India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  By calling a press conference in Mumbai, Narendra Modi was subtly contrasting his own preference for strong, quick, visible action with the rather more understated style of the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. That commandos took so long to come to Mumbai was certainly a security lapse for which the government of India was responsible. Once the attack had subsided and the terrorists killed, a clamour grew for retributive action against the nation which had harboured and trained the attackers. Opposition politicians called for the bombing of terror camps in Pakistan. The prime minister resisted these pressures. The fact of the attack, and the way it had played out in public, had shamed Pakistan enough in the eyes of the world. To escalate matters now, with both countries in possession of nuclear weapons, was risky in the extreme. This restraint in the face of extreme provocation was both necessary and wise.

  Restraint of another, and perhaps even more admirable, kind, was displayed by the ordinary citizens of Mumbai. The city had a long history of Hindu-Muslim violence, extending back a hundred years and more. Most recently in 1992–3, there had been savage attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs celebrating the demolition of the Babri Masjid, followed by bomb attacks by Muslim extremists on the Stock Exchange and other buildings. Although one cannot be absolutely certain, it is overwhelmingly likely that one of the aims of the terrorists of 26/11 and of their handlers was to spark a fresh cycle of religious violence. Had Hindus been provoked into attacking Muslims within Mumbai, perhaps this would have spread to other cities, justifying the Islamist claim (or hope) that India was as much a ‘Hindu’ state as Pakistan was a ‘Muslim’ one. But this did not happen. The city mourned its own dead, peacefully and with dignity. The Hindus did not target innocent Muslims; on their part, the Muslim clerics of Mumbai declined to bury the bodies of their co-religionists from across the border since their acts were so plainly immoral.

  XI

  The year 2008 witnessed Islamic radicals launching terror attacks in different parts of India, culminating in the attack on Mumbai in November. In these twelve months Hindutva extremists had not been entirely inactive either. There was the bombing of the Samjhauta Express, mentioned earlier. And in the autumn of 2008 there was a major episode of religious rioting in the tribal districts of Orissa. This was sparked by the killing of a VHP leader, Swami Laxmanananda, after an attack on his ashram at Jalespata in the Kandhamal district. The killers were most likely Maoists.

  A product of the cow protection movement of the 1960s, Swami Laxmanananda had worked for many years in Kandhamal, seeking to assimilate the tribals to the Hindu fold, by urging them to worship Hindu gods and goddesses, and abjure alcohol. In 2006, to mark the birth centenary of the RSS patriarch M. S. Golwalkar, the Swami organized a massive congregration of tribals and non-tribals in Kandhamal. This was part of the general endeavour to bring tribals ‘home’ (ghar wapsi) to what the Swami perceived as their original and natural faith, namely, Hinduism.59

  Swami Laxmanananda was not the only missionary active in these parts, however. In the tribal districts of Orissa, wrote one reporter, there was ‘a volatile mix of Christian missionaries, Sangh Parivar activists . . . and Maoists which is battling for the hearts and minds of the people.’ The Christian missionaries had been successful in converting large numbers of a former Untouchable community, the Panos. The Hindu missionaries targeted the tribal Kandhas, who made up 52 per cent of the population. The Maoists, for their part, sought volunteers from both communities for their armed struggle against the state.

  In this fragile, deeply contested space, the murder of Swami Lakshmanananda proved the proverbial fire in the haystack. The VHP leader from Gujarat, Praveen Togadia, an old hand in stoking sectarian violence, led the Swami’s funeral procession, following which angry mobs torched Christian homes and churches. The violence continued for a full seven weeks. Tens of thousands of Christian Panos fled their villages into makeshift refugee camps.

  Visiting the villages the Panos had abandoned, a reporter found their homes ‘reduced to charred shells, their churches ransacked, their hard-earned worldly goods looted or destroyed, their grains burnt and their goats scattered. The manner in which the houses have been targeted show prior knowledge: as in Gujarat [in 2002], only the homes of the minorities have been torched.’60

  The Kandhamal district had a mere thirteen police stations, with just five hundred constables tasked to maintain the peace in this vast and hilly terrain. The police were too few, they were poorly trained and they were under-equipped. Even if they had the will to contain the violence they had not the means. Indeed, at least two police stations were attacked by mobs, thousands of rioters surrounding a post with a few cowering cops inside.61

  XII

  As the next general elections approached, the political landscape was as complex and variegated as it had ever been. In May 2007, the BSP won a surprising, as well as striking, majority in Uttar Pradesh. Once implacably hostile to the upper castes, the party had now reached out to Brahmins and Muslims. As many as 139 of the seats contested by the BSP were allocated to upper castes.62 As one commentator put it, by forging alliances with other communities, ‘the BSP has turned the old Congress constituency – the Brahmin, Muslim, Dalit combine – on its head. Only, in Mayawati’s brave new world, instead of the Brahmins being in the driver’s seat, it is the Dalit: indeed, she has done what her mentor and creator of the BSP, Kanshi Ram, had dreamt of – she has turned the pyramid upside-down. And so, for the first time after 1991, when the BJP won an absolute majority in Uttar Pradesh, the state has voted for single-party rule and stability, ending 14 years of messy coalition governments.’63

  A year later, in May 2008, the Bharatiya Janata Party formed a government in Karnataka. This was the first southern state in which the BJP, traditionally a party of the North and West, had won power. The Congress in Karnataka had been discredited by years of (mis)rule; while a group of powerful and wealthy mining lords had thrown their weight, and their cash, behind the BJP. A prominent BJP leader, Ananth Kumar, described this election as a ‘semi-final’, presaging what he hoped would be the party’s victory in the general elections due to be held in a year’s time.64

  In December 2008, when state elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference emerged as the largest party. Omar Abdullah, the grandson of Sheikh Abdullah and the son of Farooq Abdullah, became chief minister. The Congress once more joined the ruling coalition, as the junior partner. In elections held in other states in the same month, the Congress regained power in Rajasthan, but could not wrest back power from the BJP in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

  The next general elections were due in May 2009. The Congress was in power at the centre, and in some key states. But the advent of the BJP in Karnataka indicated the growing pan-Indian appeal of the party. Meanwhile, regional parties were still robust in some states, whereas in the largest state of all, Uttar Pradesh, a party founded for and by Dalits was in power.

  In January 2009 the prime minister underwent heart surgery. Some thought he would retire once his term was over. However, when the general elections were announced in early March, Manmohan Singh was presented as one of the three faces of the Congress. The others were the party president, Sonia Gandhi – the prime architect of the 2004 win – and her son Rahul, who in September 2007 had been made one of the Congress’s general secretaries. Party posters featured portraits of all three leaders.

  On the other side, with Atal Behari Vajpayee ailing, the BJP offered as its Prime Ministerial candidate his long-time colleague and sometime deputy, Lal Krishna Advani. Advani had waited many years for this opportunity. The prime mover behind the Ayodhya campaign that had effectively made his party a national force, he had, in 1996 and again in 1998, made way for Vajpayee when the BJP was in a position to form the central government.

  At the time of the 2009 elections, Advani was eighty-one. Manmohan Singh was only five years younger, but he had kept his government going for a full term. The economy was doing well, for which
sections of the middle class gave him credit, as they did for the nuclear deal with the United States. The prominence given to Rahul Gandhi was intended to attract first-time voters, while, as the architect of the UPA’s social welfare schemes, Sonia Gandhi had an appeal among the underprivileged. The rural employment guarantee programme in particular had begun to show results. Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women had benefited substantially from this scheme, while the building of roads and wells had helped the rural economy as a whole.65

  Most observers (this writer included) expected a fragmented verdict, with both Congress and BJP falling well short of a majority, each side then scrambling for partners to make up the numbers. The possibility of a ‘Third Front’ (as in 1989 and 1996) forming the government was also in the air. In the event, the Congress increased its tally by more than 60 seats. It won as many as 206 seats in the Lok Sabha, the first time it had crossed the two hundred mark since 1991. With several regional parties already committed to an alliance with it, the Congress no longer needed the Left at all.

  The incumbent prime minister, Manmohan Singh, would now emulate Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi in serving two full terms in office. Speaking to his party after the results were out, Dr Singh said the five years to follow could be ‘decisive’ in India’s history. ‘If we can sustain the growth rates of the last five years’, he said, ‘we can reduce poverty, create new employment, accelerate rural development and industrialization and transform the lives of our people.’ ‘We must’, said the prime minister, ‘grasp the nettle firmly and forge ahead.’66

  XIII

  In the 2009 elections, the Congress had done particularly well in Andhra Pradesh, winning 33 out of 42 seats on offer. This was because of the energetic campaigning of the state’s chief minister, Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy. ‘YSR’, as he was popularly known, was a ruthless political operator, who ran both party and state with a firm hand. One of his achievements, such as it was, was to suppress the long-standing demand for a separate state of Telangana, to be carved out of the districts of Andhra that had been part of the erstwhile Hyderabad State.67

  The parts of Andhra Pradesh once ruled directly by British had access to the coast, and were watered by large rivers. They were progressive and prosperous compared to those parts that lay in the interior, and had formerly been ruled by the Nizam. However, when the united state of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956, the princely capital of Hyderabad was chosen as its capital too.

  The coastal Andhra/Telangana divide beset the state from its origins. The intellectuals of Telangana complained that the politicians and businessmen diverted public investment away from the hinterland towards the already pampered coastal districts. They produced figures showing that while Telangana had 42 per cent of the state’s cultivated area, it was allotted 30 per cent of the state’s expenditure on agriculture, 27 per cent of the allocation of fertilizers, and less than its fair share of canal waters and hydel power as well.

  In the late 1960s a major movement broke out, led by students, demanding the creation of a separate state of Telangana. A pamphlet issued by the movement’s leaders argued that ‘smaller states can help [in] democratising our political process, which in turn will attract the larger sections into [the] developmental process . . .’ Indeed, ‘smaller states may herald a new and promising era in the political and economic life of [the] nation’. These words were accompanied by massive street protests, which paralyzed road and rail links. The movement was suppressed only by the use of considerable force.68

  In later decades the demand for Telangana never went away, with dharnas and strikes occurring from time to time. Before the general elections of 2004, the Congress party, then out of power, forged an alliance with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS). It made one particular promise and one general promise; support for the creation of a Telangana state, and the formation of a new States Reorganization Commission. Linguistic states had assured Indian unity; now it was perhaps time for a further reorganization, to break up large, unwieldy states such as Andhra, Maharashtra, West Bengal and, above all, Uttar Pradesh.

  After it unexpectedly came to power, the Congress reneged on both promises: the first because it was opposed by the powerful Andhra chief minister, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the second because it was opposed by the Left parties, whose support was crucial to the new government’s survival, and who vetoed a new SRC because Bengali communists did not want to give encouragement to the movement for a state of Gorkhaland.

  The demand for Telangana revived after Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy died in a helicopter crash in September 2009. YSR’s successor lacked his authority, and his ruthlessness. On the other side, the Telangana movement was now led by K. Chandrasekhar Rao (known as KCR), a charismatic figure and powerful orator. In the last week of November 2009 KCR went on a fast unto death demanding the immediate constitution of a separate Telangana state. This drew tens of thousands of his followers into the streets, disrupting life in the state’s capital, Hyderabad, which was now also a major centre of the IT and pharmaceutical industries.

  Confronted by KCR’s fast and the popular upsurge that it led to, the UPA panicked. On 9 December 2009, the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, issued a statement promising that ‘the process of forming the state of Telangana will be initiated’. He urged KCR to abandon his fast (which he did), and asked the chief minister to withdraw all cases against those associated with the agitation.

  The announcement led to anger and disappointment among the Congress MPs from coastal Andhra. But once the Union home minister had made his promise in public there was no going back. After a series of tortuous and prolonged negotiations, Andhra Pradesh was formally bifurcated. The two states would share Hyderabad as their capital for ten years, after which it would be exclusively Telangana’s. The residual state, still called Andhra Pradesh but popularly known as Seemandhra, would be allocated Central funds to build a new capital.69

  XIV

  Two core principles of the Indian constitution were equality and pluralism. The constitution sought to bestow equal rights on women and Dalits, and recognize and respect different languages, religions and ways of life. There was, to be sure, a substantial slippage between theory and practice. Women and Dalits continued to be discriminated against. Hindutva radicals made Muslims and Christians feel vulnerable and insecure.

  One area in which neither diversity nor equality was prescribed or recognized, even in theory, was sexual choice. The practice of homosexuality was held to be criminal, as defined by Section 377 of the nineteenth century Indian Penal Code. In August 2009 – shortly after the UPA was re-elected – the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377 of the IPC. A division bench, consisting of Chief Justice A. P. Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar, held that Section 377 violated the right to privacy and dignity. It traced the rise of progressive legislation in these matters in other countries, where sex between consenting adults in private had been decriminalized, and homosexuals given equal rights in the professional sphere, even in such bastions of conservatism as the army.

  The original petition against Section 377 was filed by the Naz Foundation in 2001. It sought the legalization of gay sex between consenting adults. The petitioners were opposed by various religious groups, Hindu, Muslim and Christian, as well as by the Home Ministry of the government of India.

  Those who argued for the retention of Section 377 claimed it was needed in the interests of a generalized and ostensibly universal notion of ‘public morality’. Justices Shah and Muralidhar on the other hand, saw the section as specific in place and time; as they remarked, ‘it was based on a conception of sexual morality specific to [the] Victorian era drawing on notions of carnality and sinfulness’. Section 377, said the High Court, ‘targets the homosexual community as a class and is motivated by an animus towards this vulnerable class of people’. For as it stood, ‘Section 377 IPC has the effect of viewing all gay men as criminals. When everything associated with homosexuality is treated as bent, queer, repugnant, the whole g
ay and lesbian community is marked with deviance and perversity. They are subject to extensive prejudice because of what they are or what they are perceived to be, not because of what they do. The result is that a significant group of the population is, because of its sexual non-conformity, persecuted, marginalised and turned on itself’.

  Removing Section 377 would free this group of this stigma, and incidentally be a progressive public health measure as well. In any case, remarked the judges, it ‘is not within the constitutional competence of the State to invade the privacy of citizens’ lives or regulate conduct to which the citizen alone is concerned . . .. The criminalisation of private sexual relations between consenting adults absent any evidence of serious harm deems the provision’s objective both arbitrary and unreasonable’.

  The Delhi High Court held that Section 377 of the IPC violated Article 14 (equality before the law), Article 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, the court accepting the petitioners’ pleas that ‘sex’ included ‘sexual orientation’) and Article 21 (protection of life and liberty) of the constitution. The judges ended by observing that ‘if there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be the underlying theme of the Indian constitution, it is that of “inclusiveness”. This court believes that [the] Indian constitution reflects this value deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations. The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognising a role in society for everyone. Those perceived by the majority as “deviants” or “different” are not on that score excluded or ostracised’.70