One conflict may be taken as representative. This was over control of a shrine in the village of Talhan, on the outskirts of the industrial city of Jalandhar. The shrine was in memory of an artisan-turned saint named Baba Nihal Singh. Sikhs of all castes worshipped there, and in such numbers that their offerings made the temple one of the richest in the whole district. (The collection was estimated at fifty million rupees annually.) However, the temple committee was controlled by the Jats. They decided how the money was to be spent, whether in the beautification of the shrine, or in building roads to the village, or on feasts. The Dalits had long asked, and long been denied, representation in the management committee. At last they decided to take the matter to court. In January 2003, while the case was being heard, the Jats announced a social boycott of the Dalits. They, in turn, organized a series of protest strikes. Six months later, the groups clashed violently at a village fair. The administration then intervened to work out a compromise; two Dalits were inducted into the management committee, but they had to maintain Sikh tradition by keeping their hair and beard unshorn.38
VIII
In the first years of the new millennium, Kashmir was relatively peaceful. After the 2002 assembly elections, tourists began returning to Kashmir, filling the hotels in the Valley and the houseboats in Dal Lake. In January 2005, civic polls were held in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in almost three decades. An impressive 60 per cent of voters cast their ballots in these local elections, despite intimidating threats by terrorists and the assassination of several candidates. Those who voted said they wanted the new councillors to provide new roads, clean water and better sanitation. A shopkeeper in the town of Sopore – a stronghold of pro-Pakistani militants – was quoted as saying: ‘We can’t wait for civic amenities till azadi [independence]’.39
According to official figures, the number of ‘violent incidents’ in Jammu and Kashmir decreased from 3,505 in the year 2002 to fewer than 2,000 in 2005.40 The state could by no means be said to be at peace. But, for the first time in many years, the claim of the Indian government over this territory did not seem altogether hollow. In talks with Pakistan, New Delhi could urge a series of ‘confidence-building measures’, such as a bus linking the two halves of Kashmir. The first bus was scheduled to leave from Srinagar for Muzaffarabad on 7 April 2005. On the afternoon of the 6th, terrorists stormed the tourist complex where the passengers were staying. They were repulsed, and the next day two buses left as planned. A reporter who travelled on one of the vehicles wrote of how, when it crossed the newly built Aman Setu (Peace Bridge) and entered Pakistani territory,
divided families were reunited, tears and rose petals flecked their faces. The significance of this extraordinary moment lay perhaps in the ordinariness of the backdrop: two buses with 49 passengers had crossed over – and blurred a line that has divided Kashmir for over five decades in blood and prejudice.41
Meanwhile, across the country, the ceasefire called in Nagaland in 1997 held, albeit uneasily. However, a mutually satisfactory solution remained out of reach. The government of India said it would give the Nagas the fullest possible autonomy, but within the Indian Constitution. The NSCN insisted that any solution must acknowledge Naga sovereignty, for – it claimed – ‘Nagaland was never a part of India either by conquest by India or by consent of the Nagas’.42 It also asked for the retention of a separate Naga army. Anything less would be a betrayal of the memory of those who died for the cause.
Adjoining Nagaland was the state of Manipur, which was increasingly beset with violence, between insurgent groups and the Indian government, and between different communities within Manipur itself. Large-scale unemployment had led many young men to take up the gun. Among the majority Meities, who lived in the valley, there were several armed groups unreconciled to being part of India. Meanwhile, in the hills of Manipur, the Tangkhul Nagas wished to make common cause with their brethren in Nagaland. The violence was intensified by ethnic rivalries between Meities, Nagas and Kukis.43
In the Kashmir Valley, as well as in some parts of the North-east, the Indian security forces operated under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which gave officers and soldiers immunity from prosecution by civil courts, unless specifically permitted by the central government. Since the Act also granted permission to ‘fire upon or otherwise use force even to the extent of causing death’ on anyone suspected of breaching the law, it acted as an incentive to aggressive behaviour.
There was a massive military presence in the north-east. The states of the region variously bordered China, with whom India had fought a costly war; Bangladesh, with whom India had a profoundly ambivalent relationship; and Burma. But it is not merely for external security that the Indian army had so many men there. They were also needed to maintain the flow of essential goods and services, protect road and rail links, and, not least, suppress rebellion and insurgency. ‘We have no say vis-à-vis the army’, remarked a long-serving Manipur chief minister: ‘They have their own way of working, they will not tell us or listen to us, although they are supposed to be aiding the civil administration’.44
For many years now, human rights groups had asked for the repeal of the AFSPA. In the lead were the women of Manipur, long active in opposing male violence of all kinds. The state had dozens of local groups called Meira Paibis, or Women Torch Bearers. These campaigned successfully against alcoholism, before turning their attention to the excesses of the security forces. The Meira Paibis demanded that troops leave schools and marketplaces, that they stop picking up young boys at will, and that they open up their prisons and detection centres to public scrutiny.45
In November 2000, a young Manipuri woman named Irom Sharmila went on a hunger fast demanding the repeal of AFSPA. Taken away to hospital – she still refused to eat – she was force-fed by the state because she said she would rather die than live under a regime run by the military.46
The anti-AFSPA movement was renewed in July 2004, when a Manipuri housewife was picked up from her home on the charge of abetting terrorism. She was tortured, raped and killed, and her body left to rot by the roadside. The incident sparked a wave of angry protests in the Manipur Valley. A group of women marched to the army base in Imphal, where they took off their clothes and covered themselves with a white banner carrying the legend: ‘Indian Army, Take our Flesh’. A student leader set himself on fire on Independence Day, leaving a note which read: ‘It is better to self-immolate than die at the hands of security forces under this Act. With this conviction I am marching ahead of the people as a human torch’.47
IX
In the 2000s, as in the five decades that had preceded it, some parts of India were peaceable and quiet; other parts, turbulent and disorderly. The economy grew and the middle class expanded, but poverty continued to be widespread. From New Delhi, the central government sought to manage and moderate conflicts as best, or as least badly, as it could.
The prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, was in matters of state policy not always his own man. He had to accommodate his party president’s economic preferences even when they did not coincide with his own. He had to consult with her on all major appointments: ministers, governors, heads of commissions.
Dr Singh was a scholar and civil servant by background, not a politician. Back in 1991, when he was made finance minister, he publicly thanked Prime Minister Narasimha Rao for, as he put it, ‘having given me an opportunity to serve the country at the fag-end of my career’.48 This son of Punjabi refugees, this earnest, self-effacing, hard-working, professional economist could never have imagined being in a position of such responsibility. When, a decade and more later, his party president offered Dr Singh the top job itself, he was even more grateful. Thus his extreme deference to Sonia Gandhi on almost all matters of domestic policy and politics.
The one sphere in which the prime minister was given a relatively free hand was foreign policy. Here, he was determined to further strengthen ties with the United States. That country was now the so
le superpower, and it was a major market for India’s software industry. There was now a large and wealthy Indian diaspora in America, which could be used profitably in this regard. Indian strategic thinkers suspicious of China urged Dr Singh to forge an ever-closer partnership with Washington so that the two countries could together ‘bear the burdens of ordering the Eastern Hemisphere in the twenty-first century’.49
Dr Singh got along well with the American president of the time, George W. Bush. This relationship helped the prime minister negotiate a special agreement, under which the United States would collaborate in enhancing the capacity of India’s civil nuclear energy industry. Ever since the Pokharan blasts of 1998, India had not been allowed access to advanced Western technologies. Now, on the promise that this would be for energy generation alone, and that India would make its civil nuclear facilities open to inspection by international agencies, the US agreed to provide such technology and expertise as this industry would require.
The proposed Indo-US nuclear deal was debated in the Lok Sabha in November 2007. The government found its plans to forge a national consensus thwarted by an unlikely alliance of the right-wing BJP and the left-wing CPI(M). The BJP had always stood for closer relations with the United States, and had it been in power would surely have pushed for such a deal itself. But now, merely to spite the Congress and deny it any credit, it opposed the deal. The opposition of the Left was at least more consistent, based on a long-standing suspicion of the leading country of the capitalist world.
The prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, ran a minority government, which had stayed in power only through the support of the Communist parties. Indeed, even if they were not formally part of government, the Left had left their imprint on some of its policies, most notably the rural employment guarantee programme. But now India’s growing rapprochement with the United States caused unease in the minds of party patriarchs, schooled during the Cold War to regard America as an enemy of socialism and of the ‘working people’. The CPI(M) thus described the nuclear deal as a ‘surrender’ to Washington.50
Despite the opposition of the Left, Dr Manmohan Singh pushed forward with the tilt towards the United States. In January 2008, the two countries signed an agreement worth more than $1 billion, whereby the US would supply the sophisticated C-130J transport aircraft to India, along with spare parts and spare engines. These would greatly augment the capacity of the Indian Air Force, since these planes could fly in the most adverse weather conditions and could land on makeshift runways in deserts and mountains.51
Through the first half of 2008, the Congress and the Left parties held a series of informal meetings to seek to bridge their differences. In the end, a reconciliation proved impossible. In July, the CPI(M) and the CPI withdrew support from the Congress-led central government, chiefly on the question of the civilian nuclear deal with the United States. The Congress was unrepentant; a party spokesman remarking that the ‘Left are isolated on this issue. They are not only isolated but in the exalted company of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party).’ The ruling party were confident that they had the numbers to have the nuclear deal ratified in Parliament.52
The optimism was not misplaced. With the support of regional parties and independents, the UPA government won a trust vote in the Lok Sabha in July, with 253 members voting in favour of the government, 232 against. (There were claims that some non-Congress members of the House had been bribed to vote in favour of the government.) The result, said Prime Minister Singh, would ‘send a message to the world at large that India is prepared to take its rightful place in the comity of nations’.53
In economic matters, the prime minister always had a global orientation, advocating an outward-looking trade policy early in his academic career and helping dismantle the licence-permit-quota-raj while serving as finance minister in the 1990s. What was new, and distinctive, was Dr Singh’s determination to forge closer relations between India and the United States. He believed that India’s rising economic might had to be accompanied by a corresponding rise in its global political influence. For that, he judged, India had to ally strongly with the world’s sole remaining superpower.
While Sonia Gandhi would have liked to keep the alliance with the Left intact, Manmohan Singh was prepared to break it on the question of the nuclear deal, which he saw as vital to a wider India-US rapprochement. That Dr Singh was sincere in his belief that this policy was in India’s larger interests was not in question; but his enthusiasm was such that it led him to a quite uncharacteristic display of hyperbole. On his next visit to the United States, in September 2008, Dr Singh told the American president, George W. Bush, that ‘in the last four and half years that I have been prime minister, I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship’. Then he added: ‘For 34 years, India has suffered from a nuclear apartheid. We have not been able to trade in nuclear material, nuclear reactors, and nuclear raw materials. And when this restrictive regime ends, I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And, for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.’
We must take Dr Singh at his word that George W. Bush was affectionate and friendly towards him. We might also accept that the ending of India’s nuclear isolation was a significant victory. But whether these facts had to be stated in such flattering terms must be open to question. More noteworthy still was a further, final, effusion, where, in the full glare of cameras and recorders, the Indian prime minister told the American president that ‘the people of India deeply love you’, an assertion far more problematic, and far harder to justify, than those that had preceded it.54
X
Through 2007 and 2008, as the high politics of the Indo-US nuclear deal was being played out in New Delhi and Washington, there had been a wave of terror attacks in different parts of the country. In February 2007, the Samjhauta Express that ran from New Delhi to the border with Pakistan was bombed, with sixty-seven people dying in the attack. The train was promoted as a symbol of peace and understanding; and those who attacked it were almost certainly Hindu fundamentalists, opposed to any reconciliation with Pakistan. The timing suggested as much, for the terror attack occurred a day before the Pakistani foreign minister was scheduled to visit New Delhi.55
Other terror attacks were the handiwork of Islamic terrorists, often based in or aided by elements in Pakistan. In May 2007 nine people were killed when a blast ripped through the historic Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad. A year later, at least sixty-four people were killed when a series of blasts rocked another old, historic, city, the Rajasthan capital, Jaipur. Then, in September 2008, twenty people were killed when five bombs were set off in a busy marketplace in New Delhi.56
India had been subject to terror attacks before. Over the years, dozens of bomb explosions had taken place in markets and suburban trains. In 2001 the Parliament in New Delhi had been stormed by a group of terrorists. In such attacks over the years, perhaps hundreds of security personnel, and certainly thousands of civilians, had been killed or maimed.
On 26 November 2008, India witnessed its most daring terror attack yet. That evening, a group of militants from Pakistan came by boat right up to the waterfront in south Mumbai, a much-visited tourist spot housing the iconic Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel. They had previously undergone weeks of training in camps run by the Islamist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, overseen by serving and retired officers of the Pakistan army. In the course of their training the Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed had told the young militants: ‘If you die waging jihad, your faces will glow like the moon. Your bodies will emanate scent. And you will go to paradise’.57
After landing in Mumbai, these terrorists, ten in all, went on a rampage through the city, attacking guests in the Taj Mahal Hotel, commuters in the city’s main railway terminal, and any others who came in the way. The militants also attacked a Jewish centre, another target deliberately chosen, in view of India’s growing closeness to Israel, and of the general demonization of Jews among Islamic radicals around the worl
d.
News of the attack spread through Mumbai and India, provoking horror and amazement in equal measure. Television crews and cameras parked themselves outside the Taj, where the terrorists were setting off grenades as they went from room to room, from floor to floor. Mumbai had a large police force, but commandos trained to meet such attacks were not assigned to the city. These were instead concentrated in Delhi, to protect government installations and powerful politicians. By the time special forces were dispatched the terrorists had been on the rampage for more than twelve hours. It took four days in all for nine of the attackers to be killed, and a tenth, the sole survivor, to be captured. The captive confessed to having come from Pakistan, and to having been trained by the Lashkar-e-Toiba.58
More than two hundred people were killed by the terrorists in Mumbai. About twenty of them were foreigners. Large sections of the Taj Hotel were gutted from inside. But beyond the damage to men and materials the attack had left a deep emotional scar on the citizens of Mumbai and of India. These parts of the city were well loved and well visited. The Taj was arguably India’s most famous hotel. The Chhattrapati Shivaji terminus was the busiest railway station in India. The shock was deepened by the ease with which these famous places were attacked – by a group of marauders coming in from the open sea in a small boat that they had hijacked.
The terror attack on south Mumbai swiftly acquired the label 26/11, to match the 9/11 that had ravaged that other great, buzzing, cosmopolitan, commercially vigorous and culturally vibrant city, New York. Looking back at the tragedy eight years on, three responses to the attack at the time it occurred strike one as especially significant. The first came from the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, who flew to Mumbai and based himself outside the Trident Hotel (another target of the terrorists) where he told eager reporters of how he would like the government to tackle attacks such as this one. Mumbai was not in his state, and he had thus no business to be speaking in public about such matters. This was an opportunistic bid to project himself as a leader with national ambitions and aspirations.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 89
