No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  For all Ramanand Sagar's insistence that his Ramayan is not a film success but a divine phenomenon, he too has not been above taking advantage of its success. When he was granted his extensions, he raised the price for the advertising sponsors who pay for the production. Santosh Ballal said, ‘It was blackmail. The programmes became uneconomical, but we decided to continue because of their power.’ In an office in a Bombay studio, Prem, another of Ramanand Sagar's sons, was launching video cassettes of the Ramayan. The cassettes are coloured saffron – the holy colour of Hinduism. There are twenty-six cassettes in the series, and each one has a different picture from the Ramayan on the front. The cassettes are imported from Singapore – always a strong selling point in India. Prem told me, ‘We are making a quality product – purely quality-based – which people will want to buy for itself, so we can defeat the video pirates. They will never be able to bring out a cassette like this.’

  When I asked whether the consumer might not prefer something cheaper, even if a little nastier, Prem Sagar replied, ‘We believe that people will be buying these cassettes to keep, like they might buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They are not just buying a cassette: they are buying the Ramayan.’

  ‘So it will be something like the family Bible used to be in our tradition.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Along with the cassettes, Prem was also marketing the other by-products which accompany successful television programmes everywhere – books, calendars, pens, key-rings, stickers and all the rest. He would not say what sales he had achieved so far, nor what his target was - none of the Sagar family would give any details of the finances of the Ramayan. Rediffusion said the price they paid Sagar was ‘a secret between the agency and its client’. The minister of information and broadcasting told Parliament that the sponsors had paid Doordarshan 10,350,000 rupees - that is, more than £2 million.

  The Sagar family own a large share of the Natraj Studios where Prem has his office. Although Ramanand has said that he is going to restrict himself to devotional works in future, the studios are still open to all. When I went to meet Prem, a nightclub scene was being filmed on one of the floors. The singer was Mandakani, a star who shot to fame by bathing near the source of the Ganges in a flimsy white sari which left little to the imagination. In this nightclub, she was dressed in a clinging sequined dress and a platinum-blonde wig. Another disco number was being rehearsed on the next floor, this time in the smoke-filled den of a smuggler. A male chorus wearing silver shorts and glittering eyeshadow gyrated around a young starlet in a bra and the briefest of brief gold and red loincloths – a far cry from Sita.

  Bombay is India's most westernized city. When I was there No Sex, Please, we are Hindustani, Run for your Wife and Cabaret were playing in the theatres. In video libraries, the most popular cassettes were Dallas and Dynasty, which I was told could be delivered to your door. The bookstalls were full of glossy magazines. There was Savvy for women, and for men there was Debonair – the nearest India gets to Playboy (and it's not very near).

  Bombay unashamedly worships Mammon. A young journalist told me, ‘Everyone in this city wants to join a foreign bank, work on the stock exchange or be an advertising executive. The civil service, the police and the other government jobs no one wants, because you are not making money.’

  But there are some Bombay-wallahs who reject that culture. One is Iqbal Masood, a former income-tax commissioner who is now a distinguished film critic. I knew that he disapproved of the Ramayan, but after my visit to Umargaon I wanted to find out exactly why.

  Iqbal Masood believes that the Ramayan is part of a government plot. ‘They wanted a model which would be religious and keep people glued to their sets. You see, now they have already started showing the other great Hindu epic, the Mahabharat, and they have given Ramanand Sagar another extension to make that doubtful portion of the Ramayan. The tendency of the minorities to break away is watched with great alarm. Here is something which is very Indian and makes people submissive.’

  ‘But what about your community – the Muslims – and the other minorities?’

  ‘You see, people like you can't understand the Indian Muslims. They are influenced by the passive attitudes of Hinduism, whatever their politicians might try to say. The minorities were the most ardent fans of the Ramayan.’

  ‘But isn't it a good thing if the Ramayan is bringing people of different faiths together? Surely India has enough communal trouble.’

  ‘I don't agree. All religions are useless to the philosopher and useful to the magistrate. Here you have a prime minister talking about bringing India into the twenty-first century and he puts on this television series which teaches you to lie back and rely on miracles. That will induce a submissive temperament. If you are going into the twenty-first century you want technology, not Hanuman lifting up a mountain. There are no “works” in Sagar's Ramayan, only “faith”. You know, it's possible that if the Ramayan had been given to a modern director, and a sensitive one, a relevance to modern life could have been established. Sagar didn't attempt to relate religion to life and problems today.’

  ‘My feeling is that Sagar's Ramayan has succeeded because, in spite of whatever faults it might have, it is very Indian, and people are looking for that.’

  ‘What is Indianness today? The basic thing in India today is mediocrity. It has never been so mediocre as it is today. I feel stifled by the mediocrity. All our genuine intellectuals live in the West. We need another infusion of the West here. The freshness has gone out of this country, because people stopped reading and thinking thirty years ago.’

  When I suggested that India had perhaps had too much of the West imposed on it and needed to get back to its own roots, Iqbal Masood laughed and said, ‘You are an idealist.’

  By the time of the Dussehra festival, I was back in Delhi. There was a traditional Dussehra image of Ravan in the small park opposite my house. Thirty feet high and made out of coloured, shiny paper wrapped around a bamboo frame, it was secured with ropes and tent-pegs. This Ravan had a cardboard black moustache shaped like Arvind Trivedi's, and round earrings. He carried a raised sword in one hand and a shield in the other. I asked the taxi-drivers who had first made me interested in the Ramayan whether there had ever been a Ravan in the park before. ‘No,’ they replied. ‘Usually there are only a very few Ravans in the big parks, but this year they are everywhere, because of the television.’

  There are Sikhs and Hindus on our taxi rank. They had all loved Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan because it was so Indian. Dilip, a young Hindu from the Himalayas, said, ‘It made me proud to see how great my country was.’ A Sikh, Manjit Singh, told me, ‘I was interested because I learnt about ancient history. Some parts of the story I had never heard. They have shown the whole story on the television, but they never do in the Ram Lilas. I am thirty-eight, and this is the first time I have seen it in full.’

  ‘But some people have said it went very slowly – the story, I mean. Didn't you get bored?’

  ‘No. It was like a novel you couldn't put down.’

  Across the road, a large crowd had gathered to watch the death of Ravan. Drums were beating and fireworks exploded. Five young men – two Sikhs and three Hindus – picked up flaming torches, marched seven times round the demon king and then set him alight. The fireworks stuffed inside Ravan exploded like machine-gun fire, the crowds cheered and a mushroom of smoke formed above his crown. Just four years ago I had seen smoke rising from the market behind that park as Hindus killed Sikhs and burnt their property in the dreadful riots which followed Indira Gandhi's assassination.

  5

  OPERATION BLACK THUNDER

  Operation Blue Star, the Indian army's clumsy attack on the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar in June 1984, shook the foundations of the Indian nation. It deeply wounded the pride of the Sikhs, the most prosperous of India's major communities. It strengthened the cause of those Sikhs campaigning for the setting up of a separate Sikh state – Khalistan – and gave them a
martyr - Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the fundamentalist preacher who had fortified the Golden Temple complex and died defending the shrine. It caused Sikh soldiers to mutiny. It led directly to the assassination of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and to the worst communal violence since the partition riots of 1947. What particularly ‘hurt the Sikh psyche’ – a phrase I must have heard a thousand times – was the attack by tanks on the Akal Takht, one of the two most sacred shrines in the complex. The Akal Takht symbolizes the temporal authority of God, while the Golden Temple itself symbolizes his spiritual power.

  Before Bhindranwale fortified the Golden Temple complex, it had been a place where only those entirely devoid of all spirituality could fail to feel something of the presence of God. The reflection of the Golden Temple shimmered in the water of the pool in which the temple is set. The sound of the sacred music, sung with verve but without vulgarity, and backed by the light, quick beat of the tablas, reached to all corners of the complex. Venerable Sikh priests with flowing white beards sat reading the Sikh scriptures in the Akal Takht. Pilgrims stood praying immersed to their waists in the water of the pool or prostrated themselves before the shrine. Families walked round the marble pavements or parikrama surrounding the pool, children chattering away happily. In India, awed silence is not necessary for prayer or worship, but the Golden Temple complex never degenerated into the noisy bazaar which tourists have made of so many cathedrals and temples. There was never any attempt to extract money from visitors – Sikhs were too proud to do that, and voluntary donations proved more than adequate.

  Loving the Golden Temple as I did, I was deeply shocked when I entered the complex just after Operation Blue Star. Heavily armed soldiers in battle fatigues had replaced the pilgrims. There was a sullen silence. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. Squash-head shells fired by tanks and designed to destroy by sending shock waves through their targets had pulverized the frontage of the Akal Takht, leaving hardly a pillar standing, blackening marble walls and destroying plaster, filigree and mirrorwork decoration more than 200 years old. The floors of the shrine were carpeted with spent cartridges. The white marble of the pavement outside was stained with blood.

  For months before Operation Blue Star there had been no secret about the fact that Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, with the assistance of a retired general of the Indian army, was turning the Akal Takht into a fortress. I filmed the fortification of the shrine three months before Blue Star. If Bhindranwale had been removed when he first started his fortifications, the Akal Takht would not have been destroyed and all the disasters which flowed from that would have been avoided. Yet, just four years after Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv allowed Sikh separatists to fortify the Golden Temple again, and was eventually forced to order another operation by the security forces to get them out.

  The cause of Operation Black Thunder was the same as that of the earlier Blue Star: once again the prime minister and the politicians of the Sikh religious party, the Akali Dal, had both failed to rise above considerations of their own immediate petty political gains. Within a year of coming into office, in July 1985, Rajiv Gandhi had signed an imaginative and effective accord with the Akali Dal. The accord survived the assassination of Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, the Akali leader who signed it, and was enthusiastically endorsed by the success of the Akali Dal in the elections for the Punjab state assembly later that year, only to be scuppered by Rajiv Gandhi. He failed to implement the accord, I believe, because he was persuaded that it would spell disaster for his party in the neighbouring state of Haryana.

  Haryana was unhappy about the accord because it gave the city of Chandigarh to Punjab. The city was shared as the capital of both states. Haryana also believed that the division of river waters agreed to under the accord was unfair. There was fear in the Congress Party that the opposition in Haryana would capitalize on the discontent over the accord and defeat the Congress in the next state-assembly election. A defeat in Haryana, Rajiv Gandhi was warned, would have a domino effect throughout the party's stronghold in northern and central India – the Hindi belt as it is always known. So Chandigarh was not given to Punjab and the accord with the Akalis was put in cold storage.

  A few weeks before the Haryana state elections in June 1987, Rajiv Gandhi again sacrificed the interests of the Sikhs for short-term political gains by dismissing the Akali chief minister and imposing central-government rule in Punjab. This crude gesture to Haryana chauvinism did not produce the expected gains: the Congress Party was routed in the assembly elections. In the general election two years later, the Congress Party met a similar fate throughout the Hindi belt. Sacrificing the Punjab accord had not prevented the dominoes falling.

  Rajiv Gandhi does not bear the sole blame for the collapse of the accord and the return of central-government rule in Punjab: the Akali Dal leaders had also let down their community again. Before Operation Blue Star they had been arguing among themselves, pursuing their own petty interests rather than presenting a united front against Bhindranwale, who was as grave a threat to them as he was to Indira Gandhi. This time some Akali leaders had deserted their own government because it was not headed by a member of their faction of the party. This fatally weakened the Akali chief minister, Surjit Singh Barnala, and gave Rajiv Gandhi an excuse not to implement the accord and to dismiss the Punjab government.

  The collapse of the Punjab accord strengthened the separatists, who argued that it proved that Bhindranwale had been right when he said that Sikhs were slaves of a Hindu government. Rajiv Gandhi followed his mother's example by failing to take resolute action against this new threat. Sikh separatists were again allowed to occupy and fortify the Golden Temple, and there is no telling how long they would have been allowed to stay there if they had not shot a senior police officer on 9 May 1988.

  On that morning, police pickets surrounding the Golden Temple sent a wireless message to their deputy inspector general, S. S. Virk, asking what they should do about some Sikh separatists who had now started building fortifications outside the temple complex. Virk, who was himself a Sikh, had just returned from investigating the killing of six people in a village outside Amritsar. Such killings by Sikh militants had become an almost nightly affair. Virk had been given strict orders by the government that his men should not open fire on the militants inside the Golden Temple unless the separatists shot a policeman or came out of the complex and flaunted their arms, so he decided that he should go immediately to the Golden Temple to see whether these new fortifications justified opening fire or asking for new orders.

  At the temple, Virk was told that young Sikhs were building a wall which would provide them with cover to cross into a four-storeyed building outside the shrine. Possession of that building would have given the Sikh militants a firing-position overlooking four of the paramilitary police pickets surrounding the complex. As he and his colleagues walked down the alley which ran behind the room which the militants used as the office of Khalistan, the young men building the wall fled into the temple complex. Virk ordered policemen to demolish the wall. Suddenly a paramilitary policeman on guard in a picket overlooking the alley shouted, ‘Look out, look out – extremists are aiming at you.’ Virk bellowed, ‘Take cover!’ As he himself was running for cover, a bullet from an AK47 rifle hit him. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, pressed it to his jaw to staunch the flow of blood and ran on. When he reached a safe place, he lifted the handkerchief and blood and splinters of bone fell on to his uniform.

  By this time, heavy firing had broken out between the militants and the police pickets, so Virk couldn't get away for five minutes. When the way seemed to be clear, his colleague Suresh Arora, the senior superintendent of police of Amritsar, borrowed a scooter from one of the local residents and drove off with Virk on the pillion. Just before the hospital, the scooter had to stop at a level crossing, so the two officers got off and walked the rest of the way.

  When Virk reached the hospital, doctors found that his jaw was b
adly broken but his life was in no danger. He wrote an order which was broadcast to the pickets over the police wireless. It read, ‘I am all right. Continue firing and keep up the pressure on the extremists in the temple.’ S. S. P. Arora returned to the temple complex to supervise the firing.

  Dinesh Kumar, the journalist who reported for the BBC from Amritsar, was inside the temple with some colleagues when the firing started that morning. He suddenly found himself surrounded by young Sikhs firing AK47s, ammunition pouches hanging from their necks. One man shouted, ‘We've got that bastard Virk. He's dead.’ The others shouted ‘Khalistan zindabad!’ – ‘Long live Khalistan.’ Three pilgrims scuttled across the causeway leading from the parikrama to the Golden Temple. The police fired on them, ignoring the danger of hitting the Sikhs' most sacred shrine, but the pilgrims somehow reached the sanctuary. A sewadar, or temple servant, hiding in front of the Akal Takht was less lucky.

  The journalists and some pilgrims eventually managed to reach a room with a telephone. Dinesh Kumar rang the police headquarters and was told, ‘We are doing something.’ But nothing happened and he prepared to die, writing a letter to his girlfriend which he hoped would be found when his body was recovered. Then the telephone line was cut.

  There was no longer any point in waiting for instructions from the police, so the journalists decided the best thing was to make for the main gateway. They reached it running from pillar to pillar along the verandah. At the main gateway they halted – no one wanted to run over the open ground in front of the temple in case the police opened fire. Eventually two people did pluck up courage and ran. When they got out safely, they came back to call the others.