India After Gandhi (113 page)

Word that a group of
kar sevaks
had been burnt to death at Godhra quickly spread through Gujarat. A wave of retributory violence followed. This was at its most intense, and horrific, in the cities of Ahmedabad and Baroda. Once known for their philanthropic industrialists and progressive intellectuals, once centres of technical innovation and artistic excellence, both places had experienced a prolonged period of economic decline. With this came a deterioration in inter-community relations. Hindus and Muslims now rarely worked or played together, a separation that had in the recent past expressed itself in bouts of communal violence.
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These latest riots in Baroda and Ahmedabad were unprecedented in their savagery. Muslim shops and offices were attacked, mosques torched and cars vandalized. Muslim women were raped, Muslim men killed and bonfires made of their bodies. The mobs were often led by activists of the VHP, with the local administration in collusion. Their weapons ranged from swords and guns to petrol bombs and gas cylinders. The vandals had voter lists, which allowed them to identify which homes were Muslim and which were not. Ministers of the state government were camped in police control rooms, directing operations. The police had been instructed to give ‘free run of the roads to VHP and Bajrang Dal mobs’.
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Beyond Baroda and Ahmedabad, the violence also reached out into smaller towns and rural settlements. In the district of Sabarkantha, mobs roamed the countryside in tractors and jeeps, targeting properties owned by Muslims. The numerical record of their activities is available:
‘altogether, 2161 houses, 1461 shops, 304 smaller enterprises . . . 71 factories, 38 hotels, 45 religious places and 240 vehicles were completely or partially destroyed’.
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What was true of Sabarkantha was broadly true of the state as a whole. The VHP had made it clear that it wanted to render the Muslims hopeless as well as homeless. Thus in Ahmedabad, weeks after the riots had subsided Muslims still found it difficult to get loans from banks, gas and phone connections and enrolment in school for their children. Muslims who had fled their villages were told they would have to drop charges against the rioters if they wished to return. Sometimes their safety was made conditional on their conversion to Hinduism.
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The chief minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots was Narendra Modi, a hard-line Hindutva ideologue who had grown up in the unforgiving school of the RSS. Now, he justified the violence on Muslims by pointing to the burning of the railway coach in Godhra, which, he said, had set in motion a ‘chain of action and reaction’. In truth, the reaction was many times that of the original action. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed, and at least fifty times that number rendered homeless, living in refugee camps whose pitiable condition was noticed by the prime minister and president themselves.
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The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines ‘pogrom’ as ‘an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group’. By this definition, while there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. There are some striking similarities between the two. Both began as a response to a single, stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community. Both proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole. The Sikhs who were butchered were in no way connected to the Sikhs who killed Mrs Gandhi. The Muslims who were killed by Hindu mobs were completely innocent of the Godhra crime (which may anyway have been an accident).

In both cases the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The prime minister in Delhi in 1984, and the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings. And serving ministers in their government went so far as to aid and direct the rioters.

The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the
violence they had legitimized and overseen. Rajiv Gandhi’s party won the 1984 general election by a very large margin, and in December 2002 Narendra Modi was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat after his party won a two-thirds majority in the assembly polls.

The rise of the Hindu right in general, and the events at Ayodhya in particular, prompted afresh wave of gloomy forebodings about the future of India. ‘The secular fabric of the country has been seriously damaged’, wrote the Madras fortnightly
Frontline
, adding: ‘India will never be the same again’. For the ‘events of December 6 and 7 gave India a taste of what things would be [like]if and when the Hindutva combine’s Hindu Rashtra [Hindu State] comes into existence. It became clear . . . [that] the minority communities would have no right to live, not to speak of social interaction; that freedom of expression would be non-existent; and that truth would be only what the rulers perceive. ‘In the week that followed [6th December 1992], India changed, perhaps forever’, commented the Calcutta weekly Sunday. With the breakdown of authority and the rule of law, ‘in the eyes of the world, India moved one step closer to being perceived as a tinpot African “republic”’. The ‘forces let loose by the vandalism at Ayodhya’ , lamented the New Delhi magazine
India Today
, ‘have begun not just to take a ghastly toll of human lives, but also to reduce to rubble the edifice of our hopes and aspirations as a people and as a nation.
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These worries were shared by the Western press. ‘Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque’, wrote
Time
magazine, ‘the three pillars of the Indian state – democracy, secularism and the rule of law – are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism’.
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The day after the mosque came down,
The Times
of London carried a story with the headline ‘Militants Bury Hope of Harmony in Rubble of Indian Mosque’. The next day’s paper quoted the views of the Labour politician Jack Straw, then on a visit to Bombay. Straw thought that there was a real danger that India would slide ‘into the abyss of sectarianism’. The same issue carried a leading article by the Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien, which confidently proclaimed that ‘India’s history as a secular state appears to be coming to an end’. O’Brien anticipated a mass flight of Muslims into
Pakistan, and the emigration of educated Hindus into Europe and North America.
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These were the immediate, so to say knee-jerk, responses of excitable journalists and professional cynics (O’Brien had previously predicted that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the revival of a cult of Hitler and of a party based on Nazi ideals). But writers trained to take the long view also echoed these fears. A British author who had written many affectionate books about the subcontinent remarked that ‘all who care about that country must tremble for the future of its secular democracy’.
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And an American scholar who had spent a lifetime studying India went so far as to compare the Sangh Parivar to the Nazis: ‘It is past time to note’, wrote Paul Brass, ‘that Indian politics and society display many of the symptoms of a murderous pre-fascist stage which has already produced a multiplicity of localized
Kristall-nachts
in numerous urban sites.’ The ‘spread of violence, lawlessness and disorder at the local level, thought Brass, might prompt the central government (then controlled by the Congress) into ‘another venture into authoritarian practices’ . And so the ‘Indian state may yet disintegrate in this clash between secular opportunists and chauvinist nationalists equally tied to the pursuit of illusions and chimeras, “symbols and shadows” of national unity and greatness pursued by all the tyrannical regimes of the twentieth century .
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At the time of writing (2008), these dire predictions have not come to pass. In theory, if less assuredly in practice, India remains a secular state. The rule of law is not what it might be, but the writ of the central government still runs over most of India. India has not (yet) become either a tinpot dictatorship of the African kind or a fascist one modelled on European examples.

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

P
RAMOD
M
AHAJAN
, Union minister, 2000

The current resurgence of identity politics, or the politics of caste and community, is but an expression of the primacy of the group over the individual. It does not augur well for liberal democracy in India.

A
NDRÉ
B
ÉTEILLE
, sociologist, 2002

I
N
J
ULY
1958 I
NDIA
’
S
leading journal of public affairs carried an anonymous essay with the intriguing title ‘After Nehru . . .’. At the time, Jawaharlal Nehru had been prime minister of India for a full eleven years. He was pushing seventy, and the last representative of the old guard within the Congress Party. Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Azad were dead, Govind Ballabh Pant was ailing and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was sulking in retirement in Madras. The party, and the nation, were being willed along by the moral authority of the prime minister. There was no obvious successor among the next generation of Congress politicians. What would happen after he was gone?

The essay that posed the question in July 1958 provided this answer:

The prestige that the party will enjoy as the inheritor of the mantle of Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru will inhibit the growth of any effective or healthy opposition during the first few years. In later years as popular discontent against the new generation of party bosses increases, they will for sheer self-preservation, be led to make
increasing attempts to capture votes by pandering to caste, communal and regional interests and ultimately even to ‘rig’ elections.

In this situation, argued the essayist, the Congress Party would find it hard to resist the allure of commerce. For

in a politico-economic system of mixed economy, in which the dividing line between mercantilism and socialism is still very obscure and control over the State machinery can give glittering prizes to the business as well as the managerial classes, the moneyed interests are bound to infiltrate sooner or later into the ruling cadres of the party in power.

Finally, the writer predicted that the growth of caste, communal and regional caucuses would lead to an ‘increasing instability of Government first in the States and later also at the Centre’. This instability, in turn, might lead to a competitive patriotism among the different parties.

For instance, the Congress Party may try to unite the nation behind it by warning of the dangers of ‘Balkanisation’, the Jan Sangh by playing up the fear of aggression from Pakistan, the P[raja] S[ocialist] P[arty] by emphasising the competition between India and China and the Communist Party by working up popular indignation against dollar imperialism.
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Of all the predictions quoted in these pages, this one reads best with the passage of time. The 1967 elections, the first held after Nehru’s death, produced instability at the centre as well as in the states. There was a growth of popular sentiment along the axes of region, religion and caste, which found expression within the ruling party and – something the writer did not anticipate – in new parties organized on sectarian lines. As politics became more competitive, the Congress under Indira Gandhi played up the fear, real or imaginary, of Balkanization, the Jana Sangh played up the threats, real or imaginary, from Pakistan and the communists pointed to the diabolical designs, real or imaginary, of the United States. There was an increasing infusion of money into politics, and various attempts to rig elections.

Who was this gifted political astrologer, whose forecasts have been so largely vindicated by later events? He might have been a Western political scientist, constrained to write anonymously about a controversial subject concerning another country. Or perhaps he was a civil servant working within the government of India, precluded by his job
from speaking out in his own name. That he was one such is suggested by the remark that ‘senior civil servants are hoping that they will retire before Nehru goes’, so as not to work under what was likely to be a less broad-minded as well as less competent successor.
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While Jawaharlal Nehru was alive, the Congress always ruled at the centre. And of all the opposition parties, only the communists in Kerala had enjoyed power in the states. Beginning with the elections of 1967, the political landscape of India became more variegated. An increasing number of state governments fell into the hands of non-Congress parties. In 1977 the first non-Congress government came to power in New Delhi. The 1980s saw Congress regain power in the centre, but at the end of the decade it lost it again.

This growing decentralization of the political system has manifested itself in the rise of coalition governments. The Janata Party which came to power in 1977 was itself a coalition of four different parties. The next non-Congress government was the National Front that came to power in 1989. This had seven distinct components, and was yet a minority government. Since then no government in New Delhi has been ruled by a single party.
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