India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  The increasing visibility of the RSS, and its growing influence on government policy, sparked a torrent of criticism from scholars and writers on the Left, who had dominated intellectual discourse in India. They feared that the secular and plural character of education would be replaced by one emphasizing the ideals of Hindu supremacists. That the prime minister had stayed silent while these provocative, abusive, statements were made by his party MPs was seen as a sign that he agreed with them. Many writers, some very distinguished, returned state awards in protest.

  Meanwhile, the BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), sought to increase its influence in university politics. The ABVP urged MPs and ministers to throw their weight behind them, by, for instance, arresting or intimidating left-wing student activists. In Hyderabad University, pressured by the ABVP, the Union Ministry of Education had an Ambedkarite group banned and some of its members rusticated. This led to the death by his own hand of a young Dalit activist, a research scholar who in his suicide note wrote poignantly of his own intellectual ambitions, now to remain unfulfilled because of upper-caste hostility and prejudice.80

  The protection of the cow, and a total ban on cow slaughter, had long been a key item in the Hindutva agenda. Now, with the BJP in power, it was sought to be made a major plank of public policy. BJP governments in Haryana and Maharashtra banned the sale and consumption of beef. In other states, Hindutva vigilantes attacked and occasionally killed individuals suspected of selling cows or eating beef.81

  The early victims of these attacks were Muslims, but then, in July 2016, four Dalits in Modi’s home state of Gujarat were thrashed by upper-caste vigilantes for skinning dead cows. The leather trade was traditionally dominated by Dalits, and the skinning of dead cows was a ubiquitous phenomena in rural India. But in the heightened passions unleashed by the cow protection campaigners, this everyday practice was deemed blasphemous. Worse, the vigilantes in Gujarat filmed their beating of Dalits and uploaded it on social media.

  The outrage sparked condemnation in the press, and, more significantly, massive protests across Gujarat. Dalits threw dead carcasses in front of government offices, and burnt government buses. They organized well-attended meetings in many towns, vowing not to submit to upper-caste persecution. The protests were so intense and prolonged that Anandiben Patel, Modi’s handpicked successor as chief minister of Gujarat, was compelled to resign. The prime minister himself, who had previously stayed silent on the subject, was finally forced to speak out once cow vigilantism had manifested itself in his own home state.82

  Not all of the protests against the BJP government were provoked by RSS or Hindutva policies, however. Others were a legacy of past policies by other parties and governments. Thus the extension by V.P. Singh of affirmative action beyond Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes had prompted a manic rush to be included in the official list of ‘Other Backward Castes’. Among the new and arguably spurious claimants to ‘backward’ status were the Jats of Haryana and the Patidars of Gujarat. These were both dominant castes, who controlled the village economy in these states, and were extremely influential in politics as well.

  Both Patidars and Jats had a strong sense of, and pride in, their caste identity. Both resented the rise of castes lower than them in the social hierarchy, and now sought to re-establish their dominance by acquiring access to reserved seats in colleges and government offices.

  In July 2015, the Patidars commenced a major agitation in Gujarat, blockading roads and bringing everyday life to a halt. They demanded immediate inclusion in the OBC list. In February 2016, the Jats of Haryana emulated them. Their protests were even more violent, with the burning of bus and train stations, and the torching of homes and government offices. At one stage, the water supply of the nation’s capital, New Delhi, was imperilled.83

  Both the Patidar and Jat agitations were led and staffed by men in their twenties and thirties. For the younger members of these castes no longer wanted to make a living by farming. In Patidar villages, young men drove around on their motorbikes, played cards or fiddled with their smartphones. Jat youngsters did all these things, and organized wrestling matches and drinking parties as well.84 Turning their back on their past, unable to fully grasp or control the present, this new generation of Jats and Patidars channelled their anger and frustration into collective protests against the state on the question of reservation.85

  In power in both Haryana and Gujarat was the BJP. The suddenness of the Jat and Patidar protests, their almost savage intensity, were a sign of how fragile the hold of the ruling party, of any ruling party, on the populace was. Democracy and development had brought both prosperity and discontent in their wake. What face would manifest itself when, and in what manner, was something no scholar or historian, or even a politician presumably more in touch with the ‘grassroots’, could accurately or properly anticipate.

  XII

  In December 2014, Assembly elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir. The results revealed a divided state, with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) getting 28 seats in the Muslim-dominated Valley but the BJP sweeping the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. Neither party enjoyed a majority. After weeks of uncertainty, the PDP and the BJP formed a coalition government.

  Unlike the National Conference, which since Sheikh Abdullah signed his accord with Indira Gandhi had been solidly committed to making Kashmir part of India, the PDP had a more ambivalent stand. It fought elections and eschewed the gun, but sometimes expressed sympathy for the separatist movement. On the other side, the Jammu wing of the BJP had deep roots in the RSS, going back to the Praja Parishad movement of the 1950s which sought to completely ‘integrate’ Kashmir with India.

  The PDP-BJP coalition was dictated by the fractured electoral verdict. It held the peace, uneasily, both between the two parties and in the Valley itself. In the summer of 2015 the tourist trade was brisk. However, an attempt to impose a beef ban on the Valley provoked resentment, as did the tardiness of the government in releasing funds to rebuild homes damaged or destroyed by floods the previous year.

  In January 2016 the chief minister, the veteran Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, died. His daughter Mehbooba was sworn in as his successor. Then, in July, the always uneasy (and perhaps unnatural) peace was broken by the killing by the security forces of a young militant named Burhan Wani. It was said that Wani had gone underground after witnessing his brother being thrashed by army men. From his hideouts he posted videos of his speeches on social media, acquiring a cult-like status in the process.

  The killing of Wani led to an outpouring of grief, followed by anger. There was a massive attendance at his funeral (estimates of the crowd range from 30,000 to over 100,000), following which young Kashmiris clashed with the police in many towns and villages. The police responded with pellet guns, these blinding many protesters, further intensifying the anger. For more than a month the Valley lay under curfew, with shops, schools, colleges and offices all shut. More than seventy people died in the violence.86

  The troubles in Kashmir led to a tide of jingoism in the Indian media. Television channels competed with one another to term the protesters agents of Pakistan. Indians who deplored the excessive use of force and the blinding of youngsters were called Pakistani agents too. These media hounds juxtaposed, to the ‘bad Kashmiris’ on the streets of Srinagar, a ‘good Kashmiri’ named Shah Faesal, who had topped the prestigious Indian Administrative Service examination some years previously. This crude stereotyping prompted a public response by Shah Faesal, where he worried that the government he served ‘had outsourced, or rather abdicated, communications to TV channels, which are only interested in provoking and alienating.’ The Indian state, he continued, ‘can’t afford to leave the Kashmir project to intellectual renegades, political turncoats, opportunists, intelligence agencies, and most importantly, to self-appointed vigilantes of the national interest.’ He warned that ‘every hour of prime time TV news aggression pushes Kashmir a mile westward from India.’87
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  This was written in late July. In the third week of September 2016, terrorists coming into Kashmir from Pakistan attacked an army camp at the border town of Uri, killing eighteen Indian soldiers. There were fresh calls for retribution against Pakistan, for the bombing of training camps in that country. Some ideologues even demanded that India abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty, so as to starve Pakistan into submission. As the rhetoric escalated, the sufferings of the Kashmiris receded further into the background.

  Back in May 1949, Vallabhbhai Patel had written to the industrialist G. D. Birla, then overseas, to fill him in on the news in India. ‘Here we are having a grudging time’, reported Patel, ‘both with the weather and the problems which are arising; Kashmir, in particular, is giving us a severe headache.’ By ‘us’ Patel meant the Indian state, the Indian establishment. Sixty-seven summers later, the headache was as severe as it had ever been.

  Epilogue

  A 50–50 Democracy

  The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.

  GENERAL CLAUDE AUCHINLEK, 1948

  Few people contemplating Indira Gandhi’s funeral in 1984 would have predicted that ten years later India would remain a unity but the Soviet Union would be a memory.

  ROBIN JEFFREY, 2000

  I know that most Members of Parliament see the Constitution for the first time when they take an oath on it.

  PRAMOD MAHAJAN, Union Minister, 2000

  India is a halfway house where underperforming institutions coexist uncomfortably with overzealous ones, creating stress, conflict and loss – especially when venality or whimsicality in one is matched by self-righteousness in another.

  T. N. NINAN, 2015

  I

  IN AN ESSAY SUMMARIZING a lifetime of thinking on the subject, Isaiah Berlin identified ‘the infliction of a wound on the collective feelings of a society, or at least of its spiritual leaders’, as a ‘necessary’ condition for the birth of nationalist sentiment. For this sentiment to transform itself into a political movement, however, required ‘one more condition’, namely, that the society in question ‘must, in the minds of at least some of its most sensitive members, carry an image of itself as a nation, at least in embryo, in virtue of some general unifying factor or factors – language, ethnic origin, a common history (real or imaginary)’. Later in the same essay, Berlin commented on the ‘astonishingly Europocentric’ thought of nineteenth and early twentieth century political thinkers, where ‘the people of Asia and Africa are discussed either as wards or as victims of Europeans, but seldom, if ever, in their own right, as peoples with histories and cultures of their own; with a past and present and future which must be understood in terms of their own actual character and circumstances . . .’1.

  Behind every successful nationalist movement in the Western world was a certain unifying factor, a glue holding the members of the nation together, this provided by a shared language, a shared religious faith, a shared territory, a common enemy – and sometimes all of the above. Thus, the British nation brought together those who huddled together on a cold island, who were mostly Protestant, and who detested France. In the case of France, it was language which powerfully combined with religion. For the Americans a shared language and mostly shared faith worked in tandem with animosity towards the colonists. As for the smaller East European nations – the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians, etc – their populations have been united by a common language, a mostly common faith, and a shared and very bitter history of domination by German and Russian oppressors.2

  By contrast with these (and other examples) the Indian nation does not privilege a single language or religious faith. Although the majority of its citizens are Hindus, India is not a ‘Hindu’ nation. Its constitution does not discriminate between people on the basis of faith; neither, more crucially, did the nationalist movement that lay behind it. From its inception the Indian National Congress was, as Mukul Kesavan observes, a sort of political Noah’s Ark which sought to keep every species of Indian on board.3 Gandhi’s political programme was built upon harmony and co-operation between India’s two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. Although, in the end, his work and example were unsuccessful in stopping the division of India, the failure made his successors even more determined to construct independent India as a secular republic. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues, if India was anything at all it was not a ‘Hindu Pakistan’.

  The story of Indian secularism is a story that combines success with failure. Membership of a minority religion is no bar to advancement in business or the professions. One of the richest industrialists in India is a Muslim. Some of the most popular film stars are Muslim. Many of the country’s most prominent lawyers and doctors have been Christians and Parsis. At least three presidents and two chief justices have been Muslim. Indeed, between 2004 and 2007, the president of India was a Muslim, the prime minister a Sikh, and the leader of the ruling party a Catholic born in Italy, a fact that in those months and years was often spoken of with pride by Indians.

  On the other hand, in everyday life minorities face prejudice and hostility. Muslims in particular remain one of the poorest and most vulnerable communities in India. Besides, there have been periodic episodes of religious rioting, in the worst of which (as in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002) the minorities have suffered grievous losses of life and property. Still, for the most part the minorities appear to have retained faith in the secular ideal. Relatively few Indian Muslims have joined terrorist or fundamentalist organizations. Even more than their compatriots, Indian Muslims feel that their opinion and vote matters. One survey found that while 69 per cent of all Indians approved and endorsed the ideal of democracy, 72 per cent of Muslims did so.4

  Nurturing religious pluralism in a land recently divided on the basis of faith was always going to be hard work. The creation of an Islamic state on India’s borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to merge faith with state. The Ayodhya movement of the 1980s saw Hindutva radicals greatly increase their political salience. More recently, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and especially in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, has given further fuel to Hindu fundamentalists. India is not yet a Hindu Pakistan but, for the foreseeable future, those who wish to make it so will be present and active in the country. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.

  II

  The pluralism of religion was one cornerstone of the foundation of the Indian republic. A second was the pluralism of language. Here again, the intention and the effort well predated Independence. In the 1920s, Gandhi reconstituted the provincial committees of the Congress on linguistic lines. The party had promised to form linguistic provinces as soon as the country was free. The promise was not redeemed immediately after 1947, because the creation of Pakistan had promoted fears of further balkanization. However, in the face of popular protest the government yielded to the demand.

  Linguistic states have been in existence for sixty years now. In that time they have deepened and consolidated Indian unity. Within each state, a common language has provided the basis of administrative unity and efficiency. It has also led to an efflorescence of cultural creativity, as expressed in film, theatre, fiction and poetry. However, pride in one’s language has rarely been in conflict with a broader identification with the nation as a whole. It has proved perfectly possible – indeed, desirable – to be Kannadiga and Indian, Malayali and Indian, Andhra and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Oriya and In
dian, Maharashtrian and Indian, Gujarati and Indian and, of course, Hindi-speaking and Indian.

  That, in India, unity and pluralism are inseparable is graphically expressed in the country’s currency notes. On one side is printed a portrait of the ‘father of the nation’, Mahatma Gandhi; on the other side a picture of the Houses of Parliament. The note’s denomination – 5, 10, 50, 100, etc. – is printed in words in Hindi and English (the two official languages), but also, in smaller type, in all the other languages of the Union. In this manner, as many as seventeen different scripts are represented. With each language, and each script, comes a distinct culture and regional ethos, here nesting more-or-less comfortably with the idea of India as a whole.

  Some Western observers – usually Americans – believed that this profusion of tongues would be the undoing of India. In their own country, English had been the glue binding the different waves of immigrants, who had, over time, to discard the languages they brought with them – German, Yiddish, Italian, etc – and speak and write English alone. Americans visiting or living in India thus tended to argue that a single language – be it Hindi or English – should be spoken by all Indians. Linguistic states they regarded as a grievous error. Thus, in a book published as late as in 1970, and at the end of his stint as the Washington Post’s man in India, Bernard Nossiter wrote despairingly that this was ‘a land of Babel with no common voice’. The creation of linguistic states would ‘further divide the states from each other [and] heighten the impulse toward secession . . .’. From its birth the Indian nation had been ‘plagued by particularist, separatist tendencies’, wrote Nossiter, and ‘the continuing confusion of tongues . . . can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state’.5

  That, to survive, a nation-state had necessarily to privilege one language was a view that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin shared with American liberals. Stalin insisted that ‘a national community is inconceivable without a common language’, and that ‘there is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages’.6 This belief came to inform the language policy of the Soviet Union, in which the learning of Russian was made obligatory. The endeavour, as Stalin himself put it, was to ensure that ‘there is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves – that is Russian’.7