won and would be discredited for it, Mrs Gandhi lost and would be lauded for it. The manner of her defeat, the first ever for the mainstream Congress, was emphatic enough. Her party slumped to an all-time low of 154 seats out of 542. Sanjay Gandhi was routed. His mother was defeated in Rae Bareli, the litigious Raj Narain scampering to victory. Both mother and son blamed personal spite and unspecified conspiracies. They were not good losers.
But their opponents were worse winners. Ranging from West Bengal’s Marxist Communists to the Tamil DMK, the all-Sikh Akali party and a new rightist Janata party (itself an amalgam of diehards like the Hindu Jan Sangh and the Congress (O)), the victors had nothing in common other than their rejection of Mrs Gandhi and all that she stood for. J.P. had to arbitrate even their choice of leader. As the new prime minister, Morarji Desai, a desiccated octogenarian respected more for his long association with Nehru than for his tastes in traditional medicine, did his best to mollify all interests. But unity prevailed only when the government was hounding Mrs Gandhi through the courts, buttressing the constitution against any repeat of her Emergency or readjusting her foreign policy. Though good relations with the Soviet bloc remained a priority, as foreign minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee of the Jan Sangh signalled a more conciliatory attitude to traditional foes. Anticipating his later premiership, Vajpayee visited both Beijing and Islamabad, improved relations with the new military regime in Bangladesh and in 1978 was among those who welcomed US president Jimmy Carter to Delhi.
India appeared to be opening up just when, within, it was again imploding. A bad harvest and another round of double-digit inflation had excited the usual protests, to which the faction-fighting at the top lent a dangerous dimension. Caste, calling, confession and ideology being defining traits of nearly all the parties in the ruling coalition, civil disturbances turned increasingly communal and violent. Meanwhile the Gandhis, Indira and Sanjay, protested their concern, invoked the secularist traditions of Congress, purged the party once again and bided their time.
In 1979 defections within the ruling coalition cost Morarji Desai the prime ministership. A stopgap ministry took over. It claimed support from Mrs Gandhi and promptly collapsed when she withdrew it. Government defectors now outnumbered the yet-to-defect. New elections were inevitable. They were held in January 1980 amid a sense of relief not unlike that after the Emergency was lifted. In fact it was as if the Emergency had never happened. Promising nothing more sensational than ‘a government that works’, Mrs Gandhi and her Congress (I) romped home with a two-thirds majority. Better still, anything like a national opposition disintegrated. J.P. had died, and the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh, the mainstay of the Janata Party, retired to lick its wounds and be reborn as the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), or BJP. Mrs Gandhi reigned supreme.
As usual though, when opposition at the centre was at its weakest, opponents could always be found among the state governments. Ever since Mrs Gandhi had decoupled national and state elections in 1971, incoming governments in Delhi had invariably hastened to topple any state governments not of their own party or in alliance with it. This could be done informally (by wooing defectors with, for instance, promises of office) or constitutionally (by imposing President’s Rule). Nehru had shown restraint on this front; but under his daughter the frequency of President’s Rule had increased tenfold. Once a precaution of last resort, it had become a habit, even a ritual. It might be compared to the ancient digvijaya, that ‘conquest of the four quarters’ undertaken by newly installed rulers to proclaim their authority, define their dominion and exact fealty and tribute.
ARE WE NOT ALL SECULAR?
Mrs Gandhi’s 1980 post-electoral digvijaya was the most ambitious yet. Nine state governments, about a third of the total, were suspended under President’s Rule, all but one of them subsequently being claimed by Congress (I) in snap elections. Among those toppled and replaced was the Akali Dal ministry in Panjab state. The Akali Dal was the mainstream Sikh party and Panjab was a predominantly Sikh state. Trouble should have been expected.
Ever since Partition in 1947, India’s half of the old Panjab province had been more problematic than Pakistan’s. There had been the usual tensions over the state’s official language and script (principally Hindi/Devanagri versus Panjabi/Gurmukhi) and a much more serious conflict of interest over its confessional make-up. In some areas Hindus were in a clear majority, in others Sikhs were, many of them uprooted from Pakistan. Promises had been made at the time of Partition that in India Sikhs would enjoy the freedom to practise their own faith and manage their affairs in accordance with it. Many had interpreted this as a commitment to the creation
of a Sikh state; and that was effectively what had happened, in that by the 1970s India’s half of the old Panjab province had been split into three separate states: Himachal Pradesh (consisting mainly of ex-princely states in the hills), Haryana (a predominantly Hindu and Hindi-speaking state west and north of Delhi) and Panjab (a Panjabi-speaking state with a Sikh majority, wedged between the other two plus Kashmir and Pakistan). This last was the small but richly endowed and strategically crucial state that Mrs Gandhi provoked in 1980.
Officially it was not a Sikh state, just a Panjabi-speaking state. Any concession to sectarianism being anathema to Indian secularism, its creation had been justified purely on the grounds of ‘linguistic reorganisation’. As Panjabi-speakers, most Sikhs had accepted this face-saving fiction but found little else to their taste in its denial of any overt reference to their faith. In 1973 the Akali Dal, meeting at a place called Anandpur Sahib, gave vent to Sikh grievances in a list of forty-five demands. Some were of national import, like a retraction of the central government’s interventions and a return to the qualified autonomy envisaged for all the constituent states in the 1950 constitution. Others were much more specific and included an insistence on the award to their truncated Panjab of Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed city that had been the capital of the undivided state. Naturally Chandigarh was also claimed by the state of Haryana whose Hindu/Hindi majority had no intention of relinquishing such a prize without substantial territorial concessions elsewhere. Yet no Sikh party could afford to make such concessions, and thus Chandigarh remained a bone of contention between the two states and between Sikhs and Hindus. Worse, the Anandpur Sahib resolution used an Urdu term to refer to the Sikh people that could be translated as ‘community’ – which was acceptable – or more mischievously as ‘nation’ – which was not. The resolution made no claim to an independent nation-state for the Sikhs, yet anyone keen to discredit the Akali Dal as a Sikh separatist party could here find grounds to support such a contention.
