India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  The main target of fundamentalist ire, however, was the Indian state and its symbols. Scarcely a week passed without a suicide attack on an army post or police camp, to stop or stem which even more troops were moved into the Valley. There were now bunkers on every street corner in Srinagar. The Indian army had become ‘an imposing and ubiquitous presence’ in Kashmir, a ‘parallel government’ even. It was charged not merely with the maintenance of law and order, but also with running hospitals, airports, bus stations and tourist centres. The state government had abdicated most of its duties. By 1995 or thereabouts, there were only two functioning institutions in Kashmir – the Indian Army on the one side and the network of jihadi groups on the other.37

  As the Valley came to resemble a zone of occupation, popular sentiment rallied to the jihadi cause. Terrorists mingled easily with the locals, and were given refuge before or after their actions. When their men were killed in bomb attacks, the reprisals of the Indian security forces could be murderous. Soldiers dropped in unannounced in remote villages, searching for terrorists – when they did not find them, they beat up the peasants instead. A large number of custodial deaths were also reported.

  The costs of this apparently unending war were colossal. According to one estimate, in the decade of the 1990s, some 12,000 civilians died unnatural deaths: three-fourths at the hands of militants, the rest in the cross-fire. Security forces claimed to have killed 13,400 militants, while losing 3,100 of their own. Given the low population densities, so many deaths in Kashmir was the equivalent of 4 million Indians being killed in the country as a whole.38 The casualties were spread all across this lovely if increasingly desolate Valley. However, they were mostly of young men, of Kashmiris who came of age in this cursed decade. The journalist Muzamil Jaleel, who almost became a militant himself, later visited a graveyard near his native village. As many as twenty-one tombstones were of his friends and classmates.39

  As James Buchan has written, in the years since 1990,

  the Kashmiri Muslims and the Indian government conspired to abolish the complexities of Kashmiri civilization. The world [it] inhabited has vanished: the state government and the political class, the rule of law, almost all the . . . Hindu inhabitants of the valley, alcohol, cinemas, cricket matches, picnics by moonlight in the saffron fields, schools, universities, an independent press, tourists and . . . banks. In this reduction of civilian reality, the sights of Kashmir . . . are redefined: not the . . . lakes and Mogul gardens . . ., or the storied triumphs of Kashmiri agriculture, handicrafts and cookery, but two entities that confront each other without intermediary: the mosque and the army camp.40

  Through the 1990s, as Hindu fundamentalism gathered strength in the rest of India, Islamic fundamentalism was on the ascendant in Kashmir. The two processes began independently, yet each legitimized and furthered the other. With every communal riot sparked by the Ayodhya movement, radicals in the Valley could more easily portray India as a state run for and by Hindus. With every killing of innocent civilians or Indian soldiers in the Valley, the RSS could point to the hand of Pakistan in fomenting trouble within India. There were two critical events that, as it were, defined this epoch of competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Would one trust a state that could not honour its commitment to protect an ancient place of worship? Would one trust a community that so brutally expelled those of a different faith? Such questions resonated across the subcontinent, asked by countless Indians not previously known to think along lines of religion and faith.

  VII

  Let us now move to that other historically troubled part of the Republic of India, the North-east. Here, there was some good news from the largest state in the region, Assam. This was that an accord had been reached with the Bodos, allowing for an ‘autonomous council’ to be formed in those districts where that community was in a majority.41 The bad news was that the secessionist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was very active. Some parts of the state were securely under the control of the official administration; whereas in other parts it was the writ of ULFA that ran. Practically every tea garden paid an annual sum to the rebels, this based on the numbers of workers the estate employed, and on its profitability. To further augment their coffers the insurgents mounted raids on banks. Army units were sent in to restore order; they captured and killed some top ULFA cadres, while others crossed over the border into Bangladesh.42

  The 1990s were also a turbulent decade for the state of Tripura. Armed groups fighting for tribal rights regularly attacked settlements of immigrant Bengalis. Here, too, insurgency was sometimes hard to distinguish from sheer criminality. As one researcher remarked, ‘innocent deaths, kidnappings and extortions are a regular part of life in Tripura and have been for many years now’. Nearly 2,000 killings were reported between 1993 and 2000 – of security men, insurgents, but most of all, civilians.43

  The gun was also ubiquitous in Manipur, another tiny state that had once been an independent chiefdom. The violence was chiefly a product of ethnic rivalries. The majority Meities, who lived in the valley, clashed with the tribals in the uplands. In the hills also there were divisions; principally, between the Tangkhul Nagas and the Kukis. In May 1992 Naga militants burnt Kuki villages, starting a deadly cycle of massacres and counter-massacres. While fighting among themselves, these groups were all opposed to the Indian state. Some Kukis, and more Tangkhuls and Meities, dreamt of forming independent nations of their own.44

  VIII

  The history of independent India was, from the start, a history of fires rising up in one place, yet being tamed in another. Thus, as Kashmir and Manipur smouldered in the 1990s, other once-turbulent regions and communities were making their peace with the Indian Union. In Mizoram, the leaders of the Mizo National Front (MNF) had made a spectacularly successful transition; once insurgents in the jungle, they were now politicians in the secretariat, put there by the ballot box. Peace had brought its own dividend in the form of water pipelines, roads and, above all, schools. In the latter part of the 1990s, Mizoram had overtaken Kerala as India’s most literate state. The integration with the mainland was proceeding apace; Mizos were learning the national language, Hindi, and watching and playing the national game, cricket.

  Since they spoke fluent English (the state’s own official language), young Mizos, men as well as women, found profitable employment in the growing service sector, in hotels and airlines in particular. Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga, was speaking of making his territory the ‘Switzerland of the East’. In this vision, the tourists would come from Europe and the Indian mainland, while the economy would be further boosted by trade with neighbouring Burma and Bangladesh. The Mizos would supply these countries fruit and vegetables and buy fish and chicken in exchange. Zoramthanga was also canvassing for a larger role in bringing about a settlement between the government of India and the Naga and Assamese rebels. It was easy to forget that this visionary had once been a radical separatist, seeking independence from India when serving as the ‘defence minister’ and ‘vice president’ of the ‘Mizo Government-in-Exile’.45

  The troubles had also been resolved, more or less, in the state of Punjab. Here the process had been more tortuous. In 1987 President’s Rule was imposed on the state, and repeatedly extended, for six months at a time. Without elected politicians to report to, the police energetically chased the militants, by means fair and foul. Gun battles were common, quite often around police posts but also in the countryside. In 1990 the Army was called in to help; a year later it was withdrawn. In 1992 elections were at last held to the State Assembly. The Akali Dal boycotted the polls; and the elected Congress chief minister, Beant Singh, was killed by a suicide bomber not long after he took office.

  In 1993, however, the Akalis returned to democratic politics by taking part in elections to local village councils. Four years later they won an emphatic victory in the Assembly polls. By this time militancy was perceptibly on the wa
ne. Some terrorists had become extortionists, squeezing money from Sikh professionals and from ordinary peasants. The popular mood had turned away from the idea of a separate state of Khalistan. Sikhs once more saw the advantages of being part of India. Agricultural growth had slowed down, but trade was flourishing, and the state’s languishing industrial sector was being primed for revival.46

  A sign of normalcy was that the Akalis, now in power, were fighting among themselves; individuals and factions vying for control of particularly prestigious or profitable ministries. The veteran chief minister, Prakash Singh Badal, sought to transcend these squabbles through a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the proclamation by the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, of the Khalsa, or Sikh brotherhood.47 His government alloted Rs3,000 million for the festivities, and the Centre chipped in with a further grant of Rs1,000 million. New memorials to Sikh heroes were built, along with new sports stadia, shrines and guest houses. At the great gurdwara of Anandpur Sahib, Sikh intellectuals and writers were honoured in a colourful ceremony attended by the chief minister and by the prime minister as well. One of those felicitated, the novelist and journalist Khushwant Singh, noted with satisfaction that this once ‘alienated community’ had ‘regain[ed] its self-esteem and resume[d] its leading role in nation-building’.48 The costs, however, had been heavy. By one reckoning, more than 20,000 lives were lost in the Punjab between 1981 and 1993 – 1,714 policemen; 7,946 terrorists; and 11,690 civilians.49

  The troubles in the Punjab went back two decades, long enough for the residents of the state, but actually a fairly short period of time compared to other conflict-ridden states of the Union. Many Kashmiris had been rebelling against the Indians since the 1950s; many Nagas, from the 1940s itself. In the 1990s, the main insurgent group was the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. The NSCN had a solid core of several thousand well-trained fighters. They operated from bases in Burma, making raids across the border and engaging the Indian Army. Within Nagaland the rebels commanded support, respect, and perhaps also, fear. At any rate, they were sustained by collections made from the public. Even government officials paid a monthly ‘tax’ to the underground, this a curious if typically Indian paradox, the subsidizing by the state of a group committed to its destruction.

  In the mid-1990s, however, a collective of church groups and civil society organizations called the Naga HoHo persuaded the rebels and the government to declare a ceasefire. In 1997 the guns fell silent, and the two sides began to talk. At first the conversations were held in Bangkok and Amsterdam, but eventually the two major NSCN leaders, T. Muivah and Isak Swu, agreed to visit India. They met the prime minister and travelled to the north-east, but failed to clinch an agreement. There were two stumbling blocks; the rebels’ insistence that a settlement had to be outside the framework of the Indian Constitution; and their demand that parts of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, where Naga tribes lived, be merged with the existing state of Nagaland into a ‘Greater Nagalim’.

  IX

  The year 1989 marks a watershed in Indian political history. Before that date, the Congress was a mighty colossus; after that date, single-party dominance gave way to a multi-polar system. In the past, some 40 per cent of the national vote had allowed the Congress to win some 60 per cent of the seats in Parliament. Now, behind the fall in the number of seats won by the Congress lay a steady decline in its vote share, as the following table makes clear:

  Table 27.2

  Vote share of

  1989

  1991

  1996

  1998

  Congress

  39.5

  36.5

  28.8

  25.8

  BJP

  11.5

  20.1

  20.3

  25.6

  Between 1989 and 1998, the vote share of the Congress declined by more than 10 percentage points; over this period, the vote share of the BJP increased by roughly the same extent. However, in the four general elections in these years, these two major parties garnered a mere 50 per cent of the vote between them. Where did the other 50 per cent go? The Communist parties, concentrated in West Bengal and Kerala, generally won about 8 per cent of the vote. The backward caste and Dalit parties, strong in north India, together claimed about 16 per cent of the vote. The regionalist parties, which had a marked presence in southern and eastern India, got about 11 per cent of the vote.

  The decline of the Congress had come in two phases. The first phase, which began in Kerala in 1957 and peaked in Andhra Pradesh in 1983, saw Congress hegemony challenged by parties based on the identities of region, language and class. The second phase, which began in north India in 1967 and peaked in the same region in the 1990s, saw the Congress losing ground to parties basing themselves on the identities of caste and religion. On the one hand, the upper castes in particular and Hindus in general deserted the party and gravitated towards the BJP. On the other hand, the lower castes preferred to throw their weight behind parties such as Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party. Even the Muslims, traditionally among the Congress’s strongest supporters, were turned off by the demolition of the Babri Masjid into voting for other parties.

  Between 1947 and 1989, India had six different Prime Ministers. Between 1989 and 1998, India also had six different Prime Ministers. Governments now were more unstable, and also more variegated, tending to be multiparty rather than single-party affairs.

  The rise of coalition or minority governments was a manifestation of the widening and deepening of democracy in India. Different regions and different groups had acquired a greater stake in the system; with parties that sought to represent them winning an increasing number of seats – usually at the expense of the Congress, which for the first two decades of Independence had claimed, rather successfully, to be a party that represented no section of India in particular but all in general.

  This deepening of democracy had however come at a cost – that of a steady loss of coherence in public policy. The wide-ranging policies of economic and social development that Jawaharlal Nehru crafted in the 1950s – among them the boost to heavy industrialization, the reform of archaic personal laws and an independent foreign policy – would not have been feasible in the fragmented and divided polity of the 1990s. Even programmes focused on specific sectors, such as the thrust to agricultural development that Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi provided in the 1960s, would have been difficult to bring to fruition.

  In the past, in allotting portfolios to ministers their relevant experience and abilities were taken into account. Now, the distribution of ministries was dictated more by the compulsions of having to please alliance partners, who demanded portfolios seen either as prestigious or profitable. And in the execution of their duties, cabinet ministers were prone to think more of the interests of their party or their state, rather than of India as a whole.

  As the decade of the 1990s came to an end, the once unipolar polity came to have several distinct poles. There was the Congress, declining but still significant, and the BJP, rising but by no means dominant. These were the two so-to-say ‘national’ parties. Meanwhile, there was also a third pole, this constituted by a variety of caste- and region-based parties which neither the Congress nor the BJP could ignore. Now, before a general election, the smaller parties, each powerful in a single state, needed to be cajoled and placated before joining an all-India coalition. Thus, as one long-time observer of Indian politics put it, ‘the two aspirants to be “national parties”, the Congress and the BJP, now must behave like fast-food franchises. They sell their brand to local agents, who choose, reject, bargain or change sides on the basis of local conditions . . .’.50 Ideology played no part in this bargaining – it was all based on strategic calculation, on what one could extract from the national party by way of ministerships at the centre or subsidies to one’s state.

  28

  Rulers and Riches

  Meet the pissed-off [American] programmer . . . He’s t
he guy – and, yeah, he’s usually a guy – launching websites like yourjobisgoingtoindia.com and nojobsforindia.com. He’s the guy telling tales – many of them true, a few of them urban legends – about American programmers being forced to train their Indian replacements.

  Article in Wired magazine, February 2004

  I

  IN EARLY 1998, THE Congress withdrew support from the United Front government. When elections were called, the Bharatiya Janata Party improved its position further, winning 182 seats, forty-one more than the Congress. This time, the support of smaller parties and independents gave the BJP the numbers to govern. Among its allies were regional parties from Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Haryana, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, as well as a fragment of the old Janata Dal, led by the once-fiery socialist George Fernandes.

  This collective partnership was known as the ‘National Democratic Alliance’. The main party, the BJP, provided the prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, while also holding the Home, Finance, and External Affairs portfolios. However, George Fernandes was made defence minister; he was also appointed convenor of the NDA, a not insignificant move, since Fernandes was a Christian by birth. The BJP under Vajpayee thereby wanted to signal that whatever the rhetoric it had recently used in the election campaign, once in power it would seek to moderate its hardline ‘Hindutva’ image.