XV
The Delhi High Court judgement was widely welcomed by democrats, who saw it as the natural, logical, extension of the promises of equality and pluralism mandated by the constitution. However, even as pluralism was being extended in one direction, in theory, it was being denied in another direction, in practice. After several years of relative peace, there was now discontent once more in the Kashmir Valley.
In May 2008, some forty hectares of forest land were allotted to house pilgrim shelters on the route to Amarnath, a popular Hindu shrine in the mountains of Kashmir, inaccessible by motor road, and involving a long, arduous journey by foot or on horseback. When the diversion of land was made public, some feared that this was the thin edge of a wedge to carry out the proclaimed policy of Hindutva radicals to settle Hindus permanently in the Valley.
In the third week of June, protests erupted in the Valley against the transfer of land for the Amarnath yatra. This prompted a counter-stir in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region, where activists threatened to blockade the only road connecting the mainland to the Valley. After more protests and the killing of several Kashmiris in police firing, the land allotment order was reversed. The BJP and its associates now called for an all-India bandh. ‘If there is no Amarnath yatra, there would be no Haj also,’ declared the VHP’s Praveen Togadia in Delhi. The VHP also called for a countrywide boycott of all products and goods from Kashmir.
The protests and counter-protests continued through the autumn of 2008. When winter came and the state’s political class shifted to Jammu for the winter, the troubles had subsided. But they had left further and fresh wounds on the collective psyche of the Kashmiris of the Valley, new hurdles in the way of their being seen as, and seeing themselves as, full-fledged citizens of India.71
2009 was relatively quiet in Kashmir (and for Kashmiris) but 2010 was another year of discontent. In June a student was killed in police firing. This led to crowds of young men (and sometimes boys) coming out into the streets to protest, provoking more firing, and inevitably, more protest. The protesters threw rocks and stones at the police. The army was then called in to restore order. Troops marched through the narrow lanes of Srinagar and other towns, while Kashmiris watched, sullenly, from their homes.72
The protests resumed, and at episodic intervals, the police and protesters battled it out in the streets. Friday evenings were often the most tense, as, after hearing stirring sermons in mosques, young Kashmiris were in a militant mood. Occasionally, police posts were attacked, provoking fierce retaliation. Through July and August large parts of Srinagar and other towns were often under curfew. On several different occasions, police and paramilitary fired on crowds shouting ‘azadi, azadi’ (freedom, freedom), the deaths and the injuries mounting steadily.73
The protests further intensified in September, when copies of the Koran were burnt by a fundamentalist pastor in Florida. Angry Kashmiris torched a Christian school and fought with the police who had come out to contain them. The death toll for the summer of 2010 had now crossed seventy.74 A journalist who had closely tracked Kashmir for many years urged the prime minister to take ‘bold steps to demonstrate his willingness to address the grievances of ordinary Kashmiris.’ Dr Singh, wrote this commentator, should not insult Kashmiri sentiments ‘by talking of economic packages, roundtable conferences and all-party talks’. Rather, ‘he should unreservedly express regret for the deaths that have occurred these past few weeks. He should admit, in frankness and humility, the Indian state’s failure to deliver justice all these years. And he should ask the people of Kashmir for a chance to make amends. There is still no guarantee the lava of public anger which is flowing will cool.’ For, wrote this journalist in August 2010, if the prime minister did not ‘make an all-out effort to create some political space today, there is no telling where the next eruption in the valley will take us.’75
The advice was well meant, but unlikely to be heeded. For the Indian political establishment had increasingly ceded control of the Kashmir Valley to the army. The AFSPA continued to be deeply resented, but no prime minister was courageous enough to think of repealing it, even in districts away from the border where militancy was on the wane. If the central government was unable or unwilling to offer a hand of friendship and reconciliation, the Kashmiris for their part were now increasingly under the sway of a fundamentalist, Wahabbist, version of Islam. The Sufism that had once permeated the Valley was now in permanent retreat. What had begun as a freedom struggle had taken on the characteristics of a holy war.76
XVI
In August 2009, the Lok Sabha adopted The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2009, mandating free and compulsory education to children aged between six and fourteen. Although such a provision had been mandated in the constitution, the government had thus far failed to meet this obligation. Indeed, government schools were so poorly run that even peasant and working-class families preferred to put their children in private schools, often incurring debts to do so. Now, to make up for past failures by the state, all private schools, except those recognized as ‘minority’ institutions, would henceforth have to allot 25 per cent of their seats to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who would pay no fees.77
Later the same month, the UPA government proposed that reservation for women at all tiers of the panchayati raj system be raised from 33 to at least 50 per cent. To become law, the proposal would however require an amendment to the constitution.78 Some months later, the Cabinet approved an even more radical proposal, which was to have 33 per cent of seats in the national Parliament, and in State Assemblies, reserved for women. The Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, strongly backed this proposal.
In March 2010, the Women’s Reservation was tabled in the Rajya Sabha, where it was bitterly opposed by some of the Congress’s own alliance partners. The Rashtriya Janata Dal pulled its ministers out of the government in protest. The bill was then dropped, for fear of creating a further rift in the ruling coalition.79
These gestures towards an inclusive education policy and parliamentary reservation for women were aimed to consolidate the Congress’s claim to represent or speak for the majority of Indians. However, from the end of 2009 the Union government found itself in the middle of one scandal after another. First, there was a controversy about the allocation of second and third generation (2G and 3G) telecom licences, which, said the Central Bureau of Investigation, were given to private companies ‘on a first-come-first-served basis at the rates of 2001 – which were very low – without any competitive bidding’. The CBI estimated the loss to the exchequer as being about Rs22,000 crores.80
The minister in charge of the telecom sector was A. Raja of the DMK. However, the next scandal involved a senior Congress politician, Suresh Kalmadi, who was in charge of preparations for the Commonwealth Games (CWG), due to be held in New Delhi in 2010. Reports began to surface of large sums of money being paid to secure road and building contracts for these Games.81
These allegations were energetically taken up by newspapers and television. In a bid at damage control, the government appointed a Committee to probe into the Commonwealth Games affair, while A. Raja resigned from the Cabinet. However, the corruption scandals were a blot on the reputation of the prime minister, who, despite his personal reputation for honesty, had allowed these alleged illegalities to happen.
In October 2010, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) was tabled in Parliament. This estimated the loss to the state exchequer as a result of the 2G allocation to be up to Rs 1.76 lakh crore.82 The credibility of the prime minister and his government fell further when, in February 2011, the CBI felt it had enough evidence to arrest A. Raja.83
There were now a large number of television channels which energetically competed for viewers. Corruption was not unknown in the past; but never before had it been manifest in so many high places. That a central government headed by a prime minister who claimed to be personally incorruptible had its hand in the till – or seve
ral tills – made this an exciting story for journalists to follow. That state agencies such as the CBI and the CAG had themselves held that illegalities had occurred, that the real or putative sums of the money pilfered were so colossally large, and that Cabinet ministers had been arrested, made the story even more compelling. Through the winter of 2010–1 the 2G, 3G and CWG scandals dominated the headlines, on television and in print, and in both English and Hindi, with other language-media not far behind. That the prime minister and his party president stayed silent added to the intrigue and to the sense of their presumed complicity in the corrupt acts of their party colleagues. In the summer of 2011, within two years of its re-election, the United Progressive Alliance was facing a serious crisis of credibility.
30
The Rise of the ‘BJP System’
The Congress is still, and is likely to be for a long time, the most organized political party in the country, with a nationwide following and considerable depth in the localities.
RAJNI KOTHARI, 1970
In Narendra Modi, the people of India see a dynamic, decisive and development-oriented leader who has emerged as a ray of hope for the dreams and aspirations of a billion Indians. His focus on development, eye for detail and efforts to bring a qualitative difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor have made Narendra Modi a popular and respected leader across the length and breadth of India. Narendra Modi’s life has been a journey of courage, compassion and constant hard work.
The website of the Prime Minister of India, as updated at 7 p.m. on 26 May 2014
I
AMONG THE REASONS THAT the Congress lost the 1989 general election was the Bofors scandal. And some assembly elections had also been won and lost on the question of corruption. However, it was only in the summer of 2011 that the misuse of public office for private gain became a major national issue, debated all over the country. The debate was sparked by a fast in New Delhi in April by the veteran social worker Anna Hazare.
In 2011, Hazare was seventy-three years of age. Born in a peasant family in Maharashtra, he worked for many years as a driver in the Indian army. After retirement, he settled in his ancestral village, Ralegan Siddhi, and designed and implemented an extremely successful model of sustainable agriculture. He motivated the peasants to conserve rainwater (by building check dams) and reforest barren hillsides. He also persuaded (by some accounts, coerced) them to give up alcohol. A decade after Hazare settled in the village, Ralegan Siddhi was a beacon of ‘green development’, visited by environmental activists from around India and the world.1
Hazare’s given names were Kisan Baburao. However, through his work in Ralegan Siddhi he came to be called ‘Anna’, elder brother. Once his village became well known, he expanded his theatre of action to the state of Maharashtra as a whole. He drew attention to corruption in the state’s development programmes, and occasionally fasted to put pressure on Maharashtra’s officials and politicians. Now, in April 2011, the telecom and Commonwealth Games scams, and the massive media attention they engendered, persuaded Hazare that he needed to move himself to the national stage.
Hazare’s fast in New Delhi was conducted at Jantar Mantar, which had become the preferred venue for protests once the police had closed Rajpath to activists. Before starting his ordeal he visited Rajghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. Here he told the assembled reporters: ‘I have come to request Gandhiji to give good sense to this government. So many sacrifices were made for this country. But everything is being destroyed. You [Gandhiji] gave direction to this country but these people are destroying it.’2
By ‘these people’, Hazare meant the politicians and officials who manned and ran the government of India. His fast had one general aim – to focus national attention on the problem of corruption – and one specific aim, to compel the government to pass a bill appointing a ‘Lokpal’, or ombudsman, with the powers to detect and punish corrupt officials and politicians.
Hazare’s fast was widely, and at times breathlessly, covered by the press. The government’s failure to punish the guilty in the telecom and Commonwealth Games scams was imprinted on the public imagination. And more or less every Indian had at some stage of his or her life paid a bribe. There was, the television cameras sensed, an extremely receptive audience for the fast, so they positioned themselves at Jantar Mantar, reporting the event. Hazare sat on the stage, while anti-corruption activists made a series of stirring speeches, the national tricolour waving in the background. A stream of writers, retired judges, musicians and even the odd Bollywood actor trooped off to Jantar Mantar to visit Hazare, each new celebrity endorsement adding to the excitement and the drama.
An umbrella organization called ‘India Against Corruption’ had been formed to support Hazare. Its prime movers included Arvind Kejriwal, an engineer-turned-civil servant-turned-activist, who had worked on the Right to Information campaign. India Against Corruption organized supportive vigils in cities across the country, where candles were lit and songs sung in solidarity with the protests in Delhi.3
Prominent among those who came out to support Hazare were college students and young professionals. They were moved by the sight of an old man come, as he proclaimed, to save the nation from those who had corrupted it. Hazare himself did not use a smartphone or the Internet, but these young admirers took his message energetically across social media. They suggested that, in terms of message and method, Anna Hazare was, so to say, Mahatma Gandhi reborn. ‘Join Dandi March-II’ and ‘A Mahatma announces fast-unto-death’ were among the taglines used on Twitter and Facebook. On 7 April 2011, two days into Hazare’s fast, a tweet reading ‘Earthquake named Anna Hazare lashes on corrupt Indian politicians, epicenter India, it measures 1.22 Billion Richter Hearts’ was one of the top ten global trending topics on Twitter.4
Unnerved by the protests, and even more so by the widespread and entirely sympathetic coverage in the media, the government of India buckled in. On 9 April it announced that it would set up a committee of ten members to help prepare a Lokpal Bill. In this committee, five Cabinet ministers would work with five people nominated by India Against Corruption, an extraordinary concession placing an elected national government on par with one, and not entirely representative, section of civil society. On hearing of this, Hazare broke his fast, and said he hoped the new Lokpal Bill would be passed by Parliament before 15 August 2011, Independence Day.5
II
Through the summer of 2011, the national conversation was focused on corruption. In the last week of April, the CBI arrested Suresh Kalmadi, the chairman of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee in New Delhi, for ‘conspiracy’ in awarding a contract to a Swiss firm at an inflated cost of Rs141 crore. Kalmadi was a prominent and influential Congressman, and although the party now suspended him, it could not escape the odour from his arrest.6
Meanwhile, the ten-member committee set up to draft a new Lokpal Bill had run into rough weather. The Cabinet ministers and the social activists deeply distrusted one another; this distrust separately communicated by them every evening to reporters as soon as the sittings ended. India Against Corruption demanded that the sittings be telecast live; a demand the government found impossible to meet. The activists then chose to boycott the meetings, and the committee was disbanded.
In the first week of June, a fresh fast commenced in New Delhi, this one undertaken by Baba Ramdev, a yoga teacher with a substantial following in northern and eastern India. Ramdev was, in terms of personality, quite different from Hazare; earthy rather than earnest, and with large ambitions for himself, these both political – he was close to the BJP, and had contemplated forming a party himself – as well as commercial, the development of a line of food and medicinal products based on Ayurveda.
Ramdev had for some time demanded that the government act to bring back money stashed away in Swiss banks by rich Indians. Now, in June 2011, he sat on fast under a massive pandal at the Ramlila Maidan, the great open ground at the border of New and Old Delhi, which had
witnessed many epic speeches and rallies from the time of the Independence struggle of the 1920s and 1930s to the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s. When asked about the cost of the marquee, Ramdev answered (to quote the inadequate English translation of his richly flavoured Hindi): ‘Making one such pandal is nothing big for me. Everyone knows I can get several like these built in a single day. All the people gathered here would be willing to pay for the cost’.7
Knowing of his mass appeal, the government had at first treated Ramdev with indulgence. Cabinet ministers had met him beforehand and urged him to postpone or abandon his fast. When he went ahead anyway, they sent emissaries to the Ramlila Maidan urging him to call it off. That didn’t work either. They then chose to take a punitive line, with a large posse of police descending on the marquee and dispersing Ramdev’s followers. Ramdev himself panicked, changing into a woman’s dress and seeking to flee the scene. The police detained but did not arrest him. Instead, he was served an order externing him from Delhi.8
In the last week of July, the Union Cabinet approved a Lokpal Bill. However, the bill did not meet the approval of the activists, for it exempted the prime minister, the higher judiciary, and the conduct of members of Parliament from its purview. India Against Corruption termed the bill a ‘cruel joke’ and ‘a deceit on the nation’.9 Anna Hazare announced that he would go on a fresh fast to press for an improved bill that would be ‘strong and effective’.10
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 91
