India After Gandhi (149 page)

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Authors: Ramachandra Guha

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24. D
EMOCRACY
IN
D
ISARRAY

Walter Schwarz, ‘Two-Party Democracy Faces a Test Run’, Guardian, 14 May 1977.
Clippingfrom the New York Times, 4April 1977; letter to S. K. De, dated 17 June 1977, both in Temp Mss 577/81, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
Horace Alexander to Indira Gandhi, 8 April 1977, ibid.
These figures on seats and vote shares come from the statistical supplement to the Journal of Indian School of Political Economy, vol. 15, nos 1 and 2, 2003, this part of a special issue on ‘Political Parties and Elections in Indian States: 1990–2003’, edited by Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav.
Prabhas Joshi, ‘And Not Even a Dog Barked’, Tehelka, 2 July 2005; India Today, 1–15 January 1980.
SeeMervyn Jones, Chances: An Autobiography (London: Verso, 1987), p. 271.
Moin Shakir, ‘Election Participation of Minorities and Indian Political System’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, February 1980.
Nalini Singh, ‘Elections as They Really Are’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 May 1980.
Bashiruddin Ahmad, ‘Trends and Options’, Seminar, April 1980.
Typescript of interview with Bobby Harrypersadh, dated 31 May 1980, in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.
India Today, 16–31 May 1980.
The Hindu, 24 June 1980.
The Tribune, 27 October 1980, copy in Pupul Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.
India Today, 16–31 August, 1980.
M. V. Kamath, ‘Why Rajiv Gandhi?’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 31 May 1981.
India Today, 1–15 December 1981.
These paragraphs on the Festival of India are based on the clippings and correspondence in Mss Eur F215/232, OIOC.
Rajni Bakshi, The Long Haul: The Bombay Teytile Workers Strike (Bombay: BUILD Documentation Centre, 1986); Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004). The strike, in effect, killed the city’s textile industry, with most units being declared ‘sick’ by the owners or the state. These mill lands are now the subject of much controversy in Bombay, with citizens asking that they be used for working-class housing or for parks, and property speculators hoping to turn them into luxury apartments and shopping malls.
Jan Myrdal, India Waits (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984).
Mahasveta Devi, ‘Contract Labour or Bonded Labour?’, Economic and Political Weekly 6 June 1981.
Darryl D’Monte, ‘In Santhal Parganas with Sibu Soren’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 8 April 1979, and ‘The Jharkhand Movement’ (in two parts), Times of India, 13 and 14 March 1979. For wider historical overviews of the Jharkhand question, see Sajal Basu, Jharkhand Movement: Ethnicity and Culture of Silence (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1984); Susan B. C. Devalle, Discourses ofEthnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); Nirmal Sengupta, ed., Jharkhand: Fourth World Dynamics (Delhi: Authors Guild, 1982).
See Shankar Guha Niyogi, ‘Chattisgarh and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India: Seminar Papers (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union, 1982).
Bertil Lintner, Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1990), pp. 83–4 and passim.
‘Report of a Fact-Finding Team’, chapter 21 in Luingam Luithui and Nandita Haksar, eds, Nagaland File: A Question of Human Rights (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1984).
Personal communication from P. Sainath, who was covering Andhra Pradesh politics at the time.
Times of India, 30 March 1982; Sunday, 16 January 1983.
See interview with NTR in Sunday, 12 December 1982.
Times of India, 10 January 1983.
M. Ramchandra Rao, ‘NTR – Victim of His Own Charisma?’, Janata, 24 April 1983.
Indian Express, 15 September 1983.
Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflictin India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 3; Alaka Sarmah, Immigration and Assam Politics (Delhi: Ajanta Books, 1999); Anindita Dasgupta, ‘Denial and Resistance: Sylhet Partition Refugees in Assam’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 10, no. 3, 2001.
Amalendu Guha, ‘Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam’s Anti-Foreigner Upsurge 1979–80’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, October 1980.
Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. chapter 5; Tilotomma Misra, ‘Assam and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India; Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000), chapters 4 and 5.
Chaitanya Kalbagh, ‘The North-East: India’s Bangladesh?’, India Today, 1–15 May 1980.
Economic Times, 3 November 1980.
Quoted in the Times of India, 30 July 1980.
See T. S. Murty, Assam, the Difficult Years: A Study of Political Developments in 1979–83 (New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1983).
Devdutt, ‘Assam Agitation: It Is not the End of the Tunnel’, The Financial Express, 8 October 1980.
A wide-ranging and still valuable collection of essays on Sikh political history is Paul Wallace and Surendra Chopra, eds, Political Dynamics of Punjab (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1981).
There are various versions of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. I have here used the text as authenticated by Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal and printed in White Paper on the Punjab Agitation (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1984), pp. 67–90.
This account of the Punjab dispute draws upon the following books and articles: Robin Jeffrey, What’s Happening to India: Punjab, Ethnic Conflict and the Test for Federalism, 2nd edn(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); ChandJoshi, Bhindranwale: Myth and Reality (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1984); Anup Chand Kapur, The Punjab Crisis (Delhi: S. Chand and Co, 1985); Ram Narayan Kumar, The Sikh Unrest and the Indian State (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1997); Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Pan Books, 1985); Satinder Singh, Khalistan: An Academic Analysis (New Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982); Harjot Oberoi, ‘Sikh Fundamentalism: Translating History into Theory’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds, Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Hamish Telford, ‘The Political Economyof Punjab: Creating Space for Sikh Militancy’, Asian Survey, vol. 32, no. 11, November 1992.
Cf. the suggestive analysis of Bhindranwale’s sermons in Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The Logic of Religious Violence: The Case of the Punjab’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988.
Ayesha Kagal, quoted in Paul Wallace, ‘Religious and Ethnic Politics: Political Mobilization in Punjab’, in Francine R. Frankeland M. S. A. Rao, eds, Dominance and State Power in India: Decline of a Social Order, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 451.
See profile of Bhindranwale in India Today, 1–15 October 1981; Murray J. Leaf, Song of Hope: The Green Revolution in a Panjab Village (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), chapter 7, ‘Religion’.
Clipping in Mss Eur F230/36, OIOC.
Indian Express, 21 September 1981.
The verdicts, respectively, of Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, p. 71, and Joshi, Bhindranwale, p. 90.
For an insightful contemporary account of the pressures on the Akalis to become more extreme, see Gopal Singh, ‘Socio-economic Bases of the Punjab Crisis’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January 1984.
Interview with MadhuJain in Sunday, 4 September 1983; Rajinder Puri, ‘Remembering 1984’, National Review, November 2003.
Anne Vaugier-Chatterjee, Histoire Politique du Pendjab de 1947 á nos Jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), pp. 158f.
On the significance of the Akal Takht, see Madanjit Kaur, The GoldenTemple: Past and Present (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983), pp. 268–70.
Paul Wallace, ‘Religious and Secular Politics in Punjab: The Sikh Dilemma in Competing Political Systems,’ in Wallace and Chopra, Political Dynamics of Punjab, pp. 1–2.
M. J. Akbar, Riot after Riot: Reports on Caste and Communal Violence in India (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1988).
Achyut Yagnik, ‘Spectre of Caste War’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 March 1981; Pradip Kumar Bose, ‘Social Mobility and Caste Violence: A Study of the Gujarat Riots’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 April 1981.
Quoted in Moin Shakir, ‘An Analytical View of Communal Violence’, in Asghar Ali Engineer, ed., Communal Riots in Post-Independence India,2ndedn(Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1991), p. 95.
Individual studies of these riots are contained in Akbar, Riot after Riot; Engineer, Communal Riots; in the reports of civil liberties groups and in articles published in the Economic and Political Weekly during these years.
The following paragraphs, identifying and enumerating these themes, are based on my own reading of the literature; but see also Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘An Analytical Study of the Meerut Riots’, PUCL Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1, January 1983.
George Mathew, ‘Politicisation of Religion: Conversions to Islam in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 19 June 1982.
See M. J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 197ff.
Cf. Balraj Puri, ‘Who is Playing with National Interest?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 11 February 1984.

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