At 161 seats, the BJP was more than a hundred short of a majority of Parliament. It could not attract adequate numbers on this side, and after a mere thirteen days in office, Vajpayee’s government fell. It was replaced by the United Front, a coalition of socialist and regional parties, including the Communist Party of India but not the larger Communist Party of India (Marxist). The Congress chose to support the party from outside, as did the CPI(M).
The United Front’s nominee for prime minister was H. D. Deve Gowda, then serving as chief minister of Karnataka. He belonged to the UF’s largest fragment, the Janata Dal. After ten months as Prime Minister Deve Gowda was replaced by Inder Kumar Gujral. India had now had twelve prime ministers; five were serving Congressmen, while six others had previously been, and for long periods, members of the Congress Party. The only prime minister of India thus far who had never been a Congressman was Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had held the job for thirteen days in 1996.
The UF Government was a fragile and unstable experiment. Lacking the numbers, or the will, it could not effect major policy changes, even if it had desired to make them. Meanwhile, after Rao’s exit, the Congress had persuaded Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia to join the party. Born in Italy, a Catholic by upbringing, Sonia had married into India’s top political family but had no political ambitions herself. In 1981, she had been deeply resistant to the idea of her husband entering politics. After his death ten years later, she retreated into her home and her family. But now she came back from the shadows, unable to resist the urge to restore her family to political pre-eminence.18
V
In the first years of Indian independence, the wounds of Partition had provided the excuse for a vigorous assertion by the Hindu Right. The RSS was particularly active. But when the Jana Sangh won a mere three seats in the 1952 elections, commentators were ready to write an epitaph for a party that, in a modern, secular, democratic state, dared to base its politics on religion. The socialist politician Asoka Mehta wrote that Hindu communalism ‘has proved to be weak twice, once in [the elections of] 1946 and again in 1951–2’. He was confident that ‘its ghost is now laid for good’.19 ‘The Hindu is too tolerant’, remarked the writer-couple Taya and Maurice Zinkin, themselves long resident in India. The election results had shown that ‘Hindu communalism has been utterly defeated’, indeed, that ‘communalism has thus failed, probably finally’.20
Other observers were less sanguine. The Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah thought that it was mostly Jawaharlal Nehru who kept the Indian state and Indian politics along the secular path. He worried about what would happen after Nehru was gone. Indeed, after Nehru’s death the Jana Sangh slowly gained in influence. It won 25 seats to the Lok Sabha in 1967, and 22 in 1971, more or less holding its own despite the ‘Indira wave’ of that year. Later, its participation in the JP movement, its leaders’ incarceration during the emergency, and its role in the Janata government substantially increased the party’s profile and presence. Then it fell away again. As the freshly named Bharatiya Janata Party it won two seats in the elections of 1984. Even Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had been a member of parliament since 1957, failed to win re-election.
Once more, obituaries were written for a politics based on religion. Once more, it was claimed that the Hindu would not tolerate bigotry among his kind. ‘The most striking feature of Indian politics is its persistent centrism’, wrote two American political scientists. Apart from the natural Indian tendency towards moderation, the BJP had also to contend with the fragmentation of the electorate on lines of caste and region. Hence the conclusion that ‘the support base for a national confessional party, [representing] the Hindu majority, is illusionary’.21
The events of the 1990s confounded these predictions. For the big political story of this decade was in fact the rise of Hindu communalism, as manifested most significantly in the number of seats won by the BJP in successive general elections. As the VHP leader Ashok Singhal remarked in 1994, the destruction of the Babri Masjid was ‘a catalyst for the ideological polarization which is nearly complete’.22
Beyond the formal theatre of party politics, there was also a transformation occurring on the ground. In towns and villages across northern India, relations between Hindus and Muslims were being redefined. Once, members of the two communities had lived next to one another, traded with one another, even befriended and played with one another. True, there was also competition and conflict. Each community thought itself theologically superior, each had memories – real or imagined – of being scorned or victimized by the other. However, the compulsions of living together meant that these divisions were deflected or subsumed by activities conducted in common. But with the riots sparked by the Ayodhya movement, ambivalence had been replaced by an unambiguous animosity. Hostility and suspicion was now the governing – some would say sole – idiom of Hindu-Muslim relations.23
Fewer in numbers, and generally poorer in economic terms, the Muslims had more to lose from the souring of relations. In most riots, more Muslims died than Hindus, more Muslim homes were burnt than Hindu ones. The whole community had become prey to a deep insecurity. The taunts of Hindu chauvinists that they should move to Pakistan made them feel vulnerable and victimized. The sentiments of the ordinary Indian Muslim in the turbulent decade of the 1990s were movingly expressed by the Telugu poet Khadar Mohiudddin. On the one hand, he wrote, the Muslim is told by the Hindus to think that
My religion is a conspiracy
My prayer meetings are a conspiracy
My lying quiet is a conspiracy
My attempt to wake up is a conspiracy
My desire to have friends is a conspiracy
My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy.
On the other hand, said Khadar,
It’s no conspiracy
[for the Hindu] to make me a refugee
in the very country of my birth
It’s no conspiracy
to poison the air I breathe
and the space I live in
It’s certainly no conspiracy
to cut me to pieces
and then imagine an uncut Bharat.
The Muslim was being continually asked to prove his loyalty to India. As Khadar Mohiuddin found, ‘cricket matches weigh and measure my patriotism’. When India played Pakistan, it was demanded of Muslims that they display the national flag outside their homes, and that they loudly and publicly cheer for the national side. In the poet’s words: ‘Never mind my love for my motherland/What’s important is how much I hate the other land’.24
The polarization of the two communities was a victory for the ‘Sangh Parivar’, the collective name by which the family of organizations built around the RSS and the BJP is known. Through the first five decades of Indian independence, the ideology of the Sangh Parivar had remained pretty much constant. To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows:
Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by en
emies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offense is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.25
Goyal adds that ‘without fear of contradiction it can be stated that nothing more than this has been said in the RSS shakhas during the past 74 years of its existence’.
While its ideology was unchanged, in time the organization of the RSS grew enormously in strength and influence. Once an all-male body, it opened a separate women’s wing which both schoolgirls and housewives were encouraged to join. Once limited to northern India, it set up active branches in states where it previously had no presence at all. Everywhere, the core ideology of the Sangh was adapted to the local context. Thus in Gujarat the rebuilding of the ancient Somnath temple was celebrated as a manifestation of a united and assertive Hinduism. In Orissa, the focus was on the great Jagannatha temple, used by the RSS to build bridges between local and pan-Indian Hindu identities. There was a particular emphasis on work in tribal areas, on ‘reclaiming’ the adivasis and ‘returning’ them to the Hindu fold. Schools were opened where tribal youths were taught Sanskrit and acquainted with Hindu myths and legends. The RSS worked hard in times of natural calamity, bringing grain when the rains failed and rebuilding homes after an earthquake.26
As its organization grew, the RSS’s ideology found even fuller expression through a new campaign strategy. M. S. Golwalkar had once thought that cow-slaughter was the issue on which the Sangh Parivar would launch a countrywide struggle.27 That failed, but then the egregious mistakes of the Congress delivered an even more emotive issue into their lap. When Rajiv Gandhi’s government appeased Muslim fanatics and overturned the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, the Hindu radicals could claim, more convincingly than ever, that (pace D. R. Goyal’s words above) the present rulers were ‘motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes’, that to counter this ‘the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour’. That ‘non-Hindus are invaders or guests’ was further proven by the stubborn reluctance of Muslims to hand over the Babri Masjid. The monument itself was a standing insult to Hindu pride, a nasty reminder of the slavery of past times that had not yet been fully overcome. That they were not allowed to construct a shrine to their beloved Lord Ram was only because ‘the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies’; enemies within, as in the politicians who appeased Muslims, and enemies without, as in the malevolent Muslim nation (Pakistan) which had fought three wars against them. To build the Ram temple, but also to protect themselves more generally, the Hindus had to ‘develop the capacity for massive retaliation’, to realize that ‘offence is the best defence’.
To the phrases already quoted from D. R. Goyal’s summation, let us now add the critical last line: ‘lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity’.
In the Ram movement, the RSS’s mission was furthered by its sister organizations: in particular, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had taken up the issue in the first place. Then there was the Bajrang Dal, named after Ram’s great monkey devotee Hanuman (who was also called Bajrang Bali). This was composed of angry youths, equipped not so much to ‘protect’ their idol (as Hanuman is supposed to have done) but to beat up anyone who stood in their way. Finally, there was the Shiv Sena, actually another party altogether, and whose ideas and methods were even more extreme than the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. They were prone to calling Muslims ‘poisonous snakes’ and ‘traitors’, and advising them to move to Pakistan.28
By the 1980s, the RSS could no longer be called a male or north Indian body; it had reached out to women, and to other parts of the country. However, it was only through the Ram movement that it successfully overthrew the tag of being a ‘Brahmin-Bania’ organization, led and dominated by the élite, traditionally literate, Hindu castes. For the first sixty years of its existence it had been guided by a Maharashtrian Brahmin – first K. B. Hedgewar, then M. S. Golwalkar, finally Balasaheb Deoras. However, in March 1994 a non-Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra Singh, was appointed head of the organization. This was a bow not only to the Mandal debate, but also an acknowledgement of the major role played by the backward castes in the Ayodhya movement. The cadres of the Shiv Sena and the VHP were mostly drawn from the middle castes, and there were a fair number of Dalits as well.
Through this broadening of the base – in terms of region, gender and, above all, caste – was created what might justly be called the ‘mother of all vote banks’. In the early days of the Ayodhya controversy, circa 1985–6, VHP leaders were prone to refer to the issue as one which affected the ‘sentiments of sixty crore [six hundred million] Hindus’. As time went on, and the issue remained unresolved, demographic change caused a natural inflation in numbers: ‘sixty crore’ became ‘seventy crore’, even ‘eighty crore’. This was of course a conceit. The VHP and the RSS did not speak for the majority of Hindus. But apparently, they spoke for enough Hindus to allow their political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to emerge as the largest single party in the Indian Parliament.
In the 1990s, the BJP came to define the political agenda in a way the Congress once did in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, the broader political discourse came to be obsessed with questions of religious identity rather than matters of economic development or social reform. Losing its hold on the government, winning ever fewer seats in Parliament, the Congress was now merely reacting to debates initiated by the BJP. After she took charge as Congress president in 1998, Sonia Gandhi worked overtime to dispel the image of her party as ‘anti-Hindu’. She regularly visited temples, and even went so far as to participate in the great Kumbh Mela, a congregation held every twelve years in which tens of millions of Hindus take a dip in the Ganga at Allahabad.29
While the Ayodhya dispute remained its focus, the Sangh Parivar also took up other campaigns in the 1990s. More sites were identified where, it was alleged, Muslims had usurped a Hindu shrine – in Mathura, in Banaras, in the Madhya Pradesh town of Dhar, in the Baba Budan hills of Karnataka’s Chikmagalur district. Movements were launched, with varying success, to ‘reclaim’ these places from the ‘intruders’. Simultaneously, a series of attacks were launched on Christian missionaries, particularly those working in tribal areas. Churches were burnt and priests beaten up in both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. An Australian missionary was burnt alive in Orissa, along with his two sons, the arsonist later identified as a member of the Bajrang Dal named Dara Singh.30 Hindus were a comfortable majority in India, yet the RSS insisted that their pre-eminence was threatened on the one hand by Christian proselytization and on the other by the larger family size of Muslims, this in turn attributed to the practice of polygamy.31
Occurring in different parts of India, sometimes led by the RSS, at other times initiated by the VHP or the Shiv Sena, there was nonetheless an underlying pattern to these campaigns. In every case, a religious minority – Muslim or Christian – was targeted, and accused of having hurt Hindu sentiment, or of being in the pay of a foreign power. The demonizing of the other was a necessary prelude to mobilizing one’s own forces, thus to foster a collective spirit of solidarity in a long divided Hindu community.
VI
If Hindu militancy was on the rise in the heartland, in one crucial border state it was Islamic militancy that was in the ascendant. The state was, of course, Kashmir.
By the mid 1990s, Kashmiri militants had been joined by many hundreds of mehmani mujahideen (guest freedom fighters). These owed allegiance to different groups, all of which were headquartered in Pakistan, and all of which practised the austere, fundamentalist version of Islam taught in that country’s many religious schools.
Through the 1980s, the Islamicization of Pakistani society had proceeded apace. At the nation’s birth, in 1947, it had a mere 136 madrasas; by the late 1990s it had as many as 30,000. These madrasa
s, writes Tariq Ali, were ‘indoctrination nurseries designed to produce fanatics’. Pakistan now boasted of as many as 58 Islamic political parties and 24 armed religious militias, peopled in the main by the products of the madrasa system.32
The intensification of religious sentiment in Pakistan deepened its commitment to the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. Preachers in mosques and madrasas spoke repeatedly of Indian zulm (terror) in the Kashmir valley, urging their followers to join the jihad there. Youths so swayed entered groups like the Lashkar-i-Toiba, which was rapidly assuming a leading role in the armed struggle. The proximate aim was the uniting of Kashmir with the Pakistani nation; this ‘a religious duty binding not only on the people of Pakistan, but, in fact, on the entire Muslim ummat [brotherhood]’. A wider ambition was to catalyze a civil war in India. As the chief of the Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed boasted, they were aiming to ‘set up a mujahideen network across India’, which, when it was up and running, would spell ‘the start of the disintegration of India’.33 ‘Revenge is our religious duty’, said Saeed to an American journalist: ‘We beat the Russian superpower in Afghanisthan; we can beat the Indian forces too. We fight with the help of Allah, and once we start jehad, no force can withstand us’. Speaking to a Pakistani reporter, the Lashkar chief claimed that ‘our struggle will continue even if Kashmir is liberated. We still have to take revenge [against India] for [the loss of] East Pakistan’.34
This animosity and hatred was perhaps not unexpected. For the jihadis, India was the land of the kafirs, or unbelievers. But as it happened their wrath was being visited on some co-religionists as well. There were killings of activists from the National Conference, which wanted autonomy within India; of the JKLF, which wanted independence rather than merger with Pakistan; and of the Peoples Conference, which advocated non-violence.35 The fundamentalists also came down hard on the pleasures of the people. Cinema halls and video parlours were closed, and drinking and smoking banned. Militant groups distributed leaflets ordering women to cover themselves from head to toe by wearing the long black veil, or burqa. The burqa was contrary to Kashmiri custom – here many women did not even wear head-scarves. Besides, they cost Rs2,000 apiece. Cynics suggested that tailors and cloth merchants were behind the move. There were, withal, savage attempts to enforce the ban, with acid being thrown on women who disregarded it.36
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