by John Keay
Courtesy of the media, the events in Ayodhya instantly excited such Hindu triumphalism and Muslim resentment that ‘communal rioting’ – a euphemism for sectarian atrocities – broke out right across northern and central India on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Muslims were more often the victims than the perpetrators. Of the 800 massacred in Bombay’s ‘riots’, two-thirds were Muslims. There and elsewhere Muslims would strike back, targeting the police and national institutions like the Stock Exchange and the metropolitan railway. But they risked a greater retaliation. The worst came in Gujarat in 2002 when a train carrying ‘pilgrims’ back from Ayodhya caught fire as it left Godhra station. The fire claimed fifty-eight lives, and because the passengers had used the halt to abuse local Muslim vendors it was assumed to be a case of retaliatory arson. The retribution that followed left less room for doubt. All over southern Gujarat death squads sallied forth to dispossess, maim, rape and murder Muslims. With a BJP government in power in Delhi and another in power in the state, the victims felt especiallly vulnerable. At least 2000 died horribly, with many more losing limbs, virginity, property and livelihoods. As in Delhi during the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984, officials reportedly aided the destruction by distributing electoral registers, the police had orders to make themselves scarce and government ministers took over control posts to orchestrate the attacks.
Eight years later, a bandannaed gunman in Bombay’s Taj Hotel was asked by one of his hostages why he was about to kill them all. He reportedly replied: ‘Have you not heard of Babri Masjid? Have you not heard of Godhra?’ Then he opened fire.
The demolition of the Babri mosque, the massacres that followed and the state’s complicity in them antagonised all South Asia’s Muslims, whether mujahidin or moderates, Sunni or Shi’i, Indian, Kashmiri, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Comparisons were again drawn with the dreadful events of Partition. But few paused to consider how the logic of the BJP’s demand for Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, merely mirrored that of Jinnah’s two-nations theory. BJP ideologues insisted that in the name of secularism the Indian state had been appeasing Muslim sentiment for too long; for India to realise its potential it needed to reject such policies and embrace and assert its overwhelming ‘Hinduness’; Muslims and Christians had dominated the country’s past by dividing and oppressing Hindus; it was time for the Hindu nation to reunite, rediscover its prior identity and its glorious heritage, and take pride in celebrating them; non-Hindus merited only suspicion and must accept a subordinate status. All of which, after juggling ‘India’ for ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Muslim’ for ‘Hindu’, could have come from the textbook of Jinnah’s Muslim League.
Liberal opinion in India was also horrified. In the English-language press the Babri affair was portrayed as the greatest ever threat to the state, worse even than Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency or the Chinese incursion. For as of 1992 India could no longer call itself a secular nation. The dark forces of sectarian conflict had been unleashed, the noble legacy of Gandhi and Nehru rejected. The state was irrevocably tainted with the bigotry it had so long decried. Intellectual and press freedom would suffer – and did – under the BJP’s chauvinist rule. And the political process that had brought that party to power seemed itself thereby discredited. One by one, the founding principles of the nation were falling. Socialism had died in the 1970s, secularism was expiring in the 1990s and democracy looked doomed by association.
But to Muslim minds secularism was just a red herring. They had no more time for it than did the BJP. To their way of thinking the main casualty of the Babri affair was not some suspect Western liberal value but Islam, their life-force and their identity. In the cities of Pakistan every anti-Muslim outrage in India brought thousands on to the streets and swelled the ranks of the jihadist lashkars. The mujahidin in Kashmir became national heroes. Outbidding one another in their promises of support, the civilian governments of Benazir and Sharif brazenly countenanced the despatch of Pakistani volunteers to stiffen the resolve of the Kashmiri ‘freedom-fighters’.
There, in Indian-held Kashmir, the liberationist movement prompted by the vote-rigging of 1987 and the 1989 dismissal of Farooq Abdullah’s government had taken both Delhi and Islamabad by surprise. Electoral malpractice had seemingly achieved what forty years of Pakistani prompting and Indian provocation had failed to elicit – a militarisation of the Kashmiris themselves. Self-determination was initially the goal, but in the early 1990s, as the BJP ramped up its rhetoric in India and jihadist lashkars in Afghanistan were redirected to Kashmir, the struggle turned increasingly sectarian. The liberation movement was subsumed in a jihadist bloodbath. Mujahidin targeted the Valley’s Hindu minority, hundreds of whom were horribly massacred while most of the remainder were removed to safety. With the state now under President’s Rule, the exodus was organised by Kashmir’s controversial governor, a man associated with Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses during the 1975–7 Emergency who had been despatched to Kashmir in 1989 by a Delhi government that included the BJP and who would later himself join the BJP.
The impression that India was clearing the decks for action in Kashmir was heightened by the despatch of ever more troops. Following a Pakistani infiltration of the Line of Control near Kargil (between Srinagar and Leh) in 1999 – itself a test of whether Pakistan’s recently demonstrated nuclear capability was insurance against a disproportionate Indian response – the number of Indian troops in Kashmir approached half a million. The Valley was now clearly under military occupation, and if not technically a war zone was certainly a ‘dirty war’ zone. One of the main reasons for India’s claiming Kashmir in the first place – to demonstrate the secularist credentials of the Indian republic – had become as redundant as secularism itself. Hindu fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism were feeding off one another. ‘The two processes began independently, yet each legitimised and furthered the other.’8
In 2001 ‘Kashmiri terrorists’ mounted an attack on the state assembly in Srinagar, then followed it with an attempted suicide bombing of the Indian parliament in New Delhi. Neither succeeded, and the latter, a murky affair involving a one-time Indian informer, raised questions that have yet to be answered. Together they occasioned an eruption of national outrage, followed by warlike deployments along the Pakistan frontier that came to nothing. But perhaps it was the terrorists’ targets that were most instructive. Chosen for maximum impact, they yet hinted at an ongoing grudge against electoral mismanagement as much as the nation responsible. A year later the state elections in Kashmir went ahead regardless. Generally reckoned fair and well organised under the circumstances, they attracted a surprising 48 per cent of voters. Subsequent polls improved still further on this. Though the bombings and shootings continued, Kashmiris had clearly not given up on the democratic process.
Nor had the governments of India and Pakistan given up on improving their bilateral relationship. Despite war scares over Kargil in 1999, the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the terrorist rampage through Bombay in 2008, both governments fitfully pursued a normalisation of relations. Of all people it was Prime Minister Vajpayee of the first BJP-led government in Delhi who in 1999 epitomised the launch of these overtures with a well-publicised visit to Lahore to meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. International pressure following the previous year’s nuclear tests played its part in the meeting; nothing substantial was achieved; and the Kargil incursion seemed to scupper further progress. But in 2001 Vajpayee welcomed a return visit, this time of Musharraf who had by then taken over as president of Pakistan. Again little was achieved. But later in the year the events of 9/11 and Washington’s re-engagement in Afghanistan revived what was now being called a ‘process’. Under American pressure to end Pakistan’s support of the mujahidin, Musharraf needed a face-saving quid pro quo of talks on Kashmir; and Vajpayee, needing something to show for his previous efforts, was prepared to have one last go.
Thus direct dealings were resumed in 2004 at a heads-of-state meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operati
on (SAARC), a body set up in the days of Rajiv and of the Indian involvement in Sri Lanka that had led to his 1991 assassination. Political progress remained minimal. But the setting did encourage confidence-building agreements on cultural contacts, travel links, social concerns and anti-terrorism measures. Above all, the enormous potential of regional trade and economic development was recognised in a commitment to establish a South Asian Free Trade Area.
Expectations of what might yet become the world’s most populous trading group have still to be realised. On the other hand, the impact of globalisation and of India’s growing economic clout had at last entered the bilateral equation. Optimists hoped that Delhi’s new-found confidence promised an end to its obsession with Pakistan. Prosperity, whether feared or shared, could conceivably trump political intransigence; and, sixty years on, the conundrum that is Kashmir could yet be laid to rest by an Indian-led surge in cross-border trade, investment and collaboration. Pessimists might retort that with Pakistan looking ungovernable, Bangladesh looking submersible and both of them mired in post-military recriminations, the outlook for regional co-operation could scarcely be bleaker. Yet if recent history is anything to go by, all such forecasts merely invite contradiction. Expect the unexpected.
Though the great turnaround in India’s economic fortunes had become self-evident by the turn of the century, it had not been at all widely foreseen. Nor for that matter is it easily explained. The gradual deregulation of the economy and the enthusiasm with which the Indian private sector, both at home and abroad, embraced the opportunities of globalisation were undoubtedly critical. So too were India’s vast human resources; thanks to the industrialisation and language policies of the Nehru era, Midnight’s grandchildren outnumbered any other modestly remunerated but technically proficient English-speaking generation in the world. The West’s earlier outsourcing of its technology, economic thinking and favoured language had made possible India’s insourcing of the West’s service industries.
Necessity, too, played its part. By 1991 India’s financial deficit, accumulated over decades of state-run inefficiency, had threatened to bring the country to a standstill. The national debt topped $70 billion and foreign exchange reserves were sufficient for just two weeks. Narasimha Rao, the Congress prime minister who had just replaced Vajpayee, had little choice but to invite his chosen finance minister, Manmohan Singh, to embrace the market. Although Rajiv Gandhi, A. B. Vajpayee and others had got the engine of reform started, it was Rao and Singh who released the handbrake of state control and let private enterprise run riot.
Less obviously, a variety of social and political factors provided a context and climate in which the reforms could thrive. One such was a gradual restoration of the federalist principles enshrined in the original constitution. Rajiv Gandhi, though no great thinker, had concluded from the turmoil of his mother’s later years that government had become too interventionist. The people and their elected representatives had grown accustomed to looking to the state for every imaginable provision and facility. It was time they rediscovered their own potential through the exercise of private initiative, local endeavour and personal responsibility. In terms of the economy this had meant a first tentative simplification of the licensing raj with a reduction of tariffs, the freeing of some quotas and a little encouragement for private investment. At the grass-roots level it led to the revival of locally elected bodies that could be entrusted with community responsibilities, plus the funds to perform them. And at the constitutional level it led to a reining in of the central government’s propensity for interfering in the states.
The circumstances under which President’s Rule might be imposed were more closely defined, legislation was introduced to discourage elected representatives from changing their party allegiance whenever the inducements of office, cash or concessions directed, and efforts were made to provide state governments with a more equitable share of federal revenues. States run by governments that were of the same party as that in power in Delhi still tended to be better funded than others, and centre – state tensions were by no means reduced. But with post-electoral digvijayas like that conducted by Mrs Gandhi becoming a thing of the past, state governments enjoyed greater stability and generally responded by behaving more responsibly. Instead of pandering to New Delhi, they increasingly competed with one another to attract investment, improve infrastructure and, in the best cases, extend social provision.
These trends anticipated a wider decentralisation of the political process and encouraged a dramatic maturation of Indian democracy. Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide victory in 1984 would not be repeated. In fact the one-party domination by Congress became the exception rather than the rule as minority governments, multi-party coalitions and electoral fronts trooped through the corridors of power in Delhi. In some states Congress became an irrelevance, in others it survived through local alliances. Everywhere it was parties based on caste allegiance, sectarian sentiment and regional or linguistic solidarity that were in the ascendant. Instead of simply deciding between Congress or a non-Congress party of one’s choice, voters now encountered a great electoral bazaar stocking a political style to suit every identity. In reflecting the numerical balance of Indian society as well as its diversity, the bazaar naturally empowered those parties identified with the hitherto uncultivated masses that comprised the lower castes and the Dalits (Harijans, outcastes). This was especially evident in the great northern states of UP and Bihar where, by 2000, the votes of Dalits and Yadavs were consistently returning caste-based governments pledged, above all, to uplifting their own communities. As chief minister of UP, the formidable Ms Mayawati of the (Dalit) Bahujan Samaj Party ordained Dalit theme parks and festooned the state with statues of distinguished Dalits, herself among them.
Not everyone approved. A degeneration in standards of political conduct was widely remarked and often attributed to these new caste-based parties. Studying a 2004 analysis of the affidavits filed by elected MPs, Ram Guha reports that 35 per cent of the (Yadav) Rastriya Janata Dal members and 27 per cent of the (Dalit) Bahujan Samaj Party members confessed to having once faced criminal charges. The Congress party and the Hindu nationalist BJP fared slightly better with 17–20 per cent having faced criminal charges. Yet to judge by the assets and loans the latter saw fit to declare, members of these two mainstream parties had much stickier fingers. For a Congress member, assets of 31 million rupees were the average. ‘We may conclude’, says Guha, ‘that, while in power, the Congress and BJP have systematically milked the system.’9
With the Delhi parliament sitting for no more than seventy or eighty days a year and seldom well attended, it could be argued that a decline in the probity of its members and in the quality of debate scarcely mattered. Legislation was pre-approved behind closed doors, parliament’s job being simply to pass it. Getting elected was what mattered; and what with by-elections, state elections and local elections providing an almost continuous commentary on the political scene, the counting of ballots had become a constant of political life.
But by the same token India’s democracy could not be considered unresponsive. If it empowered the underprivileged and inducted the hitherto under-represented, then that surely was what democracy was all about. The exigencies and expenses of office, whether above-board or not, generally had a sobering effect. The chauvinism of the BJP had sent shivers down secular spines in the early 1990s, but in government the party, though obdurate in matters dear to its heart, proved far from irresponsible. Likewise Kashmir’s unimpeded participation in the electoral bazaar increased hopes for a solution to South Asia’s most intractable problem. In 2010, with elected governments once again in power in all the successor states of pre-Partition India, democracy looked far from doomed. Arguably its promise of a better tomorrow was never brighter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography lists only those works which have proved of most help in writing the text. It is divided into seven sections. The first section lists mainly general histori
es, and the remaining six correspond to groups of chapters. The periodisation of Indian history into ‘classical’, ‘medieval’ and so on has not been used in the text but, since much extant scholarship falls into these categories, they have been resurrected for the chapter groupings in the bibliography.
The following abbreviations are used in the chapter groupings and refer to works specified in full in the General section:
HCIP = The History and Culture of the Indian People (ed. Majumdar, R.C. et al)
HOIBIOH – The History of India as Told by its Own Historians (ed. Elliot, H.M. and Dowson, J.)
NCHI – New Cambridge History of India (ed. Johnson, G. et al)
GENERAL
Basham, A.L., The Wonder that was India, 1967, repr. Rupa, New Delhi, 1981
Basham, A.L. (ed.), A Cultural History of India, OUP, Oxford, 1975
Davies, Philip, The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India, vol.2, Islamic, Rajput, European, Penguin, London, 1989
Dodwell, H.H. et al (eds), Cambridge History of India, 6 vols, CUP, Cambridge, 1922–37 (no vol.2)
Elliot, H.M. and Dowson, J. (eds.), The History of India as Told by its Own Historians (HOIBIOH), 7 vols, Trubner, London, 1867–
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, The History of India: The Hindu and Mahometan Periods, 6th edn, John Murray, London, 1874
Harle, J.C., The Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986
Hunter, W.W., The History of India, London, 1899–1900
Hunter, W.W., A History of British India, London, 1912
Johnson, Gordon, Bayly, C.A., Richards, John F. (eds), The New Cambridge History of India (NCHI), 4 pts, numerous vols, CUP, Cambridge, 1987–
